Introduction – Park at Your Own Risk
“What the hell does everybody want with my Gran Torino?”
Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood)
Gran Torino (2008)
Automobile theft is a crime at the margins of American life. Yet, it also reflects themes that are at the core of modern existence, and what it means to be human. For the thief, the act can be a vicarious experience. It is a moment that linguist Jeffrey T. Schnapp suggests vaults the perpetrator into "the world as its conqueror, rule and judge." In a classic role reversal, the often clever and technologically adept thief gains freedom at the expense of an "unhorsed" owner, who has lost autonomy and identity. Additionally, the criminal, usually from the periphery of society, moves, albeit temporarily, into a life "of bigger living," a world in which class distinctions and material possessions have been temporarily suspended. 1
Auto theft is such a common occurrence in America that we hardly take notice of it happening -- unless the car is ours. Yet insurance industry statistics tell us that in 2013 someone steals a car every 33 seconds. If we were to string out the annual total of stolen cars bumper to bumper, the line would stretch from New York City to Phoenix, Arizona. Auto theft may not be central to our everyday lives, but is far from inconsequential, particularly when it relates directly to more serious crime.
Many Americans have directly or indirectly experienced the theft of a car, our most prized possession after our homes. Our personal experiences, however, capture only a portion of the complexity and changing nature of auto theft in the US from the early days to the present. Accordingly, several questions stand out: Who steals cars, why, and how has the crime changed over time? Is it the drug of speed and thrills, sovereign individualism, easy money, wanting what one does not have, race and class antagonisms, the need for transportation, repressed sexual impulses, boredom, or something else? Or is it, as anthropologist Sarah S. Lochlann Jain suggests almost laudatory where “freedom meets regulation and a potential for individuation rubs uneasily against actualized homogeneity?”2 On the flip side, why did so many Americans up to and through the 1960s leave their keys in their cars, purportedly objects that were loved and often considered part of the family? In examining the design of automobiles, questions surface concerning what anti-theft measures were incorporated into the cars coming off the assembly line and why, as well as the thousands of inventors’ aftermarket technologies? Automobile theft has presented opportunities for inventors to not only create devices to thwart thieves, but also for thieves to use creative means to overcome ingenious locks and electronic alarms. And with the increasingly sophisticated technology and approaches to theft have come issues regarding who, what, and why of institutional responses. From the perspective of society and the built environment, an examination of why some places are hot spots for auto theft and others relatively safe begs to be explored. And in a transnational age, it is pertinent to ask how international forces work to the advantage of thieves?
But why take time to tell this history at the margins? The narrative is not about luscious cars or creative engineers and businessmen, but about everyday people, both lawbreakers and victims. Fundamentally, however, it is a telling tale about a significant slice of the American past. The topic also fits well in the direction in which the recent historiography in automobile history seems to be going, away from a focus on producers and toward users, even if those users happen to be thieves and joy riders. And it illustrates one example of just how central the automobile has been to American life during the twentieth century and beyond.
Although, the meaning of auto theft in the history of twentieth century American life remains somewhat unclear, one conclusion is that the auto thief steals an owner’s freedom, both literally and figuratively. Consequently, and as mentioned previously, movement is transformed into immobility, and vice-versa. As the Brazilian literary scholar Guilllermo Guicci has argued in a different context, the deed marks “the demise of an illusion and the loss of the hope of salvation through acceleration.”3 Going a bit further and drawing on the insights of English sociologist John Urry, this sacred thing called the car is central to the modernization of urban life, including life’s disappointments. Movement, or kinetic modernity, cannot be understood however, according to Urry, without the conceptual mirror image twins of flexibility and coercion. Indeed, the history of auto theft links intimately to the interplay of these notions, and in this case some of those automotive users -- thieves unlucky enough to be caught -- end up with the ultimate loss of freedom, sentencing to jail or prison.
Thus, the history of automobile theft in twentieth century America bridges science, psychology, economics, technology, and society. As such, it helps one explore the foundations of criminal motives, techniques, and organization; the development of a variety of anti-theft technological countermeasures; the rise of institutional rejoinders from government, the insurance industry, and manufacturers; the environmental solutions created by city planners and architects; and finally, opportunities, challenges, and diplomatic and legal relations among nations in an international society. Additionally, it is a story that has taken place with recurring cycles. During every era authorities proclaimed that auto theft had been largely solved. Yet, subsequent to every announcement, new criminal strategies thwarted the best of efforts, and the problem became bigger than ever. Only in the recent past have we experienced a statistical decline in this criminal activity.
