Growing up one of the weird rules my parents had was to NEVER leave a baseball hat in a car (or at least in plain sight) because baseball hats (specifically ones with actual MLB teams) were “hot” on a theives radar. The justification was that theives will steal them either because they were very easy to flip, or it was some weird gang thing where they wanted to own as many hats of the local team as possible for local pride.
The weird thing was that both my parents grew up in Los Angeles so they were fairly street smart so I assumed they learned from example, has anyone else heard of this?
I’ve never heard of breaking into cars for baseball hats but I have heard of breaking into cars looking for a few dollars in spare change or even just to “look around inside” so I guess anything is possible when it comes to vandalism and thieves.
I grew up in the SF Bay Area and never heard this before. It may have been a thing, but I wasn’t aware of it. In my day, people mainly broke into cars to go on joy rides or steal and part them out.
People will break into cars for anything. I think there are more valuable items that are the main target of thieves but I’m sure something like a top quality Red Sox cap is highly desirable. I can’t imagine anyone having such low self esteem that they’d break into a car to steal a Yankees cap, but possibly they are doing the car’s owner a favor instead.
The only context I’ve ever heard this in that might have made sense is that different gangs would wear a certain sports team’s hats as a uniform of their gang (Like the ‘Pillbox Boyz’ would wear Phillies hats for the P symbol) so that if you saw the hat of an opposing gang member, taking their hat was the equivalent of a Native American taking coup of an enemy. That being said, I don’t think that explanation is true.
I did grow up in L.A. in the 1960s-70s and I never heard anything about bad guys breaking int cars to steal baseball caps. I think your parents were confused / deluded or you misunderstood them.
I’ve lived in places where people would break into an unlocked car (smash the side windows) for the $5 pair of sunglasses and 37 cents in assorted change you have in the center console.
If this were a real thing, my various vehicles over the years would have been savaged week in and week out. There’s usually at least a couple of caps in my car at any time. It’s because I work the second shift. I put on a cap to shield my eyes when I go to work, when it’s light out, but don’t think about putting one on when I head back home in the dark. Then, you know, lather, rinse and repeat, and suddenly I’ve got an entire colony of hats living in my car.
Years ago someone broke into my car outside the apartment I lived in at the time. They obviously rummaged around the glove box and center console, popped the trunk and looked around in there, and then moved on when they didn’t find anything they wanted (I guess they didn’t think my jumper cables or lug wrench were worth anything). And they just left the trunk open, which was my first clue that someone had broken in. As far as I could tell they didn’t take anything; they apparently just were looking around to see if there was anything worth taking.
Never really heard of this and as a matter of fact back in the 80s I knew a lot of people that put baseball hats of their favorite teams on their rear window deck. Never had any problems with them being stolen, just a lot of them faded quickly by the sun.
About 20 years ago, while my car was parked in a parking lot at a suburban station for the Chicago L (rapid transit train), during daylight hours, someone smashed open the driver’s-side window. I discovered this when I got back to the car, after taking the L home during the evening commute.
In talking with the police officer who was filling out the incident report, such break-ins happened with some regularity at that parking lot; he told me that the thieves were typically after two things:
Change – the thief did get about $5 in change, which had been in one of the cupholders
CDs, which they would then peddle to passengers on the L – this was before MP3 players and smartphones
In fact, I found my CD case, unzipped, but otherwise unmolested, on the floor. It seemed that the thief didn’t think that my collection of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings soundtrack CDs would sell well.
Huh. Back then I would have thought car radios high up there, though now thinking about it, that was 25 years ago. I’ve had my car broken into three times in Chicago and once in Milwaukee. The first time (in Evanston, got too comfortable in not locking my door as I lived across the Civic Center), they stole my new Blaupunkt CD radio. Nothing crazy expensive, but it was $100 for a college kid. Like you, they riffled through my CDs and left them all in the rear footwell. Not Sonic Youth and Pixies fans, I guess.
Less than one week later, in Logan Square, they smashed my window and stole my cheap replacement Radio Shack Realistic-brand tape player. It wasn’t even a CD player. WTF? Who is going to buy that shit from them? And they did a horrible job, to boot, bending the shit out of the radio cage (or whatever you call it.)
In Milwaukee (that one would have been less than 20 years ago), they got as far as taking my faceplate off and then must have run off. No damage – the hotel valet who parked my car apparently didn’t lock the door. For a few minutes, I thought they stole my faceplate, those dicks. But, no, it was under the passenger seat.
(And the last time in Hyde Park, nothing was taken, but I did end up gaining a butter knife in the break-in. Once again, door left open, this time by passenger.)
In roughly 1993 it was a 10 year-old well-worn truck, parked late at night in the small lot off the alley behind my business in the older semi-sketchy part of downtown Las Vegas. They smashed the passenger window and tried to remove the factory AM/FM/cassette unit. Which they did by attacking the general area around the knobs with a big screwdriver. All they succeeded in doing is scratching the paint of the heavy exposed metal around the knobs and breaking the radio’s plastic faceplate. Hint kids: radios like that don’t come out by prying; you need a wrench or better yet a 1/2" nut-driver to remove the nuts around the knob shafts; then it pulls out from the back easily.
They rifled through the glove box and console too, tossing the contents around the cabin, but I don’t recall that they took anything. Not that there was much of interest in there.
Amazingly the police came out to take a theft report. Apparently they’d had a rash of vehicle burglaries in many of the businesses along this 24-hour area and were hoping to catch a print or two. No such luck for me / them. Anyhow, I mentioned to the officer that I was surprised we’d had a break-in since we had bright security lighting, unlike many other places up and down the alley. “Ah yes, work lights for thieves; very considerate of you to put those up.” was her response. Hmmm.
