FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to Motor Trend readers in 1952 that: “automobiles
now are among the largest items on the nation’s ledger of annual losses due to
theft.”12 Indeed, between 1945 and 1952 more than a million vehicles
were stolen. In 1951 alone, an estimated 196,960 cars worth more than $190
million were counted as taken. The 1950s were considered as the Golden Age of
the automobile in America, and they were also golden years for auto thieves.
In confronting the auto theft
problem during the 1950s and 1960s, politicians and local law enforcement
officials regarded the auto theft problem as largely a youth or juvenile
delinquent problem.13 Organized crime or rings remained a very real
threat to motor vehicle owners. However, it was a threat largely subsumed by
concerns about the next generation, the future of American society, and the
tendency of young people to defy authority and commit largely victimless crimes.
The enlightened response toward young offenders that followed stressed reduced
punishment, understanding young adult psychology and sociology, and above all
education. The hard line stressing strong absolute values and harsh punishment
was largely thrown out the window, at least in public pronouncements. Prevailing
attitudes of the day suggested that criminal behavior was a social disease, the
result of a breakdown of society and values, and that the youthful car thief
was to be treated with compassion and understanding. To that end, a 1955 Senate
report pointed to the high rates of imprisonment under the Dyer Act and argued
that juveniles taking joy rides across state lines were never meant to be
covered by that law. Rather it was seen that these youngsters had “misappropriated
cars with no intent to steal.”14
Compassion and understanding did
little to arrest the meteoric rise of joy riding and juvenile delinquency. It
was one more phenomena that added to the fears surrounding the early Cold War
era. Then and now, government bureaucrats were fixated on statistics, regardless
of whether they were helpful or misleading. And the statistics, despite their
shortcomings, indicated a dangerous trend. For example, in 1948 young persons
under the age of 17 were responsible for 17 percent of all car thefts, while
four years later, in 1952, some 52 percent of auto thefts were committed by
thieves under the age of 17. This disconcerting trend continued unabated until
the mid-1950s. In 1956, of the 28,035 auto thieves who were arrested, some 39
percent were 15 or younger, 56 percent were 16 or younger, and 73 percent under
the age of 18. And at the federal level, some 55.5 percent of all juvenile cases
brought before the courts involved auto theft. Indeed, by the mid-1950s,
teenagers were committing the majority of larcenies and burglaries, a statistic
that did not augur well for a free and democratic United States engaged in a
life and death struggle with global communism. Further analysis of auto thefts
showed that this crime was overwhelmingly perpetrated by young males (the ratio
of male to female was 120:1), and that the urban rate for such crimes was three
to four times higher than offenses taking place in rural areas.15
Sociologists William W. Wattenberg
and James Balistrieri fleshed out the motives and class origins of these young
criminals in an important study published in 1952. Their investigation of
violators in Detroit was most disturbing to those involved in law enforcement,
the courts, social work, and above all the parents of adolescents.16
By examining the arrest data of nearly 4,000 young people in Detroit in 1948,
Wattenberg and Balistrieri concluded that the majority of auto thieves in this
group came from above-average homes, had grown up in racially homogeneous
areas, lived in an economically and sociologically stable home environment, and
perhaps surprisingly, were on the whole better socially adjusted when compared
to their peers. Why did they steal cars? As one New York City policeman would
surmise a bit later in the decade, “for the sheer hell of it.”17 Wattenberg
and Balistrieri concluded that the failure of community controls coupled with
opportunity, amusement, and trifling punishment were at the heart of this major
social problem.
Another study from the period,
however, that of Logan A. Hidy, demonstrated the complexities associated with
any analysis of joy riding.18 As part of a survey of boys committed
to the Boys’ Industrial School in Lancaster, Ohio for the offense of auto theft,
Hidy explored the motives of a group of 98 young men. While some 42 percent
stated that they stole cars for fun, a surprising 48 percent claimed that they
took a vehicle because they needed temporary transportation, understandably so,
since half of that second cohort was runaways.19 As it turned out,
almost all of the stolen vehicles were unlocked and open, and 80 percent had
the key in the ignition lock. Only four of the 98 boys intended to keep the car
they had taken, and only one wanted to sell the vehicle.
While the Hidy study went largely
unnoticed, the Wattenberg and Balistieri article became the starting point for
many follow-up investigations conducted during the 1950s and 1960s. For
example, between January 1952 and December 1954, Erwin Schepses conducted a
careful study of 81 boys who had previously been involved in one or more car
thefts and were committed to the New York State Training School for Boys in located
in Warwick, New York. The group of younger boys, who had previously lived
either in the New York City area or in rural Orange County, New York, were categorized
in one of two groups: one cohort only stole cars; the other stole cars and also
had committed other antisocial acts like larceny, assault, or crimes of a
sexual nature. Motives for what was concluded to be mostly impulsive behavior
included being influenced by the “Goddess of Speed,” inherent restlessness, or
an “erotic element.” The latter motive was given an interesting twist in a 1960
study by Juvenile Court Judge Albert A. Woldman entitled “Juvenile Thefts and
Juvenile Court.” He concluded that since “ ‘walking’ among young people has
become a lost art,” auto theft was “almost exclusively a juvenile offense,”
adding that “girls who require boys dating them to have cars are responsible
for many thefts.”20
In particular, the group considered “pure,”
namely those who only stole cars, was decidedly white rather than negro or
Puerto Rican. They also had higher IQs and a slightly lower rate of recidivism.
Additionally, and again confirming Wattenberg and Balistieri, the families of
the pure car thieves were typically economically secure and stable.21
While the Wattenberg and Balistieri
study pointed a finger to the white middle class, late 1950s crime data on
large northern cities suggested that most auto thefts were due to “The Problem
of Negro Crime.” Yet it was not a widely discussed issue; a Chicago judge
claimed in 1958 that the reason for the silence was due to a “conspiracy of
concealment.” According to this view, the NAACP, along with politicians eager
to garner the black vote conveniently ignored the facts. For example, in
Chicago (15 percent African-American) twice as many blacks were arrested as whites;
in Los Angeles (13 percent African-American) 48 percent of all arrests for
major offenses (including auto theft) were negro; and in Detroit (25 percent African-American),
66 percent of all those held in the Wayne County jail were black. Los Angeles
Chief of Police William Parker did not mince words about this matter as he
stated that the “Negro Community” is “his No. 1 crime problem. 22 Furthermore,
a widely-held assumption was that the underprivileged and minorities were more
likely to become hardened criminals.
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