The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : If Thieves Want Your Car, They Will Get It

Detective Bob Graybill is definitely not the kind of police officer who does television pitches for The Club. For one thing, he does not talk like an early-model Disneyland robot.

But Graybill, who is head of the Community Effort to Combat Automobile Theft unit in the San Fernando Valley, does have some nice things to say about the automobile anti-theft device that locks to the steering wheel. Up to a point.

“We just did a case near the Van Nuys Airport where a Toyota van that was stolen had a Club on it,” said Graybill, who works out of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys station.

“When we found it, The Club was still attached to the steering wheel.”

Unfortunately, the steering wheel was no longer attached to the car.

“They had taken the steering wheel off and put on one of their own,” he said.

While it’s true that increased use of anti-theft protections, as well as stepped-up police efforts, have had an effect, there were still 12,902 cars reported stolen this year, through Aug. 14, in the parts of the Valley covered by the Los Angeles Police Department. That’s more than 30 per week.

Graybill said he is all for protection, especially anything that makes a thief think twice about stealing a car. He recommends relatively inexpensive kill switches that render the car inoperable without rewiring to get past the switch. “They can still take it, but anything that delays them increases their chances of getting caught, and odds are they will go on to another car.

“But if they really do want your car--if they have an order for it--they are going to get it.”

Sometimes in admittedly ingenious ways.

“Not too long ago, we were getting reports about a man who would answer an ad placed by someone selling a car,” Graybill said. “He would ask to take the car for a test drive and leave the keys to his own car as security.

“Then he’d drive off and they’d never see him again. Eventually, they would call the police and find out that the car he left behind had been stolen.”

A series of similar robberies occurred in the Santa Clarita area, with a deadly twist. “A guy would take a car for a test drive with the seller riding along,” said Detective Kenneth Kyle of the Santa Clarita Valley sheriff’s station. “He would drive out to an industrial park or some remote place. Then he would pull a gun and tell the seller to get out.”

Alarms help prevent auto thefts, of course, but are not fail-safe. “They can bypass any alarm,” Graybill said.

And even the loud screech of an alarm is little defense in itself. “There are so many false alarms that no one even looks up when they hear an alarm go off in a parking lot anymore,” Graybill said.

There are times, police warn, when thieves set off an alarm on purpose.

“They go over to a house in the middle of the night and set off the alarm in a car,” Graybill said. “They would leave and come back maybe 45 minutes later and do it again. Then maybe a third time.

“By then, no one would be checking on the alarm, and they would just take the car.”

The police also tracked thefts by a group that would drain a car battery and cut the wires to the alarm, rendering it ineffective. Then they’d simply jump the battery and drive away.

One of the newest wrinkles had to do with missing cars not really being stolen. “They would be sent by their owners overseas,” said Detective Frank Turner of the Burbank Police Department, “in big crates on ships. Practically no one would know they were there because there aren’t enough inspectors to look in all those crates.

“Once the cars were overseas, the owner would report them as stolen and collect the insurance.”

A man allegedly involved in one of these theft rings was arrested in March when he allegedly shoplifted a pair of shoes from a Price Club in Burbank. Police say that when they looked in his car, they found about $40,000 worth of cocaine and forged Department of Motor Vehicle forms that led them to believe he was shipping cars to Russia.

“Some days, it seems like we only catch the stupid ones,” Turner said.