Police cracking down and setting traps for thieves.
By Jeremy Kohler, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Vehicles are being stolen in St. Louis at a rate approaching one every half-hour. Thousands of people are inconvenienced. Innocent people are being hurt, occasionally killed. And police are scrambling to reverse the trend. This year, city officials expect to rejoice in the lowest murder total in 41 years. But what roils them is how car thieves continue to erode the quality of city living.
Tommie Ryan left his buddies’ card game to drive home about midnight Oct. 23 and groaned. In the space on North Taylor Avenue where he had parked his Dodge pickup was now just a couple hundred cubic feet of air.
The real losses, Ryan said, are the lives of Ketrease and the 13-year-old boy accused of driving the truck, who is in the custody of the Family Court.
For the past two years, city police have focused their efforts on gangs and gun violence - with great success. Murders have been cut in half in that time. Criminologists say people who aren’t drug dealers or in street gangs are not at much risk of being shot.
But they are at more risk than ever of having their cars stolen, or being injured by thieves either driving recklessly for fun or being pursued by police.
And city officials say they worry about far-reaching consequences for a city that has hemorrhaged businesses and residents for half a century.
“I think that it frustrates the victims to such an extent that they want to move,” Police Chief Joe Mokwa said. “They want some kind of resolution. It’s just such a dissatisfying experience and has such emotional consequences that it debilitates the neighborhoods.”
And it just makes people mad. Larry Beckton awoke last Sunday to discover his candy-apple red 1988 Toyota Camry gone from outside his house in the 1200 block of Ohio Street. As of Thursday, he hadn’t gotten it back.
“I wasn’t ready to take on another car payment,” said Beckton, 45, who works at a nursing home in St. Louis. Now his wife, Sabrina, gives him a ride to work, and he walks home. “You work hard for a living. I just got through paying for that car. I feel violated. I just feel violated.”
The wave of thefts has led to a sea change in policing.
Three months ago, the St. Louis police had two officers assigned full-time to fight car thieves. Now it’s 50.
Last week, Mayor Francis Slay and Mokwa promised to step up two particular tactics:
Using special cars fitted to bait and trap thieves.
Issuing window stickers to vehicle owners who agree to let police stop their cars between 1 and 5 a.m. to see who’s driving.
“I’m frustrated for the people in the neighborhoods,” Mokwa said. “This probably impacts the average Joe Citizen more than the violent crime does.” Gone every 37 minutes
Mokwa calls it an infection. St. Louis - population 350,000 - has got it bad. And no one is immune.
In 1999, a vehicle was stolen in St. Louis every 79 minutes. That was relatively often, compared to cities its size. The next year, there was an auto theft every 67 minutes. In 2001, every 59 minutes. Last year: 53 minutes. This year so far: 43 minutes. Over the summer months: 37 minutes.
The number of car thefts in St. Louis has surpassed other major U.S. cities - Washington, San Antonio, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta - and approaches those in the biggest U.S. cities, FBI figures show. Last year, Chicago, with 2.8 million residents, had a vehicle stolen every 21 minutes. In New York, home to 8 million, there was one every 20 minutes.
Los Angeles, a car-crazy town of 3.7 million, led the nation with a theft every 15 minutes. That was just 2 1/2 times more often than what St. Louis - a city one-eleventh its size - endured this summer.
Officials portray auto theft as a regional problem. After two St. Louis County police officers fatally shot a 15-year-old boy who they said tried to run them over in a stolen car last week, Chief Ron Battelle called auto theft “an epidemic.” Indeed, vehicle thefts were up 32 percent in the county through July.
But police records show it’s foremost a city problem. This year, three cars have been stolen in St. Louis for every one in St. Louis County (incorporated and unincorporated areas). Ten cars were stolen in the city for every one in Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, St. Charles, Warren and Washington counties combined; six for every one in Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties combined. Certain neighborhoods in the city have been hammered. The Central West End had 726 auto thefts through September, a 54 percent increase over the same period last year. Thefts have more than doubled, to 210, in Southwest Garden. And they’ve nearly tripled in Forest Park Southeast, to 222, and in Skinker-DeBaliviere, to 181. People get hurt
The conundrum for police is that when they chase car thieves, innocent people get hurt. When they don’t chase, thieves get bolder, steal more cars and taunt them by speeding and fishtailing through city streets. And people still get hurt.
“If I see a cop, I speed away from them,” said an accused car thief, 30, interviewed Nov. 11 in the St. Louis Justice Center. “If he were going in the same direction, I would speed up.”
The man said he has broken into hundreds of cars and stolen at least 24 to support heroin and cocaine habits.
About the danger of injuring someone, he said, “I never thought about it.” No one knows for sure what’s fueling the explosion in auto thefts. But there are some principal factors to consider: Police don’t chase. Many chiefs, including Mokwa, put tight reins on street pursuits after two dozen people - including a city police officer - died during such circumstances over the past two years.
The city’s no-chase policy - covered extensively by the news media - coincided with an explosion in reported thefts.
“Once word gets out that you can do this or that with impunity, you’ve given the streets to the car thieves,” said Larry D. Liggett, a retired St. Louis police detective who is now an investigator for the National Insurance Crime Bureau, a nonprofit company set up to reduce vehicle theft and insurance fraud.
