Brazen car thieves plaguing Palo Alto.
Criminals target the Palo Alto area to smash, grab and run — often times successfully
Auto burglars are having a field day in the Palo Alto area.
They come from as far away as Oakland, Richmond, Emeryville and San Francisco, several law enforcement officials say.
Their preferred M.O. is smashing a car window and grabbing whatever valuables they find inside.
“It’s a huge problem with no end in sight,” said Wayne Benitez, a patrol sergeant with the Palo Alto Police Department.
Benitez, who has been on the front lines of law enforcement for nearly 30 years, said that under new laws, particularly Propositions 47 and 57, criminals are not going to jail for property crimes, and they know it.
“There is no answer, because even if we were to send our detectives out there, and do a stakeout, and we actually see the person, they’re going to run,” he said. “As soon as they jump into the car and speed off, we can’t do anything. They just speed right by us and they can wave to us and pretty much we’ll wave back because we’re not allowed to chase a car for a property crime.
“Even if you catch somebody, which is very rare, there is no punishment behind it. So that’s another layer of frustration. … It’s almost making a mockery of the entire judicial system.”
In Palo Alto, on a bad night, there might be 10 to 12 smashand-grab cases reported, Lt. James Reifschneider said.
It’s a regional problem that is
“There is no answer, because even if we were to send our detectives out there, and do a stakeout, and we actually see the person, they’re going to run.” — Wayne Benitez, patrol sergeant with Palo Alto Police Department
“going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” Benitez said.
Neighboring Mountain View, for example, has had 101 auto burglaries so far this year in a single parking lot, at the In-N-Out on Rengstorff Avenue near Highway 101, said Katie Nelson, public information officer for the Mountain View Police Department.
The thieves are organized gangs, said Marisa McKeown, a supervising deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County. She studies crime trends while overseeing the office’s crime strategies unit.
Most of the “smash-andgrabs” happen in pockets in affluent areas.
“There are certain shopping centers that are getting absolutely brutalized,” McKeown said. “It’s happening close to freeways, in parking lots and shopping centers.”
The criminals can exit a freeway, make a quick heist, and be back on the freeway quickly, said Reifschneider, noting Edgewood Plaza shopping center has been frequently victimized.
“These crimes can take less than 10 seconds,” Nelson said.
Many of the smash-andgrab perpetrators come in rental cars, often with stolen plates or paper plates from auto dealers, Benitez said.
They also like to target rental cars.
“They’ll go through parking lots and look for the little bar code because they’re pretty easy to see on the window. Bar code indicates it’s a rental car,” he said. “That’s the car they’re going to look into, because if it’s a rental you’re probably carrying your stuff in the car.”
Palo Alto is a shiny target because of its money and plethora of tourists and business travelers, many of whom drive rental cars and leave luggage or other belongings inside them. Upscale eateries along El Camino Real and high-end shops like those at Stanford Shopping Center also are common targets.
The problem led the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office to call an emergency meeting three weeks ago to discuss it. The office held a second such meeting Wednesday with police from every agency in the county, as well as San Mateo and Alameda counties, to “address how we will respond,” McKeown said. She expects a “massive countywide effort to address auto burglaries.”
Just how bad the problem is hasn’t been quantified yet. McKeown’s office is working to figure that out.
“We don’t actually get day-by-day stats from the agencies on just how much of a surge is happening,” McKeown said.
Parsing the numbers is difficult because of how property crimes are categorized. Burglary figures are lumped together, not broken down into just auto burglaries. Property crimes, as a whole, have been trending downward in the county. McKeown says that is because of a drop in commercial burglaries.
The groups of marauders are almost all coming from outside Santa Clara County, law enforcement sources said. Gang members brag about it on social media, McKeown said. In 2015, her office indicted 21 members of an Oakland-based gang for a string of more than 50 auto burglaries.
“They are coming here and doing auto burglaries and then they go back out of county to fence the property, and they do this every single day,” McKeown said.
“… It’s extremely lucrative and easy to do this type of crime, and the way they are doing it, they are getting away before we can stop them.”
Few perpetrators are caught in the act, Reifschneider said. Those who are caught are most likely to be found later through Palo Alto’s investigative unit.
“A lot of them are doing these crimes in multiple jurisdictions, so while we may end up with some bit of partial information, oftentimes we can marry that up with what another agency got, and come up with (an arrest later),” Reifschneider said.
Laws and police department policies have changed in recent years, preventing speed pursuits over property crimes and making it so that guilty parties, the few who are caught, might face little or no punishment. Lawmakers, and much of the public, have pushed for reductions in penalties to reduce the number of people in prisons. The toughon-crime mantra has faded.
“We have more people who have previously committed crimes that are not in custody now, where they otherwise would have been, and that’s by design of the Legislature,” Reifschneider said.
Prop. 47 has been a particular concern to law enforcement officials. Approved by voters in 2014, it led to “penalties being reduced for individuals who are committing crimes that were once serious offenses,” Nelson said. “They’re returning to the same thing over and over because they know they’re not really going to face consequences.”
Benitez said that until citizens complain to lawmakers and demand that brings increased sentences for these types of things, nothing will change in the near future.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrated I am, working in this line of work,” he said. “We just don’t have the means to stop it. If we could box cars in, throw out spike strips and all that, people would get the hint. But the community and lawmakers don’t like those heavy-handed tactics, so they’ve gone away.
“It’s extremely frustrating for us as police officers working the streets that our hands are semi-tied, and the crimes keep occurring.”
Referring to criminal raiders from Oakland and other cities, Benitez added: “They know this is a very lucrative market, and they know coming down to Palo Alto, they’ve all been schooled in their little school of burglary, they know police can’t chase them. Even if the cop’s there, they can’t chase. They just speed right by us and they can wave to us and pretty much we’ll wave back because we’re not allowed to chase a car for a property crime.”
To combat the problem, police try to educate the public to stop leaving valuables in their cars. In Palo Alto, police have stepped up patrols in hot spots and are working with merchants to improve surveillance through cameras.
Nelson said the numbers of these crimes is “shocking to people,” yet many still leave things of value inside their cars in plain view of everyone.
“A vehicle is no longer a safe space for valuables,” she said. “That’s a sad reality of the world we live in right now.”
Added Benitez, “If anybody thinks that Palo Alto or Menlo Park or Mountain View is a safe community, and they can leave their stuff in their car, it is absolutely 100 percent wrong. This happens every single night.”