Salt Lake 43rd in auto thefts — police offer tips to keep vehicles safe

A new report from the National Insurance Crime Bureau ranked Salt Lake City just 43rd in the nation for auto thefts in 2006.

Nearly 5,600 cars were stolen in the city last year, according to the NICB report released this week, or roughly 541 thefts per 100,000 residents.

Compared to other Western cities, however, Salt Lake police detective Jeff Bedard said the city's car-theft rate wasn't too bad. And it could be even better, he said, if some car owners wouldn't make it so easy for thieves to steal their vehicles.

"Vehicles are not used for storage," he said. "People think they can keep their valuables in there."

Some of those valuables sometimes include keys to the car.

Salt Lake City has four detectives who work auto theft cases. So far this month, one detective has worked 51 auto theft cases. In at least 17 of those incidents, the owner's car was stolen either because the keys were left in the car or the car was left warming up in the driveway, Bedard said.

Each detective usually gets about the same case load, meaning the city averaged 200 stolen cars in April, Bedard said.

The most commonly stolen vehicles in Salt Lake continue to be Hondas. Of the 51 cases the Salt Lake detectives had worked, 24 of them involved Hondas.

Nationally, the top 10 cities for stolen vehicles on NICB's 2006 list are all in the West. Las Vegas tops the list with more than 22,000 cars stolen in 2006, or more than 1,300 per 100,000 residents. The survey looked at 361 "metropolitan statistical areas."

Five of the top 10 cities are in California. The other four cities are Phoenix, Tucson, Seattle and Yakima, Wash.

Modesto, Calif., ranked fifth in the per capita vehicle theft rate. But officials who organized the report say that's actually a great improvement for the city, which had previously been ranked No. 1 for the past three consecutive years.

And overall, the report said vehicle thefts, according to FBI statistics, were down across the United States for the first six months of 2006.

Bedard said the public can help keep their vehicles from being stolen by taking common-sense precautions such as not leaving their keys in the car, not parking in areas that lack proper lighting and always locking the doors.

"An ounce of prevention goes a long way," he said.

Other Utah cities that ranked in the survey included St. George at 268, Ogden at 286, Provo at 322 and Logan ranked No. 360 — nearly dead last.

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E-mail: preavy@desnews.com