County Council: Tell Us More About Bait Cars

At a 7/28/08 work session of the County Council’s Public Safety Committee, Chairman Phil Andrews and committee members Marc Elrich and Don Praisner asked the Montgomery County Police Department for more information on successful bait car programs. Car thieves everywhere shuddered at the news.

Regular readers will remember how I declared war against car thieves after my neighbor’s car was stolen last fall. In researching the best practices for suppressing the lurking, squealing thieves, I quickly found British Columbia’s amazing baitcar.com website. British Columbia is one of dozens of jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada that employs large, aggressive bait car programs to capture and deter car thieves. When a thief breaks into the bait car, its cameras begin recording, its GPS device activates and an alarm is triggered at police headquarters. The police then swoop in to capture the now-pitiful criminal and the video is posted on the Internet and other media outlets. The combined effect of apprehension, deterrence and the massive media campaigns that accompany these programs have produced double-digit declines in theft in British Columbia, Minneapolis, Dallas, Stanislaus County in California and other jurisdictions. Arlington County, Virginia reports that bait cars have helped cut its car theft totals to the lowest levels since 1965. Best of all, many bait car programs are paid in whole or in part by insurance companies. We have combined all of this information and more in the heavily-demanded Bait Car Bible available here.

The Public Safety Committee interviewed Acting Assistant Police Chief Wayne Jerman. Jerman said that Montgomery County purchased two bait cars in 2004: a 1991 Toyota Corolla and a 1995 Honda. Neither proved desirable to the car thieves, who have only committed one theft and one break-in on the cars over the past four years. Unlike other jurisdictions, the county does not promote the cars. (British Columbia’s famous slogan, “Steal a Bait Car. Go to Jail,” has been the centerpiece of its award-winning “advertising campaign.”) Jerman described the bait car programs in both Prince George’s County and Fairfax County as “successful” but did not have statistics on their performance.


Council Members Don Praiser (left) and Marc Elrich.

Chairman Andrews noted that Montgomery County experiences roughly 2,500 car thefts per year, much lower than in Prince George’s County (where it is 12,000 per year) but still, in his words, “a high plateau.” Mr. Andrews stated that vehicle-related thefts were the number one category of crime in Montgomery and handed out a reported crime list from the 7/17/08 Washington Post. Of the 120 Montgomery County crimes in that report, 56 were car thefts or car break-ins. Mr. Andrews told the Assistant Chief, “It seems to me we need to do more in this area, especially in those parts of the county where it is a problem.” He asked Jerman what more could be done to have a greater impact on car thefts.

Assistant Chief Jerman admitted that the police could use more bait cars, stating, “Two is not enough.” But he described them as “labor-intensive,” saying that each needed three officers – two to drive it to the drop-off point and another to monitor it from headquarters. The auto theft unit’s nine investigators together record a 70% recovery rate of stolen cars (but not the valuables inside), which everyone agrees is a good performance. But if the thieves were deterred from stealing the cars in the first place, how much more effective could the investigators be?


Public Safety Committee Chairman Phil Andrews.

Mr. Andrews then put his finger on the key issue: why have bait car programs worked so well in other places? Noting that British Columbia has used its program to cut its auto thefts from 26,000 in fiscal 2004 to 17,000 in fiscal 2007 – a decline of 35% – he told Jerman, “What I want to get is more details on how they do it... What have they done that has been so successful?” Mr. Andrews specifically asked for information on how funding is collected from insurance companies, how much costs are paid by the police themselves and how successful jurisdictions deploy the cars. Assistant Chief Jerman agreed to find out and the Public Safety Committee will reconvene in the fall.

It’s clear that the County Council, and Phil Andrews in particular, have heard us and are responding to our blockbuster letter from last fall. We will see whether the police believe that bait cars can work in Montgomery County. But if they can achieve the same success that other jurisdictions have seen, the county’s citizens will benefit in two ways:

1. The most common type of crime in the county will be seriously reduced.
2. Over the long run, the police may then be able to redeploy their resources to more serious problems, like home burglaries and violent crime.

As for the sniveling car thieves, I have one message for you: enjoy yourselves while you can because the good times won’t last forever. As our friends in British Columbia say:

STEAL A BAIT CAR. GO TO JAIL.

Update: The Gazette's coverage, which includes statistics on car thefts and break-ins, is here.

Update 2: Here's an article from the Washington Post detailing the successful use of a bait car by D.C. police in March.

In Praise of Phil Andrews

Margarita-drinking penguins surf off the sandy beaches of Antarctica. Osama bin Laden sips matzo ball soup in Tel Aviv. George W. Bush admits the Iraq War is a mistake. But in an even more unlikely event, I am praising Montgomery County Council Member Phil Andrews for winning a spending increase in this year’s budget. These are strange times indeed.

Regular readers know that I am a career trade unionist. During the last county budget round, I vigorously disagreed with Mr. Andrews’ recommendation to cut two percentage points from the public employees’ cost of living increase. I went out of my way to demonstrate how the unions’ contracts were affordable on this blog. And still Mr. Andrews faced down three hundred chanting, stomping union members and told them, “Employees need to do their part… It would be unfair to expect taxpayers to pay a tax increase to fully fund employee contracts that would be 8% next year.”