Curiously, even though victims who feel personally violated abound and the cost of auto theft to Americans remains sky high, literature and film frequently lionizes the auto thief. The act often seems to be victimless--as long as the owner has insurance--and in cultural representations the professional car thief appears as a clever hero, satisfying personal urges that reflect the central values of traditional American car culture, namely, masculinity, status, and freedom. As long it is not our car, the bad guys are not so bad.
For generations, historians focusing on the history of the automobile in America have concentrated their efforts on themes commonly associated with the history of technology or business. These scholars have also been decidedly “American-centric;” namely, their work rarely crosses national or continental boundaries. Traditionally automobile history has been descriptive of the cars themselves or of individuals associated with them, rarely probing either with broad brush strokes or interpretatively. During the past decade, however, a "new" automotive history has gradually emerged, one that explores users rather than producers, and in so doing delves into various interstices that include operation, repair, tinkering, safety, and the environment. And crime, more specifically in this case auto theft, fits in one of those niches that reflect go beyond tight bounds to reflect a much larger scene. This study follows along the lines of these contemporary scholars and others who emphasize history from the bottom up, yet who also focus on the importance of nations, government, and culture in mediating the relationship between technology and society.
The plan of this book largely follows a chronological path. It begins with an examination of American auto theft from the early era to the onset of World War II, during which a number of recurrent themes appeared: high incidences of thefts; joy riders behind the wheel for the thrills or convenience of travel; hardened professional criminals in it for money; governments expanding at all levels to preserve order; inventors devising apparatus to stymie the thieves; and technology appearing to be triumphant, but only for a moment. The following chapter continues along these lines to 1980, when the problem of theft became so significant that authorities and manufacturers stepped up both legal sanctions and technological security devices. By means of walls, gates, and cameras, designers and planners tried to devise “defensible spaces” that would protect cars and people from criminals. In spite of these efforts, auto theft in anything climbed during the 1980s. Technology once again appeared to solve this social problem, this time thanks to digital electronic security measures. An entire chapter discusses the digital age--the evolution of the automobile as an electronic system--and its long-term effect on patterns of auto theft. Because an increasingly caffeinated, digitized, and interconnected age has compressed space and made borders more porous than ever, car theft has become a major problem along the US-Mexico border. Gangs, drugs, and cars have resulted in California’s becoming the hot spot for auto theft, displacing both Detroit and Newark, New Jersey. Auto theft has rarely been an isolated illegal activity. During the 1920s it was intimately tied to Prohibition, in the 1930s to bank robberies, and in more recent times to gangs and drugs, and perhaps terrorism. Stealing Cars ends with a survey of the recent past, tracing the recent history of automobile theft in an age when numbers of stolen cars declines but criminal methods grow vastly more sophisticated and increasingly based on computer and electromagnetic technologies. Auto theft has always been a game, intellectually and in terms of technique, but only recently has it become an activity that electronic games simulate and young adults in their 20s and 30s, not to mention children after school, played by the millions.
While this study centers on the American scene, it makes no claim of American exceptionalism. Like so many other aspects of modern life that have globalized of late, increasingly automobile theft has become a complex transnational issue, with important localized differences tied to opportunity, incentives, political systems, local policing, and culture.12 As long as the automobile remains an object of desire, and the rhetoric of freedom collides with hyper-regulation, it is doubtful that the challenge of ending auto theft will ever be totally solved, no matter what deterrent technologies are introduced. Human beings always seem to be clever enough to circumvent the most sophisticated of anti-theft devices, and probably always will. After all, the human spirit both legally and illegally thrives on overcoming challenges that act to separate, regulate, and restrain it.
John Heitmann first uncovered the historical topic of auto theft when piecing together sections of what became The Automobile and American Life (McFarland, 2009). He was astonished at the scale of pre-World War II auto theft, fascinated with the characters involved, and captivated by a host of deterrent technologies that were introduced to supposedly solve the problem. It was an unlikely story about cars, anti-theft devices, teenagers, hardened criminals, the police, the insurance industry, and J. Edgar Hoover. Rebecca Morales, with her extensive knowledge of the international automobile industry, Latin America, and Mexico in particular, minorities in the U.S., and the built environment, came in later, to round out the picture.
