Title of Car Theft Capital Has Commerce Boiling Over : Crime: Survey ranks city No. 1--again. Officials say the large number of commuting workers distorts the data.

The tiny industrial City of Commerce feels like someone has climbed inside, hot-wired it and driven off with its reputation. Again.

For the second consecutive year the city has been crowned the stolen car capital of the United States--even though police say the theft problem for residents is minimal.

The dubious car theft crown has been bestowed by the Illinois-based National Insurance Crime Bureau. It reported this week that City of Commerce led the country with a theft rate of 5,053 vehicles stolen per 100,000 residents.

The problem is that City of Commerce’s 12,500 population swells to nearly 75,000 during the day when outsiders pour into the city’s manufacturing plants and office buildings and its large Commerce Shopping Center on Whittier Boulevard. The insurance bureau’s statistics do not factor in the commuters.

Carole Rowe, the city’s public safety manager, said it has learned to shrug off the bureau’s annual ranking. Crime in general is on the decline in her six-square-mile city, she said. So are auto thefts.

The majority of car thefts take place at the shopping center, about half a dozen miles southeast of Downtown Los Angeles, said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Detective Boyd Zumwalt, an auto theft specialist.

“It’s a numbers game,” Zumwalt said. “It makes it look like car thefts are going out of sight when they aren’t.”

Insurance bureau analyst Gregory Tanski, who compiled the newest statistics using 1992 crime figures and census reports, agreed that the figures can be misleading. But he said there is no way to account for commuters when compiling the annual list.

After City of Commerce, the second-worst place, statistically, to park a car is Newark, N.J., which had 5,019 thefts per 100,000 people. The best place of the 2,100 cities surveyed was Clayton, N.Y., where not a single car disappeared.

“You can let the people in Commerce know their auto theft rate has dropped 13% in the past few years. So they must be doing something right,” Tanski said Friday.

“And tell them they’re lucky they’re not Fresno. It’s jumped 75% in the last three years.”