Bumper Crop of Auto Thieves Thrives in the Central Valley

By GEOFFREY MOHAN

May 6, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

FRESNO —

It’s the kind of day in the kind of year no cop likes to have.

The 15 officers of this city’s auto-theft task force have a list of 18 cars stolen the day before, and only weeks ago they found out that the raisin capital still ranks as the worst place in the state for car thefts, per capita, and the seventh-worst in the nation.

With other leads coming up cold, most of the officers are simply “trolling” through all the usual places on this bright Tuesday morning, looking for all the usual cars. A “roller,” or stolen vehicle in motion, would be great right about now, but they’ll settle for a “duck” as well: a parked hot car.

Anything will do to help Fresno out of the top 10, in an area that has become the fertile crescent of auto theft in California. From Sacramento down through Stockton, Modesto and Fresno, the state’s agricultural heartland boasts the top four auto-crime centers, based on thefts per resident, according to the annual statistical compilation from the National Insurance Crime Bureau. It’s been that way for years, in fact.

To be sure, many more cars are stolen in densely populated Southern California, which accounts for more than 60% of the state’s auto thefts. But you’re statistically more likely to have your ride pinched in Fresno than anywhere else in the state. And you’re not going to do much better in Sacramento, Stockton-Lodi or Modesto, all of which placed in the top 25 nationally and were worse than Los Angeles (77th), and gritty industrial cities like Gary, Ind. (26th), and Trenton, N.J. (30th).

“That’s actually an improvement for us, seventh,” said Fresno Police Sgt. Tony Bennink, a supervisor on the HEAT (Help End Auto Theft) task force set up here in 1995, after Fresno placed third behind New York City and Miami. Auto thefts dropped dramatically each year afterward, until last year, when they rose by 20%.

“It’s kind of disheartening,” Bennink acknowledged. “You kind of want to drop out of the top 10.”

It’s not popular to point out to Bennink or anyone else in Fresno that the same place that received the coveted All-American City designation last year looks up to Newark, N.J., the current occupant of slot No. 11 in the survey.

But some unusual factors come into play in California’s Central Valley, according to authorities in the top four theft areas. First, unemployment is in the double digits in many agricultural communities here.

Bored teenagers, often affiliated with gangs, appear to be stealing cars just to get around town. And methamphetamine addicts are trading cars for drugs, or renting out their own cars for so-called “crank,” then reporting the cars stolen when they aren’t returned.

On top of that, juvenile offenders all too often spend as little as a few hours in the overcrowded jail before being returned to the streets to await court dates. Fresno HEAT’s bulletin board shows photographs of juveniles picked up in stolen cars while still wearing electronic-monitoring ankle bracelets while on probation.

Take Kathy Guerrero’s road-weary 1988 Honda Accord coupe--which is exactly what thieves did Tuesday morning. Guerrero said she habitually loses her keys. So she thought nothing of it when they went missing about 9 p.m. Monday. That would be a mistake, because she left them on the car seat, it turns out. Off went a $4,600 car the single mother is still paying off, and for which she missed an insurance payment this month.

That Suspicious Car Was Hers

About 3 p.m. Tuesday, Guerrero is home, contemplating a summer of taking the sweltering bus to community college when a resident calls police about a suspicious maroon Honda cruising a north-side neighborhood. It’s Guerrero’s car.

HEAT officers in their rattle-trap pickups--some of which are recovered stolen vehicles already paid off by insurance companies--home in on where the car was seen last, helped by a Fresno police helicopter. It’s a slow afternoon in Fresno, and that helps.

It’s Officer Mark Rodriques who spots the Honda, parked by a curb with three young men peering into the engine compartment. Within moments he and arriving uniformed officers have the suspects prone and cuffed.

At the end of the day, this is the story told, according to police, by suspect Steven Macias, 18, the only adult among the three suspects: He goes to score some methamphetamine when he spots Guerrero’s car with the keys inside. He takes the car, lending it out for a few hours in exchange for the drug, before driving it around himself until the clutch burns out. That’s what brings him to the curb and into the hands of HEAT, with a 14-year-old and 17-year-old who are arrested as potential accessories.

Call it a crank rental. Then there’s the “rock ride,” when a crank addict reports his own car stolen after lending it out in exchange for a rock of methamphetamine. Such incidents bedevil the HEAT squad, which arrests and rearrests many of the same teenage gang members and “crank heads.”

“The dealer says, ‘You want a rock? We’ll take your car for a day,’ ” explained Sgt. Ron Minor, a California Highway Patrol officer assigned to HEAT. “Two days go by, the car doesn’t show up and they report it stolen.”

There’s one particular upscale car, a Lexus, on Tuesday morning’s list that the officers immediately greet with suspicion as a rock rental in their daily briefing. The rest are the usual top choices: a full-size Chevrolet pickup is the most popular here, but small Japanese cars dominate the rest of the list, along with a number of vans, old General Motors full-size sedans, sport utilities and other pickups.

Because you can report your car stolen by telephone here, officers say it’s hard to assess the complainant for the withered face, bad complexion and jumpy nerves that are telltale signs of a so-called crank-head covering up for addiction misdeeds.

Also driving up Fresno’s statistics, and those for other areas, are simple joy-riders looking for a way to get around in the sprawl of the Central Valley urban areas. Some gangs seem to prefer Hondas, while others go for the bigger GMs and vans, officers here say.

“It’s not uncommon that they take a car literally to go to the north end of town, leave it there, and steal another to come back,” Bennink said.

Accurate statistics for joy-ride thefts don’t exist, but the fact that the CHP reports that as many as half the recovered stolen cars in the Central Valley are found in decent condition lends credence to officers’ anecdotal evidence.

“In the valley here in the summertime it’s 110 degrees,” said Officer Rodriques. “A kid doesn’t want to walk to the mall. If he can rob a car in five seconds, he’ll do it.”

Stealing Just to Get a Ride

Sacramento, Stockton and Modesto all report the same phenomenon. “A lot of our auto thefts are for transportation purposes, just simply, ‘I need to get from point A to point B,’ ” said Sgt. Daniel Hahn, spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department. The metropolitan statistical area anchored by Sacramento scored 16th on this year’s survey, an improvement from previous years.

The Stockton-Lodi area, ranked 21st nationally in this year’s survey, finds that even round-trip thefts are common. “Where they’re recovered, a lot of times a car is reported stolen there and found in the area where the first one was stolen,” said Doug Anderson, spokesmen for the Stockton Police Department.

Officers point out that joy riding remains a felony, and that the cost to society averages $5,000 per theft. That’s close to what Guerrero stood to lose Tuesday.

Instead, she was relieved that she had only to replace the clutch, which the inexperienced teens had burned out, and the baby seat they apparently jettisoned.

“Thank you, thank you; you guys are great,” Guerrero said as a friend dropped her off to take her car back. “It was going to be something hard, going to school on a bus all summer in Fresno.”

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Hot Spots for Hot Cars

California cities on the National Insurance Crime Bureau auto theft list, and their national ranks among the 329 metropolitan statistical areas in the 2000 survey.

Fresno, 7

Sacramento, 16

Modesto, 18

Stockton/Lodi, 21

San Diego, 23

Visalia/Tulare/Porterville, 46

Oakland, 52

Yolo, 72

Bakersfield, 75

Los Angeles/Long Beach, 77

Merced, 80

Riverside/San Bernardino, 82