CONSUMERS : Outsmarting Car Thieves : Crime: L.A. County leads the nation in auto thefts. But electronic tracking devices are beginning to put a dent in the numbers.
Welcome to Los Angeles County, the nation’s auto theft capital, where a car is stolen every 3.8 minutes despite residents trying everything short of electrifying their vehicles.
They use steering-wheel lock bars, telescoping locks securing the brake pedal to the steering wheel and simple or elaborate electronic alarms that shriek or speak. There’s even an alarm that looks like a harmless Teddy bear sitting on the seat that activates when a thief enters the car.
Still, Los Angeles County cars disappear at an alarming rate; 136,327 cars were stolen here in 1991, according to the California Highway Patrol. And auto thefts in Los Angeles city and county and the state have surpassed last year’s totals at this time. As of July 31, 42,523 cars had been stolen in the city; 79,875, county; 183,098, state.
During the last 15 months, Teresa Rosengrant has hit the trifecta: Her 1990 Mustang convertible has been stolen three times.
“I know crime is everywhere, but this has gotten ridiculous,” says Rosengrant, a legal administrative assistant who lives in West Los Angeles. “They didn’t take much--the garage door opener and some loose change--but you feel violated. I love the car, but one more time and I give up. They can have it. I’ll get something else.”
She credits LoJack, one of three electronic tracking firms operating in the Los Angeles area, for getting her car back quickly and with little damage. Each time, the car was stolen from her subterranean security garage. The first time it took two hours for police to recover Rosengrant’s missing Mustang in South-Central; the second, four hours in Northridge; the third, three hours on La Brea.
LoJack, which functions in Los Angeles County, recently celebrated its second anniversary here. Another firm, Teletrac, opened here in February, 1991, and operates in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Code Alarm, based in Madison Heights, Mich., started in Southern California in April, 1990, but does not have the local presence of the other two systems: It has only 1,000 subscribers in 20 states. LoJack operates in six states, and Teletrac does business in six cities--Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Houston and Miami.
The majority of cars stolen in Los Angeles (about 80%) are taken by professional auto thieves and don’t automatically end up out of state or in Mexico, say law enforcement officers and tracking device manufacturers. Stolen cars are much more valuable for their parts than for the automobile in tact.
A $15,000 Cadillac, for example, has about $30,000 worth of parts, if sold separately.
And stolen car parts are big business. Nationwide, illegal car parts sales amount to an $8-billion-a-year industry, according to figures from the National Insurance Crime Bureau in Glendora.
Contrary to public belief, however, the most popular cars on Los Angeles thieves’ rip-off list are not expensive Cadillacs, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Mercedes, BMWs or Porsches. They’re Nissans, Hondas, Fords and Toyotas.
“When we started, owners of luxury cars were the early adapters,” says Ron May of Teletrac. “Now we have quite the spectrum.”
LoJack representatives tell a similar story. To date, LoJack has equipped about 24,000 Los Angeles autos with its homing device; Teletrac declines to release its client totals.
LoJack is the least expensive of the three systems. Both LoJack and Teletrac have a base price of $595 installed, but Teletrac charges an additional monthly fee of $15. Their anti-theft remote tracking systems operate through homing devices hidden in the car.
But LoJack’s system is plugged directly into the state Stolen Vehicle Recovery Network and tracked by computers installed in police cars. Teletrac’s system, once activated, alerts the Teletrac computer control center in Inglewood, whose operators then notify the proper police jurisdiction. If police have a computer system, they can log on to Teletrac; if not, Teletrac directs officers to the car’s locations by phone.
Code Alarm’s system, including the cellular phone and a noise alarm, costs $1,500 plus a $15 monthly fee. It operates through a three-watt cellular phone and a Loran C receiver in the car. Once the car is determined to have been stolen, tracking personnel in Michigan contact authorities. Loran C is a navigational system maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Both LoJack, based in Los Angeles, and Teletrac, recently bought by Pacific Telesis, have impressive records of getting stolen autos back in short order with little or no damage.
“We get 80% back within four hours,” says John Raber of LoJack. “Most are driven a short distance, then parked on the street. The thieves often let a car cool off a day or so. Then, if it’s still there, they take it to a chop shop. They don’t want to risk leading police to their chop shop and exposing their operation.”
Some already have. In two years, 13 chop shops have been shut down through LoJack; one through Teletrac, say Los Angeles police officials.
Not only are more cars being recovered faster through both systems (91% recovery rate for LoJack to date; 86% for Teletrac), but arrest rates of car burglars have also increased.
Through Aug. 8, total car thief arrests through LoJack number 84 in 61 incidents, says Sgt. Paul Durnell of LAPD. “That’s a 27% technology-assisted arrest rate, as opposed to a 1% to 10% normal arrest rate (without tracking devices).”
Since its inception here, Teletrac, according to Durnell, has a 36.7% arrest rate with 16 arrests in 11 incidents.
Currently, 47 of 48 law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County--including LAPD, county sheriff and state highway patrol--participate in LoJack’s system.
Under a licensing agreement with the California Department of Justice, LoJack has installed its tracking system free in 475 police cars. The company is licensed because its tracking system taps into the California Stolen Vehicle Recovery Network. Under that agreement, LoJack is prohibited from expanding operations into other Southern California counties until July, 1993, when the state Justice Department will evaluate it.
The only Los Angeles County police department not using LoJack is Culver City, which declined, deciding to wait and see how well the system works.
Commander Lawrence Fetters of LAPD, who recently completed a study of the electronic tracking systems, is already convinced:
“Clearly it is a technology that works. It’s effective and reliable. True, to date, it has not had a significant, measurable effect on auto theft in L.A. County, but the potential is there. There is already a significant change in the tremendous impact on crooks.”
