True, but it dismisses the ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about’ thing that always pops up. Just because I’m not doing anything wrong doesn’t mean I’m okay with the cops entering my car (or house) and I’d like to undermine that excuse before it gathers any steam.
But lets ignore the ‘cops might find/plant something in your car’ thing. Imagine if this was just a random neighbor that walks through the subdivision every night at 1am and locks unlocked cars. They’d have the police called on them every night. They’d almost certainly be charged with burglary (even if charges are dropped, that’s probably where they’d start). That would be bad enough. Imagine how much worse if would be if that neighbor was nosey and a gossip. Telling anyone who’ll listen about all the things they saw (or smelled) in everyone’s cars.
I get that there’s some cops somewhere that are truly just trying to be helpful. But regardless of intent, being able to open car doors and reach into cars, without permission, is illegal. If I did it, I’d get arrested. Are the cops above the law?
Generally, IMHO best to lock your cars and if not in the best of areas not leave valuables in sight.
On FB, there was a situation in a nearby area, where a person showed their window broken- but the thief took two backpacks, a phone and pricey sunglasses.
But if you are in a area where scumbags routeinly break windows just to look for anything valuable, sure, why not leave the doors unlocked.
Note, for a very small extra premium you can have 0 deductible on your casualty and theft car insurance.
I would add that any risk/reward calculation must consider the cost of mitigation. At least for me, it costs basically nothing to keep my car empty of anything I can’t afford to lose. Compared to the expense of replacing a popped window or a ruined latch, the tradeoff is obviously worthwhile. And it’s something I can rely on, more so than me guessing as to the car burglary frequency in a given area.
It might be different for someone who’s never lived or worked in a risky area. That doesn’t make it wrong, it’s just different assumptions based on different experiences.
Taking down the details of a damaged car, stolen car, stolen property, after the thief is loooooooong gone, is a complete waste of time. At best, the stolen car might get returned to its owner in undamaged condition, but it’s better to not have it stolen in the first place. Way better, 10,000% better, it’s not even a competition, it’s LeBron vs. Me one on one kind of better.
The police get reports on this stuff all the time, a constant low level barrage of people leaving their stuff in the car, the car unlocked then crying about their stuff being taken. It makes sense for them to see an unlocked door and just lock the stupid thing.
But… don’t violate my rights when you’re saving me a headache.
For me the cost of not locking my doors over the last 25 years has been maybe $20 in change.
The cost of locking my doors was $170 and the hassle of having to get a new driver’s side window.
Just don’t leave valuables in your car. Anyone who thinks that locking your doors is protecting your valuables is making a horrid risk assessment. There is nothing in my car that is worth more than my window.
I was not saying that. Likewise for example if we were talking about wearing seatbelts–you are not, actually, better in every situation wearing a seatbelt. There are some crash scenarios where a seatbelt can screw you, but in aggregate overall, wearing the seatbelt is the better action based on the risk assessment.
But there’s an important difference. You don’t know what kind of auto accident you are likely to be in before it happens. You do know what kind of neighborhood you are parking your car in, and you are likely to know something about the styles of crime committed there.
I also wear my seatbelt to protect something valuable, namely me.
If I’m not in my car, I don’t buckle the seatbelt, as there is nothing to protect. I also don’t buckle the passenger or rear seatbelts if no one is in those seats.
Not keeping valuables in your car is the best way to keep them safe. Leaving them in your car and expecting your locked door to protect them is like assuming that you are safe driving 120mph because you are wearing your seatbelt.
And if there is nothing valuable in your car, then what exactly are you risking by leaving it unlocked?
So you are saying that you believe the number of opportunist thieves who will take advantage of easy targets—like those with unlocked doors, is less than the number of thieves willing to break a door / lock / window to get into a locker car or home?
My Wife and I have had our cars broken into by bears twice each. No damage. We have been advised NOT to lock our cars because they will just rip the door handle off. Otherwise, there is no need to lock our cars at our house.
