I don't get what people are stealing from parked cars? You can't remove radios anymore. What are they taking? Surely nobody's leaving a laptop or a purse in a car?
I live in a city that has a serious methamphetamine problem. I live in the suburbs but near a train station. For many years there would be smashed car windows in the street multiple times per week.
The thieves would be looking for small change that people leave for parking (ie $1-2 worth of coins). Break into enough cars and they get enough for some more meth ($20-30 might be enough for a small hit). They would ignore any larger or easily traceable high value items in the vehicles (or houses for that matter), preferring items they could carry in a bag and reasonably claim were their own. The train was often used to transit quickly away, so any ill-gotten gains had to not be obvious.
We never left our cars on the street at night. Our neighbours that had no other option would simply leave the car unlocked or the window down. The cars were never stolen and the cost of replacing multiple windows or door locks per year would quickly exceed the cost of insurance (typically only one window/windscreen replacement per year via insurance would be excess free).
Economic downturns and interestingly Covid have had a huge impact on meth use here. My state has imposed a hard border with the rest of the country, so interstate drug trafficking has had a major decline. Consequently there has been an increase in cannabis use and alcohol consumption has gone way up.
I can't recall the last smashed car window in my street. So there are knock-on effects on crime as well.
On one occasion a homeless person smashed passenger windows on ~8 cars parked on La Playa @ Judah in front of Java Beach. My mx-5 happened to be one of them. When I confronted him about it, he claimed some passers by called him a faggot and that's why he broke all the windows. No ashtray incentive needed when you've got Crazy to make up for it.
On another occasion a homeless person reached into my mx-5 and broke the center console door's latch while I was in Safeway in San Mateo. I had left the back window zipped down with the rag top up as I was going to be quick, nothing was left visibly out. I came out of the store to see her crawling out from the back window and run away.
These happened > 7 years ago, I'm sure it's worse now.
Not that I think car alarms would have made any difference here. People commit petty crimes in broad daylight throughout SF with impunity. It's surreal. We watched a bicycle chop shop operate in broad daylight for over a month from the CoreOS office windows, SFPD drove past constantly without doing anything about it.
Edit: Just remembered my ex's mx-5 had its new rag top cut into for the contents of its center console months after she moved to the inner sunset, parking on the street around 7th and Judah. That'd be about 10 years ago. I'd just installed that top, still raises my blood pressure to think about it.
Driving an MX-5 in San Francisco...I have to ask - manual transmission? Because if not, you're not really getting the full experience; but if so, those hills must be fun. I'm thinking of some of the streets in the Marina going up to Pac Heights with stop signs.
Mine was a track-prepped turbo NA with out of state plates, recovered gearhead here. FM2 "race" intercooled turbo w/standalone ecu and alcohol injection, ohlins dfv coilovers and tubular swaybars, R1Rs on 15x9 6ULs, 12" rotors w/wilwood 4-pot calipers, torsen lsd, the list goes on.
But driving a manual in SF proper wasn't really all that interesting compared to other CA gems like PCH, 9/skyline, 36.
Surprisingly that particular car never got fucked with. The mx-5s mentioned in my comment about petty crimes were mostly stock. Dumb luck I guess...
That's just a figment of local law enforcement policy and doesn't really speak to broader trends. Places like Boston and DC have car break ins but they're not rampant like in SF
Edit:
For those unaware SF downgraded a ton of (formerly felony I believe) property crime to low level misdemeanors with very light sentencing guidelines (termed "catch and release" by many) which results in nearly zero law enforcement action being taken against them . The result of this is that all sorts of petty theft and theft adjacent behavior (like breaking into cars) is far more rampant than in many other cities because (obviously).
I support treating petty property crime as petty but you can't accidentally allow "crime with a victim" type crime to go unenforced in the process. Victimizing other people can't be an activity that has positive ROI in the long term.
In San Francisco, those types of property crimes were going up before Prop 47. That is not to say 47 didn't exasperate the problem. The city also had diversion programs for non-violent crimes, both misdemeanor and felony, before the proposition was enacted. SF has had an epidemic of car break-ins for the last decade and the organized shoplifting rings have been a thing for generations.
I never experienced drug or grocery stores locking up merchandise until I was visiting a friend in SF in 2007. Then again that was also the first time I saw used condoms and needles in the gutter, a person taking a dump between two parked cars, and two men humping in the bushes of Golden Gate Park.
In my neighborhood, I've seen multiple reports of guns being stolen from vehicles. Anything of value should be hidden, such as dash cams, radar detectors, coins for parking meters, etc. People post videos all the time of hoodlums looking into car windows deciding whether or not it's worthwhile to break in.
Once upon a time thieves took my battery. I believe at the time they could get 5 bucks for it at a car parts store. Likewise thieves steal relatively minor parts from bikes. It was in the late 80s in South Bend.
The thing about radios isn't true. You can remove them easily, but they are usually locked in software to that vehicle so can't easily be reused. That doesn't mean they can't...
Last year someone broke into the underground parking of my apartment building and stole the radios from a couple of new BMWs. No way was that just a random smash and grab, as to get in you need to go through the car elevator or unlock two doors (with plenty of cameras that turned out to be useless).
You wouldn't do that unless you already had a plan for reselling them.
> The thing about radios isn't true. You can remove them easily
Do you think cars still use the old ISO 7736 and ISO 10487 standards for radios? Those standard-sized oblong units where people would replace them with after-market radios? That's not the case anymore and hasn't been more than a decade or two. Car radios these days are an integral part of the cars computers and the infotainment system. They aren't removable or swappable.
If you ripped out a new BMW's computer what on earth are you going to do with that? It won't fit in or connect to any other model.
Typically a single car is sold with a few different models of stereos, not only for different trim levels but also different regions, e.g. SiriusFM is common in the US but doesn't exist in Europe, and the navigation is usually region specific (you can't just swap a DVD like you could 15 years ago).
> what on earth are you going to do with that?
In my country salvaged cars are imported from Western Europe and the US, fixed up and resold here. A car with a European radio/infotainment/nav system is going to sell for a lot more than a car with a (pretty useless for here) USA system. There's also people who need a replacement for whatever reason (it broke, spilled coffee on it, dog scratched it up, etc) and want something cheaper than €5000 for a replacement at a dealership.
As I hinted at, the radio software is locked to the original ECU so you can't just swap them directly, but if you know what you are doing (or more likely know someone with access to manufacturers software) it's possible.
This wasn't just a junkie stealing a radio they can sell for $20 to get a hit, it's an organised crime. I'd be very surprised if this doesn't happen in the USA too. I would have thought it would be easier to steal the whole car and take it to a chop shop than just stealing parts though.
Can't even plop them into an identical model because they have to paired with the main computer with special software nowadays.
Sometimes I think people on HN hasn't interacted with a car made in the last couple of decades based on how outdated their statements on car functionality are.
I left a reply to the parent that should clear up your concerns. If recent Apple devices can be cracked, do you really think BMW have software engineers that can build something more secure?