Both authors directly or indirectly experienced the theft of a car, our most prized possession after our homes. The first time this occurred in John Heitmann's life was in 1980 when someone tried unsuccessfully to steal his green 1973 Ford Pinto from the Pimlico Park and Ride in Baltimore. To this day he wonders why someone would want to take that car, especially since by then the word was out about the Pinto's propensity upon rear impact to have its gas tank explode and fry its occupants by having the doors jam. But the thief was thwarted because he did not stick the screwdriver deep enough into the mechanism before trying to force it to unlock. The second occasion involved his 1979 Malibu Classic, parked at a Sears Hardware Store near my home in Centerville, Ohio. Leaving the store after purchasing a fastener, he was surprised to find a swarthy, curly-headed guy trying to start the car! After walking up to the scene, Heitmann was puzzled when the culprit quickly explained that he had tried to start a car identical to his. A very unlikely story but, in shock, Heitmann allowed the quick-witted thief to walk away. Rebecca has a different set of stories that involved auto theft in her life. She had her 1991 Acura Integra stolen three times in front of her home in San Diego -- the first two times by joy riders and the last time by professionals who left behind a stripped carcass. Now as a twist of irony, she may be driving a car that could have been stolen and subjected to what the FBI calls "cloning," or creating a “new” car from stolen parts -- a process that is becoming increasingly common with the growing internationalization of auto theft.
These personal experiences capture the only a portion of the complexity and changing nature of auto theft in the U.S. from the early days to the present. Together, the authors explore how auto theft has occurred over time, why, by whom, and the responses to it. It is a history of technology, but also of a society that is continuously assaulted by law-breakers, and constantly regrouping to meet the challenge. At the same time, we as Americans, surely influenced by our culture, are conflicted over whether to demonize the thief or applaud his or her ingenuity and courage.
1 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Driven,” Qui Parle 13 (Fall/Winter, 2001): 138.
2 Sarah S. Lochlann Jain, “ ‘Dangerous Instrumentality’ The Bystander as a Subject in Automobility,” Cultural Anthropology 19 (February 2004): 61.
3 Guillermo Giucci, et al., The Cultural Life of the Automobile: Roads to Modernity (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012), xi-xiv.
4 James J. Flink and John B. Rae, leading automotive historians of the last generation, do not specifically mention auto theft. Professor Flink, however, did touch on broader themes cogent to the story. In his America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910, Flink addressed issues of government response and regulation that are directly related to important thematic currents in this study. As it turns out, patterns related to auto theft measures established at the birth of the automobile generally stayed on course for more than half a century, with unsatisfactory results. See James J. Flink, America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), Chapters 4 and 6. Ashleigh Brilliant's, The Great Car Craze: How Southern California Collided With the Automobile in the 1920s (Santa Barbara, CA: Woodbridge Press, 1989), 42-45, 119. Brilliant's work, largely overlooked for several decades before it was published in 1989, foreshadowed a transition that is currently taking place in the historiography of the automobile in America. Social and cultural history is increasingly supplementing the largely descriptive scholarship that is still favored by many auto history buffs.
5 David Wolcott, “The Cop will Get You: The Police and Discretionary Juvenile Justice, 1890-1940,” Journal of Social History 35 (Winter 2001): 349-71. Claire Bond Potter, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 3-6, 13, 36, 38, 41, 44, 60-65. For an overview on crime and society, see also Eric H. Monkkonen, Crime, Justice, History (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002), and by the same author, Police in America, 1860-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
6 E.J. Hobsbawm, Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960).
7 Ronald V. Clarke and Patricia M. Harris, “Auto Theft and Its Prevention,” Crime and Justice 16 (1992): 2.
8 Ibid., 2.
9 Andrew A. Karmen, “Auto Theft and Corporate Responsibility,” Contemporary Crises 5 (1981): 63-81.
10 See U.S. House of Representatives, 90th Cong., 2d sess., Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee No. 5. Hearings: Auto Theft Prevention Act of 1968 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968).
11 Quoted in Karmen, 66.
12 Jurg Gerber and Martin Killas, “The Transnationalization of Historically Local Crime: Auto Theft in Western Europe and Russia Markets,” European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice 11 (2003): 215-26; Philip Gounev and Tihomir Bezlov, “From the Economy of Deficit to the Black Market: Car Theft and Trafficking in Bulgaria,” Trends in Organized Crime 11 (2008): 410-29; Ragavan Chitra, “Why Auto Theft is Going Global,” U.S. News & World Report126, June 14, 1999, 16.
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