Lawmakers discuss roots of car theft spike
At news conference, Democrats and advocates for criminal justice reform cite complex set of causes, say police and prosecutors have the necessary tools
Juvenile justice reforms instituted in Connecticut a decade ago are not responsible for the current spike in suburban car thefts, a group of Democratic lawmakers and policy experts said Friday.
Instead, they blamed a complex set of factors, including a childhood mental health crisis, economic instability brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and a fraying social service safety net in poor communities.
“Our world has been blanketed by a plague that has exacerbated and exposed
inequities across almost all the social platforms,” Rep. Toni Walker, D-new Haven, said Friday morning at a news conference on the steps of the state Capitol.
“We know the pandemic caused both international and national spikes in crime [and] in Connecticut ... we know the pandemic caused a national spike in unemployment and in Connecticut ... we know that the pandemic caused trauma especially within our vulnerable population of children,” she said. “The pandemic also shut down schools.”
Walker and other Democrats in the legislature joined advocates from the Connecticut Justice Alliance, the Tow Youth Justice Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut to address the issue, which has dominated headlines in Connecticut for most of the summer.
The group expressed sympathy for crime victims while presenting a counternarra
tive to Republican calls for tougher penalties for juvenile offenders.
According to preliminary data that won’t be finalized until the fall, 2020 saw a 19.5% jump in car thefts over the average of the past five years. Those numbers closely reflect national trends during the COVID19 pandemic, Ken Barone, project manager for the Institute for Municipal and Regional
Policy at Central Connecticut State University, said.
While several high-profile incidents have caught the attention of lawmakers and the public, including a fatal crash in New Britain last month involving a stolen car allegedly driven by a teenager, an analysis of police data statewide concluded the number of car thefts dropped sharply over the last 30 years to a historic low in 2019.
The majority of car thefts are not committed by teens: Rep. Robyn Porter, D-new Haven, cited statistics that show 62% of cars were stolen by people over 18.
Harsher punishment won’t stop the thefts, she said. “Our communities need resources. Idle time is the devil’s playground. Give these kids something productive to do ... invest in them, we can’t keep throwing them away.”
But Republicans say a lack of legal accountability has fueled the uptick and they blame a 2011 juvenile justice overhaul, which they say prevents police and prosecutors from holding teens who commit accountable.
Rep. Craig Fishbein, the
ranking Republican on the legislature’s judiciary committee, did not attend the news conference. But afterward, he issued a statement blasting Democrats for arguing in favor of “continuing the failed policies that forbid police from pursuing and arresting violent criminals who are then quickly released from detention without serious penalty.” Fishbein said juvenile crime is a problem in every community across Connecticut. “Sadly, it appears many of my colleagues have chosen to turn a blind eye to crimes being committed and are choosing to put criminals ahead of citizens,” he said. A judge can incarcerate juvenile offenders who pose a risk to public safety, Walker said. “Juvenile justice reform has continuously been referred to for the reason [we’re] seeing more car thefts committed by youths in our community. I’m here to say that is a false statement.,” she said.
Walker cited a recent incident in West Hartford involving a 16-year-old who allegedly stole a car with a 2-year-old strapped in a car seat. The child was not injured and the juvenile was apprehended and taken into custody.
“Let’s be frank: the public has come to believe that if you are a juvenile and .... you commit any crime, you shoot someone, there is no accountability and that is absolutely incorrect,” said Sen. Gary Winfield, D-new Haven.
Michael Lawlor, a former state representative and an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, said car thefts are up around the nation, including states such as Oklahoma and Texas
that treat juvenile offenders far more harshly than Connecticut does.
“There’s a real problem ... cars are getting stolen more than they have in the past,” Lawlor said. “The real question is, what’s the solution?”
Lawlor later offered one: remove key fobs from motor vehicles. “This is not blaming the victim, this is just good advice,” Lawlor said.
Kevin Kelly, the top Republican in the Connecticut Senate, said Lawlor’s suggestion won’t fix the problem. “Locking your car is good advice, but it won’t stop the violence and it won’t give kids opportunity,” he said. “To suggest police are not using tools available to them is not accurate, and shows why we need broad conversations with all stakeholders together,” said Kelly, who did not attend the news conference.
A working group of lawmakers from both parties is looking at possible solutions. Republicans have called for a special session of the legislature to vote on measures to address the issue.
Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, did not attend the news conference but said he is paying close attention to crime trends and will be putting in place measures to deal with them.
“We are acting,” he said Friday during an unrelated news conference in New Haven. “One of the changes that I’ve ordered, going into effect next week, is to make sure that judges know the difference between that first-time offender who’s just doing something stupid and can make the appropriate response to that and that chronic, repeat offender, which ... [can] create an awful lot of the ongoing problems we have especially when it comes to car thefts.”
Lamont said judges will be “armed with that infor
mation, they’re going to have that ready, around the clock, 24 hours a day, so we know who should be sent home under strict parental supervision with the necessary wraparound services we need to support them, those one-time offenders who did something stupid, and make sure we have ... group detention facilities or group secure homes for those who are more chronic offenders to make sure they’re not able to repeat that waiting for their court case.”
Winfield said he feels for people who have had their cars stolen. “I’m concerned about victims because I grew up as a victim,” he said. “I slept with a knife under my mattress ... the way you make victims more safe is make the system actually work.”
He noted the rise in crime only began receiving widespread public attention when it moved beyond the state’s cities and began happening to suburbanites.
Claudine Fox, public policy and advocacy director at the ACLU of Connecticut, echoed his observations. The highly polarized debate over suburban car thefts, she said, is really part of a larger conversation about widespread racial and economic inequities.
“I’m tired of seeing our youth, who are our sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, siblings and grandbabies, labeled as a tired ’90s trope, as menaces to society,” Fox said. “If you care about the root story, it’s not about car thefts in the suburbs at all. It’s a discussion about how two communities separated by a few miles have vastly different living standards and primarily people of color are stuck with the shorter end of the stick.”