King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg described a crime wave that once earned King County an unwelcome reputation as one of the top spots in the nation for car thieves to practice their dark avocation.
Yet car thefts are down, and many of the poster thieves of yesteryear are in prison and likely to be there for a long time, Satterberg told the Auburn Area Chamber of Commerce’s Partnership Luncheon last week at Emerald Downs.
The decline is not an accident, Satterberg said, but the result of changes to the sentencing guidelines, energized police and prosecutors, and new tools machined to catch thieves in the act.
Satterberg said that from 1984 to July 2007, car theft ranked as the lowest-level felony in King County. A big part of the problem was the sentencing schema that determined when a person graduated from jail to prison. Before July of 2007, seven convictions were required to earn a car thief six-month prison term, with half off for good time.
The message was not lost on car thieves, Satterberg said: it’s easy to steal a car in King County; your chances of getting caught are low; and if you do get caught, nothing is going to happen.
Worse yet was the demoralizing effect on police and prosecutors — why, they asked, should they pursue car theft cases with any zeal if the policy was no better than “catch and release?”
Satterberg said the sentences did not reflect the seriousness of the crime. Car theft, he said, is costly, inconvenient, and, especially to the people caught in the path of a stolen car tooling down the highway at 120 mph, extremely dangerous.
“It was a category of crime that was vastly undervalued by the law, but that had a huge impact on the community that we live in … We realized that there were a small number of people who made this their profession,” Satterberg said. “In 2005, there were 18,000 car thefts in King County. I don’t believe that 18,000 people each took one. We’ve met guys who each take 20 or 100 in a year. The thought was, if we could catch up with guys like that, we might be able to have an impact.”
So in 2005 the Prosecutor’s office created a special unit whose sole purpose was to focus on car theft. The attorneys, knowing that good cases begin with the patrolman on the street, went into the field and talked to police officers. And they instructed officers in the many little things they needed to do to make the charges stick.
They also worked with police to identify the 20 most prolific thieves in the region and began to follow them.
“We’d know when they were in jail, and when they got released and were supposed to come to court and when they were in prison and got released from prison,” Satterberg said. “And by following them, we confirmed what we knew already — that a very small percentage of people were doing a huge percentage of these cases.”
Police watched time and again as wrongdoers just out of court or even visiting their probation officers would drive up or away in a stolen car. Then officers would move in and make the bust.
Time and technology have given officers tools such as bait cars and sophisticated license plate readers like the ones now employed by Auburn police to catch car thieves.
In the 2007 Legislative session, King County persuaded state lawmakers to change the sentencing guidelines. Today, after the third car theft, an offender goes to prison for 17 to 22 months. Every car theft thereafter nets the thief a 43-to-57 month sentence, or about four to five years. Satterberg said the new “price tag” better reflects the danger car thieves represent to the general public.
Today car thefts are down. In 2005, the first year that special unit began to focus on car theft, the number of cars stolen in King County had dropped from 18,000 to just above 11,000, a 36 percent drop. By the first quarter of 2008, car thefts had dropped 55 percent from 2005.
As a result of these changes, many of the most prolific thieves are now in prison.
“When you add all these things up, you can see we are having some success,” Satterberg said.