I always lock the car if I go to Denver. In the local towns, I’m about 50/50.
Unlike you, I am not trying to speak for HMS, but no, I don’t think that that is what they are saying.
What I believe that they are saying, and what I am saying is that the cost of replacing a window far outweighs the value of the contents in the car. Your window is far more likely to be broken than anything of value taken, if you don’t keep anything of value in your car.
Unless you think that there are no places where someone will break your window in order to try to get some change, your assertions are entirely baseless.
Why you chose to throw “home” into there makes absolutely no sense though. That is entirely a strawman of your own creation, as it was not a part of the conversation in any way until you chose to interject it.
What about it? I don’t leave my keys in my car. If someone is able and determined to steal it, then a locked door is not going to stop or even slow them.
Question, you said you leave valuable items in your car, do you really think that your locks are keeping those items safe? That some pretty terrible risk assessment. Parking in a well lit, secured, and monitored place will go far for alleviating that risk, but not all of us have that option.
Since you brought up the seatbelt analogy, I will reiterate. Wearing a seatbelt certainly keeps you safer, but it does not mean that it makes it safe to drive at unsafe speeds.
Article notes that leaving your door unlocked isn’t necessarily a protection against having your windows broken–this should be understood innately, since a door lock doesn’t protect against glass being broken one way or another. There’s a crime pattern in which some criminals will bust the windows out of a row of parked cars, then go back through them and grab whatever is in quick reach, and then scurry off. They have no incentive to check if individual cars are locked because they likely fully know they will be setting a car alarm off and are planning to simply move before anyone can respond to it.
Probably the most important item is this:
Locking your car makes it less likely that the car itself is stolen. A stolen car is almost certainly the worst outcome involving your car and theft that can occur, as a whole car costs many multiples of a car window.
The article notes that many sophisticated thieves will steal pieces of a car, and are more likely to do this to a car that is left unlocked. Car stereos due to changing design, are much less easily resold stand alone now and are not that valuable. But air bags and even the car’s seats can be quickly removed and trucked away by experienced theft rings, and are worth lots–car seats can be in the multiple thousands of dollars.
It would seem at least based on our best available information, as a general rule, you are better off locking your car, regardless of whether you store valuables in it or not.
Like any general rule there are likely exceptions to it. Where I grew up no one ever locked their cars because we lived in a very rural community. Due to the low risk of theft, the inconvenience of the car being locked when we might need to get something from it but didn’t have the key on us, outweighed the protection against a low base rate of theft in the area. There are cities in the U.S. that are considered extremely high car theft activity areas, with sophisticated car thieves who can hijack even the most modern cars, in those cities it is likely that locking your car is a better bet.
If I had to wager a guess, at least some of the reason 15 out of 16 reviewed studies showed that locked cars were less likely to be stolen actually relates to car alarms, most modern cars are built with alarms as a standard feature–but they are only active when a car is locked. A noisy car alarm is a disincentive to criminals in a number of ways, and they do nothing if the car is unlocked.
The studies in the article I linked to demonstrate you are wrong about this; leaving a car unlocked meaningfully increases its risk of being stolen. A car is worth far more than a window of a car. Further, leaving a car unlocked also does not offer any guarantee that a window will not be broken out, it probably reduces the risk, but there is little evidence by how much, and it is known that some smash and grab thieves bust out multiple car windows
I’d also note that even someone with a rigorous policy of “never leave valuables in a car”, like all human enacted things, is likely to be fucked up at least occasionally. Maybe one day you leave a laptop (worth $1500) in a car and it’s stolen because you left it unlocked. Maybe one day you leave some important private documents that get stolen, increasing your risk of being the victim of identity theft.
There’s probably some people who never make mistakes like that, but most humans make mistakes, and if you’re in the habit of locking your car you do add some layer of protection against having valuables stolen in situations like that.