DENVER – Colorado’s record increase in car thefts is being driven, at least in part, by repeat offenders stealing one vehicle after another, according to a 9Wants to Know analysis of state court data.
That’s no surprise to Lakewood Police Cmdr. Mike Greenwell, head of the Metropolitan Auto Theft Task Force. This task force focuses on auto theft hot spots and repeat offenders, so it makes sense that the officers there deal with people who steal cars more than once.
“I would say 95 percent of the people my team arrests have multiple prior arrests for auto theft,” Greenwell said.
But he said he has looked extensively at police and court records beyond those generated by his 11-officer team and concluded that “two-thirds of the people arrested for auto theft have prior auto theft arrests “.
The question of what’s driving the state’s auto theft epidemic comes in this context: 41,359 cars stolen in Colorado by 2022, more than triple the number taken a decade ago.
This led 9Wants to Know to wonder: Are there a lot more car thieves or are there some car thieves who are stealing a lot more cars?
What the data shows
Credit: KUSA
To find out, 9Wants to Know pulled 22 months of data from the state court system: the 10,373 criminal cases in which motor vehicle theft charges were filed between Jan. 1, 2021, and Oct. 31, 2021. 2022.
From that data, 9Wants to Know pulled 10 random cases that were spread across metro counties and dug into the suspects’ backgrounds. He provided a snapshot of the toll repeat offenders take on the criminal justice system:
- Each of the 10 suspects had been accused of stealing cars more than once, and collectively they faced auto theft charges in 43 separate cases.
- At the low end, three of them were charged in two separate cases, and at the high end, two of them were charged in seven cases.
- In the 43 separate cases of the 10, the suspects pleaded guilty to a charge of motor vehicle theft in 27 of them. In 11 cases, auto theft charges were dismissed in an agreement with prosecutors. In the other five cases, charges were dropped, but it’s not clear in court documents why.
The data analyzed by 9Wants to Know did not include the suspects’ names, but did include their dates of birth and other demographic information, such as gender and race.
An analysis of the 10,373 criminal cases found that 2,072, almost exactly one-fifth of them, had matching demographic and date-of-birth information for defendants in at least two cases over that 22-month period. In other words, it suggests that 1 in 5 defendants during that period in 2021 and 2022 had at least two auto theft cases filed against them during that time period.
> Video below: Denver police helicopter tracks suspects after a stolen car chase at an apartment complex in Westminster on January 19, 2021:
“Your car was stolen”
Zoe Hudson-Young was at home in January 2020 when she got a call from her teenage daughter: “Mom, uh, uh, your car was stolen.”
“I really thought he was joking,” Hudson-Young said.
Instead, he was the victim of one of 10 repeat offenders 9Wants to Know randomly pulled from state data.
Hudson-Young’s daughter had borrowed her Subaru to go to swim team practice at a recreation center in Golden. While she and her teammates were in the pool, a woman with a lengthy criminal record entered the locker room, removed backpacks and left with the keys to two cars: Hudson-Young’s and one driven by another swimmer, according to court documents.
An accomplice waited outside the recreation center, and the two women allegedly drove off in the vehicles, documents say.
“I know it’s just a car,” Hudson-Young said. “It’s just a material object, but still, it’s your personal possession. I think it was like a shock.”
He got another shock weeks later when a credit card statement arrived in the mail. That’s when he realized he’d left a credit card in the Subaru, and someone had used it.
The woman caught on surveillance footage going in and out of the locker rooms that day eventually pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in that case in a plea deal that saw the auto theft charge dismissed.
She was also accused of stealing four other vehicles: two in another case from 2020 and two more in a case from 2021, both in Arapahoe County. He is now serving a sentence in community corrections.
Proposal to renew the sanctions
Greenwell said the details of the 10 cases 9Wants to Know pulled, and the suspects’ backgrounds, line up with what he sees every day.
“We’re seeing it over and over again,” he said. “We’re arresting the same people. They come in, they get low bail, they get out, they go steal a car. And then days, weeks, months later, they get arrested again. And we start that cycle all over again.”
The cases examined by 9Wants to Know proved this.
> Video below: On November 30, 2020, Denver police officers received a report of a man passed out behind the wheel of a car with the engine running. After checking, they determined that the car was stolen:
Judges granted personal recognizance bail to five of the 10 suspects in at least one case. This means they were arrested and then released after signing an undertaking to attend court hearings.
The examination also showed that even in some cases where suspects pleaded guilty to stealing a car, they got probation, small fines or short prison terms.
A man was sentenced to a total of 80 days in jail for stealing two cars. Another got 90 days in jail, another 78 days in jail. One of the 10 was fined $910.50 in a car theft case.
A bipartisan group of state lawmakers has proposed a measure that would revamp state law when it comes to car thefts. Right now, the severity of the criminal charge is directly related to the value of the stolen vehicle.
If a car is worth less than $2,000, the suspect can be charged with a misdemeanor, which happened in about 20 percent of the cases filed during that 22-month period.
The new measure would make all car theft a felony. It also calls for anyone with two convictions for auto theft to face a higher felony.
“Vehicles in our society are the way to get your kids to school, they’re the way to get to work, the way to get to important appointments,” said state Sen. Bob Gardner, a Republican. of El Paso County. “And when you deprive someone from a working-class or low-income family of a vehicle, you’ve probably done a lot more damage to them than when you steal a $100,000 vehicle from someone who has one or two more in the garage. “.
> The following video was posted on January 30: Colorado lawmakers announce plan to revamp auto theft laws:
The bill does not specifically address bail. But Gardner and state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Jefferson and Adams counties, said they hope to send a message that stealing a car, any car, is a serious crime and should be treated as to such by the judges.
In addition to Zenzinger and Gardner, several sponsors from both sides of the political aisle have signed on to the bill.
“We’ve come together as a community of law enforcement professionals, of community leaders, to say what we agree on,” Zenzinger said. “And it turns out we agree on that. We agree that it doesn’t make sense to treat victims differently under the law, and we also agree that we need to do something more for repeat offenders.”
Investigative data producer Zack Newman contributed to this story.
Contact 9Wants to Know Investigator Kevin Vaughan with tips on this or any story: kevin.vaughan@9news.com or 303-871-1862.
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