Public Safety | Daily Report

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California cities remain a haven for car thieves – just less so than in years past.

Last week, the California Highway Patrol released data [PDF] showing that statewide auto theft declined 15 percent in 2009. The CHP recorded drops in swiping of every kind of motor vehicle, from trucks to RVs.

And law enforcement recovered a larger percentage of the state’s stolen cars, 88.7 percent in 2009, up almost two percentage points from 2008.

But that reassuring news aside, six California metropolitan areas are on the National Insurance Crime Bureau’s top 10 “hot spots” for auto theft last year.

Modesto ranks second in the country with 727 stolen cars for every 100,000 residents. That high rate belies the city’s major progress in reducing occurrences of grand theft auto by 31 percent since 2007, NICB data shows.

For much of the past two decades, the state’s law enforcement agencies have formed task forces specifically targeting car thieves. These partnerships, along with auto manufacturers’ improved anti-theft technology, are credited with making cars more secure.

California’s improvement is admirable, said Frank Scafidi, an NICB spokesman. However, auto theft was previously so rampant here that the state still has a ways to go before it drops from the top spots.

“Arizona had a 30 percent decrease in 2009 from 2008, but they only had 25,000 cars stolen, too,” Scafidi said. “I mean, we lose that many at halftime of a Lakers game.”

The Golden State’s other contributions to the list are: Bakersfield (3^rd in nation, 684 stolen cars per 100,000 people); Stockton (4^th, 663); Fresno (5^th, 641); San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont (7^th, 610); and Visalia-Porterville (8^th, 567).

The rankings are based on rate of auto theft, not number of cars stolen. This is why the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metro area ranked 23rd despite leading the nation in number of cars reported stolen (more than 57,000).

California’s location, in addition to the size of its motor vehicle population, contributes to its property crime statistics, as Forbes.com reported earlier this year:

Border towns like Laredo, and the central nature of cities like Stockton, Calif., often succumb to criminals shuttling drugs, money and weapons through Mexico and into the interior of the country. According to statistics from the FBI's findings in its preliminary 2009 Crime Report, Bakersfield, Fresno, Oakland and Stockton had some of the highest violent crime rates in the country last year. (Violent crime includes murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. It does not include motor vehicle theft.) Las Vegas and Stockton have also been identified by the Department of Justice as transit points for Mexican drug cartels. Modesto and Fresno even saw an uptick in violent crime over 2008.