Theft rings seem to be targeting Chrysler products in particular. Thieves are increasingly exploiting common security weaknesses that make several DaimlerChrysler models easier to enter and start. That manufacturer makes three of the five models stolen most often in St. Louis this year. Stealing cars is in fashion. Car thieves are copying each other, said Scott Decker, a criminologist with the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Mokwa said seasoned thieves are teaching younger and younger children to steal.
The consequences are few. This year, through October, more than 9,000 cars were stolen in St. Louis. Police made 856 arrests for tampering - the crime of riding in a stolen car - and 317 arrests for stealing. Of those 1,173 arrests, prosecutors refused charges on 714, primarily because victims did not press charges. “We don’t chase”
In August, Mokwa formed a task force to find stolen cars and keep them under surveillance. The officers use unmarked cars and a helicopter to trail a stolen vehicle and then swoop in for a safe arrest after the driver gets out.
“We don’t chase,” said Lt. Ed Kuntz, the task force commander. “We engage him on our terms. We get him when he doesn’t know we’re there, pulling up at a liquor store or at his girlfriend’s house.”
Police allowed a reporter and photographer to ride with Sgt. Maurice Jackson, 45, a task force supervisor, on Nov. 11. As he drove his unmarked Chevrolet Lumina through the Near North Side about 11 a.m., Jackson scanned license plates and glanced at his “hot sheet” describing 390 stolen cars, 29 of them with Illinois registrations.
It took just minutes to find one of them - a white Nissan Sentra - parked at John Avenue and Emily Street.
Jackson rounded the block and cruised slowly past the Sentra to double-check. Five teenage boys who had been gathered near the car split up and walked away. Jackson chuckled and made the next left. He rounded the block and pulled to the curb with the Sentra distantly in view.
Jackson said he would wait for a while to see if anyone got into it. But after 10 minutes, no one had come near. Jackson later summoned a uniformed officer to recover it and to contact its owner.
Soon, a silver van screeched around the corner where the Sentra was parked. Probably stolen, Jackson said. But how did he know?
“Would you dog your own vehicle like that?” he asked.
Police have seen a lot of what they call “high performance driving,” weaving and swerving for no apparent reason, he said. It’s one way police notice stolen cars. A radio transmission moments later confirmed it. Sgt. Joe Cruz had matched the van’s plates to the hot sheet. Giving chase
Another task force member had a stolen vehicle in sight near O’Fallon Park: a 2002 Lexus LX 470 sport utility vehicle. The police helicopter roared overhead; Jackson followed. The task force calls the helicopter “Watch 1.” Jackson said people on the street call it the “Ghetto Bird.”
The radio blared: “Where’s he at, Watch 1?”
The response: “Westbound Carter from Gano.”
The Lexus driver apparently knew he was being followed. The car crashed into a trash bin in the alley behind a house on the 4200 block of De Soto Avenue. The owner of the house said she moved to the suburbs two years ago after living at the address for 29 years. She explained that people in the neighborhood were stealing too many cars.
Jackson, following the action on the police radio, pulled into an alley behind the 4200 block of Linton Avenue. There, a task force member was standing above a boy under 17 who was handcuffed and wriggling on the ground.
Another officer had captured a 14-year-old boy on the 4200 block of Prairie Avenue.
“I thought he had stopped stealing,” said that boy’s grandmother. Was she angry with him? Not really, she said.
The grandmother, 59, said was more concerned that authorities were being too lenient. She said a police officer had recently confronted her grandson near a stolen car parked in front of her house but let him go when the boy told his age.
“Why don’t they do something to stop it?” she said. “People are getting hurt.” Back behind De Soto, evidence technician Scot Seger dusted the Lexus for fingerprints, which police would use to prove they had the right man. Inside the car were ballet slippers, a ticket stub from a classical music concert, bags of Christmas lights and a 2003 yearbook from a top private school. The radio was set to a light-rock station.
Police determined the Lexus had been leased by Catherine Edwards, the wife of Benjamin F. Edwards IV, the vice chairman of St. Louis-based A.G. Edwards Inc. She had been visiting a friend for lunch on the 3300 block of Shenandoah Avenue that morning when the Lexus disappeared.
You again
Two hours later, the task force arrested two men in a stolen Jeep Liberty in the 5200 block of Cote Brilliante Avenue. One of them was William Smith, 18. He was a familiar face to the task force: Smith had been arrested in a stolen Jeep Cherokee on Halloween and was wanted on an arrest warrant for tampering with a motor vehicle.
Smith’s two arrests in 12 days pointed to perhaps the police department’s biggest obstacle: The same people are stealing cars over and over, said Mokwa. Even after they’ve been caught.
Many are posting low bonds after being charged, then returning to the streets, police have found. Many others aren’t charged at all because the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office doesn’t think it has a chance of winning the case.
“How do we get a society where people are stealing cars?” Mokwa asked. “How did they get so adept at it? What kind of resources to keep them incarcerated? It’s like an infection that’s almost impossible to control. It’s so overwhelming. “The reality is that the police force is being utilized to correct societal issues. We’re ill equipped to correct their behavior.”
Tommie Ryan, whose truck killed the 12-year-old girl, agrees. Guests at Ketrease’s wake told him that boys had been joy riding in his truck all day before the tragedy. Police had responded to a complaint about it but didn’t find the truck then.
Ryan said he thinks some of the blame belongs on “those grown folks peeping out the window at it. A 13-year-old hasn’t got any sense.”
“They should have said, ‘Get outta that truck. I’m gonna tell your mama,’ instead of watching it happen. Those boys drove that truck in shifts. The adults should have took control and took that truck back.”