‘Army’ of volunteer sleuths out hunting for your stolen car
Group prompted to action by spike in auto thefts
PORTLAND, Ore. — At the end of a quiet residential street in north Portland, Oregon, Titan Crawford took a calming drag off his cigarette and then shuffled past the gutted shell of a stolen Nissan pickup truck and into the patch of woodlands beyond.
A little ways in, there was a Mazda sedan, flipped upside down. He passed a Cadillac Escalade, its rainbow bumper sticker one of the few features that remained intact. In the bushes nearby, there was a boat filled with furniture, tires, and shoes. Crawford checked vehicle identification numbers and captured videos of an array of metal hulks along the way but came away disappointed.
“Nothing here is salvageable,” he said.
For much of the past year, Crawford, 38, has led a growing network of volunteer sleuths who scour Portland’s streets, alleys, and forests, racing against time in hopes of finding stolen vehicles before they end up shredded for parts.
There is no shortage of work to be done. Vehicle thefts in Portland are on track to reach well over 10,000 this year, more than triple the number the city recorded a decade ago, part of a nationwide trend that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. In Portland, the brazenness of the crimes, inattention from the police, and desperation of residents who suddenly find themselves missing one of their most valuable possessions have led many to take matters into their own hands.
“It would be cool if the city could do this and I didn’t have to,” Crawford said. Similar groups have popped up and grown around the country as vehicle thefts have soared.
For Crawford’s network, the effort is less about vigilante justice — his group rules say that people who take the law into their own hands will not be tolerated — and more about community building and expanding eyes and ears around town.
Rewards aren’t allowed either. The group wants people motivated by a desire to help rather than focusing on finding cars that might earn money.
Neighbors share pictures of license plates, keep watch during commutes to work, and hunt online for reports of stolen vehicles.
Nearly every day, the group, PDX Stolen Cars, helps a resident reconnect with a vehicle.
“This is an army, and it’s exploding,” said Victoria Johnson, who joined the group after someone drove off with her sport-utility vehicle while she was helping at the scene of a car accident. “It does a body good to give back and help.”
The nation is on track to record about 1.1 million stolen vehicles this year — the highest number in more than a decade but still well below numbers set in the early 1990s, when many cars were easy to steal without a key, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an insurance industry group that tracks claims. The trend appears to be connected in part to the pandemic, as disruptions in the supply chain have created a surge in the value of catalytic converters and other car parts and have made vehicles a more lucrative target for theft, said David Glawe, the bureau’s CEO.
Carjackings are also up significantly in many cities, including Portland, where the police said they did not keep statistics but had noticed a spike in reports.
Car thefts have lately taken a back seat to more violent offenses. Portland set a record for homicides last year and could surpass that number this year, part of a rise in crime that has deepened public unease and reverberated in the race for governor in Oregon, where a Republican has a possible path to victory for the first time in four decades. The Republicans in the state also have their sights on three House seats, where GOP candidates have focused some of their attacks on the public protests against police brutality that rocked Portland in 2020.
The Portland Police Bureau said staffing challenges had prevented it from doing more to help solve car thefts. Last year, the department employed fewer sworn officers than at any point in the past 30 years, although it has recently started growing again.
Sergeant Kevin Allen said the police bureau has often had to prioritize other crimes over vehicle theft but is not ignoring them. One precinct, he said, has undertaken occasional special missions to target and recover stolen vehicles.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “it’s not hard to find them.”
Older vehicles, which often lack alarms or modern security systems that prevent hot-wiring, remain among the most popular to steal. But newer vehicles can also be snatched when people leave their key fobs inside the car, or thanks to videos that show people how to steal some vehicles with little more than a USB charging cable.
Crawford said he first became caught up in looking for Portland’s missing cars a year ago when he was walking his dog and came across a vehicle that looked out of place. He posted a photo of it on social media and was soon gathering the many people interested in the issue into a Facebook group. What started as a membership of dozens became hundreds, then thousands, with many people trying to track down their own vehicles.