I think it’s better NOT to lock your doors if you’re good about taking all your valuables out of it. I know a girl whose window has been smashed twice to rifle through the glove compartment, and now she just leaves her car unlocked because the cost to replace the window is more than the value of the stuff she keeps in the car.
Talk to a gangbanger, and the word “respect” will crop up all the frickin time! It’s a core value in the gang lifestyle.
(But I know what you mean.)
I saw a locksmith get into a car using an inflatable bag that moved the window far enough from the door to get a flexible bar in an open the lock. I wonder why thieves don’t use them.
I used to own a convertible, and you should never lock a convertible, because anyone with a knife can get in quietly anyway, and those tops are not cheap.
About once a year I’d find that someone had gone in, pulled stuff out of the glove compartment and left. There was never anything of value in there.
-
Why bother, when people don’t lock their car doors?
-
I’m sure thieves do use locksmith tech on cars that are worth the risk. Most cars aren’t, though …
YOu can do the same thing with your hand, quicker and easier if you have the skill and aren’t worried about breaking a few as you learn.
He may have been looking for cigarettes. Cig thieves are often soft thieves where they won’t break things or steal anything else.
I used to live in a block with parking out the back. My car was broken into so regularly that I started leaving it unlocked so that the thieves wouldn’t bugger up the door locks getting in. The first time it happened their was loose change in the console for parking and tolls. It was the only thing taken. After that nothing was ever taken although I would often find it with the doors only partly closed. I too assumed kids were doing it.
Probably not applicable to the OP, but probably worth sharing for somebody.
When I lived in a regular house the garage was full of stuff and our cars parked in the driveway. I kept nothing of value in my car and after it got old I took to leaving it unlocked to preclude somebody breaking a window to steal the nothing inside. I’d already had that happen at work once and it was an expensive PITA.
Much to my surprise one morning I learned there *was *something valuable in my car. The remote control for the garage door opener. :smack:
The cop taking the report said a standard MO is to cruise the neighborhoods looking for unlocked cars then rifle those cars looking for garage door remotes. The bad guys push the button, drive away, and drive by again in a few minutes. If the opener’s light has turned off and the door’s still open, the people slept through the commotion. Help yourself.
I’d never put that idea together, that the $10 opener was valuable. Not for itself, but for what it gave access to. :smack:
About 15 years ago, my car was broken into while parked at a commuter lot in suburban Chicago (at one end of one of the L lines). Driver’s side window smashed in, but nothing was stolen, except for a few dollars in change, which was sitting in a cupholder.
The police officer who filed the report told me that they regularly saw that sort of break-in in that lot; other than money, what was most commonly stolen was music CDs – the thieves would peddle the CDs on the L for cash. (Obviously, that’s unlikely to be a target for thieves today, compared to 15 years ago.)
In fact, my CD case was still there, in the car. My guess is that, if the thief had looked at it, he decided that a bunch of CDs by 1970s bands (ELO, Queen, Yes, etc.) wouldn’t sell well on the L. 
Good point.
It’s not expensive to get a garage door control with a timer to auto-close the garage door after a set amount of time after the button is pressed. We have one because we kept forgetting to close our garage. We’d come out in the morning and find that we’d left it open all night. Obviously, we live in a low-crime area. It probably helps that our garage is behind our house at the back of the property. You can see that it’s open from the street, but you’d have to venture ~60 feet onto our property to get to it.
If you set the auto-close to 2 minutes, that should help for this kind of thing.
Wait, do I know you?
Several years ago, a young man was at my door Sunday morning, wondering why my pay stub was in his car. His car was parked around the block from mine. He thought I, a stranger, had played a drunken prank on him. I don’t think he expected a 40 year old woman to open the door. We talked for a bit and he admitted that his door locks didn’t work really well and that nothing else was strange. Nothing missing, just an extra someone else’s pay stub.
I knew I had forgotten that pay stub in my car. I thought maybe somehow it had blown out onto the street (however unlikely) And that someone in fact was playing some kind of prank. My car doors were locked when I checked. This was an old car where you had to use a key to lock the door.
About a month later my car was stolen.
About 20 years ago, someone broke the window of my much nicer car to take about $1.35 in change and nothing else.
I live on a quiet dead end street. One night, someone opened my (unlocked) truck, and stole my iPod nano. It was at least 10 years old. They actually sliced the AUX cord, which unplugs easily. They missed about $8 dollars in change, a a very nice lock blade knife. I hope they have iTunes, otherwise all they have is Buckwheat Zydeco and Benny Goodman.
Benny Goodman? :dubious:
Whoever tried to steal and left my satellite receivers cut the cables rather than unscrewing them. I would like to meet those guys with a baseball bat.
We had one of our truck windows broken - the “haul” taken was about three buck in change, a pink iPod Shuffle and a Bath and Body Works car air freshener.
My event was back in the early 1990s and auto-close hadn’t been invented yet that I knew of then. Nice to learn that the feature is available now. Thank you.
Although it’s not foolproof because even with manually-triggered closing every now and then a door may reverse on its own when the safety system overreacts to a gust of wind or whatever. Proper maintenance and adjustment can minimize nuisance reversals, but not eliminate them. Speaking just for me I’d not want to develop the habit of blithely driving off expecting the auto system to just handle it.
Has anyone suggested stealing gas?
Stealing a gallon pf gas would probably go unnoticed.
A couple of years ago my car was broken into (Broken passenger window), everything had been tossed around willy-nilly but nothing was actually missing. Me and my wife had been sloppy about taking stuff out of the car so there was a lot of fabric and specialy clothing in there> None of it was of much value to a thief even though some of it would be quite expensive to replace. I kept trying to figure out what they were going after. Perhaps they thought the fabric & clothes were piles of gold and electronics or something.
Its real fun to cross a fairly busy street in the rain, open your car door, get in, and slam the door shut expecting to hear the sounds of the outside world be muffled, only to hear it through the broken window you didn’t notice when approaching the car.