“Wait, where’s my Jeep?”
I was walking back across Monaco Parkway in Denver from Monday morning services at the synagogue, when I noticed something was missing from my driveway. My 2005 Jeep Wrangler. There was no shattered glass, no tools, no parts, no note reading, “Sayonara, Sucker!” Just a missing Jeep. My wife’s Subaru Ascent was present and untouched.
Twenty years ago, I would have been in an uncontrolled fury. Heck, seven months ago I probably would have been at least slamming doors and swearing. But this had nothing of December’s drama of a drowsy driver drifting onto our driveway and drilling my wife’s Outback, sending into the side of my Jeep. There was no flaming car and wreckage, just a blank space and some experience in what to do and what to expect.
What I could do was call the Denver police and the insurance company, and what I could expect was never to see my Jeep again.
In this, I was not alone. Colorado is now routinely one of the three worst states in the country per capita for car theft, and Denver-Aurora-Centennial is the seventh-worst metro area in the country, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) 2024 National Vehicle Theft Report. It rated 430 thefts per 100,000 people. This was actually an improvement from 2023, when Colorado was the worst state overall, with 583 thefts per 100,000 people. The Denver metro area is still at just under 600 per 100,000 residents.
It wasn’t always this way
According to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, from 1985 until about 2000, Colorado averaged around 1,000 stolen cars per month. Increasing population and recession push that number slowly upward, to briefly touch 2,000 in 2006, before returning to the previous average for another decade.
Then, in 2014, the Colorado legislature, without any dissenting votes, passed a law to tie the level of criminal mischief for car theft to the value of the car stolen, while lowering the overall penalties. The sliding scale of punishment not only encouraged more theft, but it also encouraged thieves to pick on poor and working-class people, stealing cheaper cars to avoid more severe punishment. (This was a double-whammy to those families, coming on the heels of the federal Cash for Clunkers program which removed hundreds of thousands of inexpensive replacement vehicles from circulation.)
And so, unsurprisingly, car theft began to rise again, this time taking only three years to reach 2,000 a month, and prompting newly-elected Governor Jared Polis to declare car theft a major priority for his administration. That worked so well that car thefts doubled again to 4,000 a month from 2020 to 2022, from the combination of loose enforcement and economic restrictions from Covid and the George Floyd/BLM Summer of Love in 2020.
In Denver, reported thefts climbed to nearly 15,000 a year in 2022, or 1,250 a month. That was more than the entire state of Colorado had registered for most of its history (see Figure 1).
Eventually, elected officials began to take action. In 2022, the City of Aurora enacted mandatory minimum sentences for car theft, and in 2023, the state legislature did an about-face, removing the tie between the cost of the car stolen and the level of the resulting felony.
Theft rates have declined significantly from their peaks, to about 3,000 per month statewide and 8,600 annually in Denver, but these numbers are only barely tolerable by comparison to the immediate past, and remain well above both historical averages and the level of safety the public has a right to expect.
According to the state’s most recent Auto Theft Annual Report, the Denver Metro area accounts for 70% of the state’s thefts, so it’s not surprising that the decline there accounts for most of the overall statewide improvement.
Part of that decline, as well as a return to over 90% recovery rates and some marginal increase in arrests, is a result of the Flock license plate-reading cameras that Denver installed beginning in May of last year.
A Tale of Two Cities – Aurora and Denver
It’s true that the Flock cameras were controversial for privacy reasons from the beginning. Depending on who had access to the data, they could be properly used to alert police to stolen vehicles or cars used in crimes, or improperly used to track individuals suspected of no crime at all.
But it’s equally true that Flock cameras and license plate readers (LPRs) are incredibly useful tools in finding, tracking, and recovering stolen vehicles.
This according to Aurora Police Sergeant Paul Davis, the officer in charge of the case where my vehicle was recovered.
Yes, on Wednesday, two days after the theft, I got a call from someone who identified himself as a member of Aurora’s DART unit:
“Does anyone else have permission to drive your vehicle?”
“No.”
“Does anyone else have permission to be in your vehicle?”
“No.”
“If we apprehend the suspects, do you wish to press charges?”
“Oh, yes.”
I was sufficiently suspicious of this call that I actually called the number back to get the officer’s name and badge number. But an hour or so later, I got another call telling me where the car was, that it appeared drivable, and that I could come pick it up.
According to Sgt. Davis, the DART (Direct Action Response Team) was restarted in 2022 after a hiatus of several years. That, not coincidentally, was the peak year for auto thefts in the state and the metro area. LPRs are one of the key tools they use to initiate surveillance of a vehicle.
Frequently, the purpose of stealing a car isn’t to chop it up and sell it for parts, as I had assumed. It’s for the anonymity that a stolen car can provide to criminals to commit other crimes. That’s why cars recovered after an extended period of time are frequently in terrible condition – it’s being used for other criminal activity, which means it’s being rode hard and put away wet, and the criminals can’t risk taking it in for service, especially when it’s easy to just ditch it and steal another one. The sooner you get your car back, the better chance you have of being able to drive it again.
In my case, finding the car also meant finding the criminal. He was arrested, and charges have been filed. That’s important, because frequently stolen cars – which, remember, are usually used in the commission of more crimes – can prove to be an entry point into larger criminal enterprises, according to Davis.
Which makes it all the more infuriating that the Denver City Council voted to terminate the Flock camera program at the end of the year, not over legitimate privacy concerns, but in order to protect illegal aliens from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
That’s right. While other jurisdictions are amping up their programs to recover stolen cars, Denver just terminated a program that helps get cars back in better condition and generates more leads into larger criminal organizations, because the City Council is afraid that it might lead to illegal immigrants being deported.
So congratulations, Denver, on prioritizing the ability of illegal immigrant to evade law enforcement over the physical safety and personal property of your tax-paying citizens. We’ll see how that works out.
Joshua Sharf is a Denver resident and frequent contributor to Complete Colorado.