But Mr. Andrews is no mere budget cleaver. While he was pursuing labor savings, he was also trying to restore another part of the budget that was of utmost importance to the county. In his original budget plan, County Executive Ike Leggett proposed doing away with the police department’s community service officers (CSOs). The CSOs maintain regular contact with community leaders and citizens inside their districts and train them to implement Neighborhood Watch programs. My neighborhood had just started a watch program and feared seeing them abandoned just as we were creating one. Moreover, many African American, Latino and immigrant leaders protested losing an important communication channel to the police. The total savings from the elimination of the liaison officers was only projected to be $623,000 (out of a $297 million deficit).

Mr. Andrews, Chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, would have none of it. He declared:

The officers in these positions provide a crucial link between the department and the public and often are the main link between community members, HOAs and other groups... A relationship has developed between the CSOs and folks in the respective district that very much needs to continue.

Mr. Andrews promptly formed an alliance with Police Chief Tom Manger and guided the restoration of the CSOs through every step of the budget process. Other spending hikes and cuts would come and go, but the CSOs survived. Yes, Mr. Andrews wanted to limit spending in some areas, but he fought hard to fund a program he believed made sense. And as the summer crime season begins, the CSOs are working with my neighborhood and many others to greet the criminals with wary eyes in every house.

But that is not all. Last year, a group of nine civic associations in Silver Spring, Wheaton and Kensington representing 4,440 households wrote to the county asking for implementation of a bait car program. As we detailed in January, bait cars are decoys rigged with cameras and GPS devices by the police to catch car thieves. We asked Mr. Andrews to consider the idea, but that was before the budget crisis dominated Rockville. However, he never forgot about us and has scheduled a Public Safety work session on the issue on July 28. Perhaps he will agree with us that bait cars are a cost-effective way to fight vehicle crime and perhaps he will not. But the fact is that none of our associations are located inside his district and he had no direct self-interest in helping us. He listened to us anyway.

One of Rockville’s most brilliant lobbyists once told me, “I communicate with everyone. Someone might disagree with me nine times in a row, but they could be with me the tenth time.” And so it is with Phil Andrews. Even his detractors admit that he will tell you exactly what he thinks without hesitation and will stick to his word. Crime-weary neighborhoods are lucky to have him in Rockville; the criminals are not.

“Oh NOOOO! It’s a BAIT CAR!!!”

Have you ever had someone ransack your car? If so, did you say something like, “If I could ever get my hands on that punk, I’d…” Well, how about watching a video of that punk getting busted by the police? That’s exactly what the citizens of British Columbia can do and MoCo citizens should be entitled to the same pleasure.

Thefts from vehicles are a huge problem in MoCo. According to the Washington Post, between 1/1/07 and 10/15/07, there were 5,092 break-ins in MoCo, up 19% from the levels of the year before. In Police District 2, which includes Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Kensington, break-ins jumped from 577 to 1,062 over the same period. In my own neighborhood, car break-ins rose by 60% and car thefts rose by 56% over last year. And when my neighbor’s car, parked right across the street from mine, was stolen – that was the final straw for me.

Rising outrage over repeated crimes led us to identify a solution: bait cars. Used in dozens of jurisdictions across North America, bait cars are rigged with cameras, GPS devices and sensors linked to police headquarters. When a thief breaks in, the devices are triggered, the police are alerted and the cameras begin recording. If the thief tries to escape, police can remotely shut off the bait car engine and lock the doors. The trapped crook then bounces around the car like a panicked ping-pong ball as the long arm of the law reaches down to drag him off to jail.

Many of these bait car videos wind up on the Internet. You can find a lot of them on British Columbia’s marvelous baitcar.com website and on YouTube. Go ahead and watch these hilarious videos! You will quickly learn who these thieves really are. They are hardly hulking mastodons of the underworld. Rather, they are sniveling, larcenous weasels, so craven that they would likely flee in terror from the raised cane of an old woman. They scurry in packs like twitching, squeaking rats through parking lots, garages and neighborhoods looking for tasty morsels to grab. While certainly greedy, many are barely intelligent enough to figure out how to pick their noses with one finger.

Here’s a video from British Columbia. Note the teeth-chattering paranoia of the car thieves as they whine, “I hope this isn’t another f***’in bait car, man!”



And here’s another sorry miscreant on his way to jail. As the cops approach with police dogs, watch the crying wretch beg, “Please don’t let the dog chew on me!”



So do these programs really work? Absolutely, but only if done in tandem with aggressive marketing campaigns that inform criminals, “Steal a bait car and go to jail!” Minneapolis started the first comprehensive bait car program in the U.S. in 1997 and has seen a 30% drop in car thefts. Stanislaus County, California saw a 40% drop in two years. British Columbia has seen 10% annual drops since implementing their program in 2004. And in Arlington County, Virginia, their bait car program has helped cut auto thefts to their lowest level since 1965. Best of all, insurance companies often donate the cars and finance the marketing programs because reduced crime cuts down on claims. Upon learning these facts, nine civic associations in Forest Glen, Silver Spring and Kensington promptly asked that the MoCo police implement a comparable program.

So how could MoCo refuse a program that can draw on private funding to cut down on auto crime by double digits? Given its current budget problems, isn’t it time for the county to get creative? One thing is for sure: the car thieves aren’t going to take next summer off just because the county is cutting funding for police. So when they steal that next car, why not make these gibbering curs scream, “Oh NOOOO! It’s a BAIT CAR!!!”