Those reliable Hondas you have in the driveway may be ripe for the taking.
Auto thefts in Honolulu rose in 2013 and bucked the national trend that has seen fewer vehicles ending up in the wrong hands.
Honolulu ranked 69th out of 380 metropolitan areas last year with 2,698 thefts, or 274 per 100,000 residents, according to recent data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau.
That’s worse than in 2012 when Honolulu had a theft rate of 235 per capita. But last year’s numbers are better than 2011 when Honolulu’s theft rate was 285 per 100,000 residents. And it’s also better than in 2010 when Honolulu’s rate was 336 per capita.
"Vehicle thefts around the nation do rise and fall in relation to local dynamics," Frank Scafidi, director of public affairs for the National Insurance Crime Bureau, said Wednesday. "Even in times when thefts are increasing in many areas, they are decreasing in others and vice versa. An interesting question to me is what happens to the cars that are stolen? As an island, driving them elsewhere isn’t an option."
In Honolulu, the three most stolen vehicles last year were the 2000 Honda Civic, 1992 Honda Accord and the 2006 Ford full-size pickup, according to the NICB.
The trend is different nationwide, however, where thefts are once again on the decline after a small increase in 2012 ended an eight-year run of decreasing incidents, NICB said.
NICB’s recent data are in line with preliminary 2013 FBI vehicle theft data — released in February of this year — that show a 3.2 percent decrease in vehicle thefts for the first half of 2013. If the preliminary FBI data hold when the final 2013 vehicle theft figures are released, there is a good chance that the national total will be close to what it was back in 1967.
So, why did this happen? Crime has been falling nationwide, but there also has been a big shift in the economics of auto theft: Stealing cars is harder than it used to be, less lucrative and more likely to land you in jail. As such, people have found other things to do.
The most important factor is a technological advance: engine immobilizer systems, adopted by manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These make it essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key, which contains a microchip uniquely programmed by the dealer to match the car.
Criminals generally have not been able to circumvent the technology or make counterfeit keys. "It’s very difficult; not just your average perpetrator on the street is going to be able to steal those cars," said Capt. John Boller, who leads the New York Police Department’s auto crime division. Instead, criminals have stuck to stealing older cars.
You can see this in the pattern of thefts of America’s most stolen car, the Honda Accord. About 54,000 Accords were stolen in 2013, 84 percent of them from model years 1997 or earlier, according to data from the NICB, a trade group for auto insurers and lenders. Not coincidentally, Accords started to be sold with immobilizers in the 1998 model year.
The Honda Civic, America’s second-most stolen car, shows a similar pattern before and after it got immobilizer technology for model year 2001.
Old cars are easier to steal, and there are plenty of them still on the road. But there’s an obvious problem with stealing them: They’re not worth very much. Cars are typically stolen for parts, and as a car gets older, its parts become less valuable.
Car theft remains a particular problem in California, which has the country’s highest auto theft rate — nearly double the national average. Nine of the 10 metropolitan areas with the highest auto theft rates are in California, mostly up and down the inland Interstate 5 corridor, according to the NICB. Bakersfield, Calif., ranks first with 6,267 thefts, or 725 per 100,000 residents.
By comparison, the lowest metro area, which ranked 380th, was Harrisonburg, Va., with 27 thefts, or 21 per 100,000 residents.
California’s car thefts are often linked to Mexican organized crime, and NICB helps auto finance companies recover thousands of stolen cars from Mexico annually, according to NICB Vice President Roger Morris.
Some cars go even farther away. "A lot of them are getting shipped out of the country," said Carol Kaplan, the NICB’s director of public affairs. Every year, Customs and Border Protection recovers dozens of cars that thieves try to smuggle out of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in shipping containers.
But while the port busts tend to recover high-end cars (one 2012 recovery included a 2010 Ferrari 458 Italia), California’s thefts are heavily weighted toward older cars that can be slim-jimmed and hot-wired, and that are much more likely to end up in Mexico than in Asia. In time, those old cars will come off the road, leading to a further decline in auto thefts.
One of the factors that keeps car theft going in the United States is the reliability of old Hondas. Eventually, mid-1990s sedans should become too old to be worth stealing at all, but that hasn’t happened yet. "They keep running," Morris said, and therefore they keep being stolen.
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