Auto Theft Research Articles

Association of Involuntary Displacement of People Experiencing Homelessness and Crime in Denver, CO: A Spatiotemporal Analysis.

In 2022, approximately 580,000 people experienced homelessness in the United States. In response, many cities have implemented "camping ban" policies enforced by involuntary displacement of homeless encampments. Displacement has been cited as a strategy to protect public health and safety. However, there is mixed evidence that displacement is effective in reducing crime, while it is associated with other adverse health outcomes. To evaluate the neighborhood-level association between displacement and crime, we performed a retrospective (November 2019 to July 2023) pre-post spatiotemporal analysis using administrative data from Denver, CO. We used the Knox test statistic to detect excess clustering and change in total crime, as well as crime stratified by the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) category, within spatiotemporal proximity to displacement events. We found that, on average, clustering of crime is high both before and after displacement. Within a 0.25-mile radius, displacement is associated with a statistically significant but modest decrease in crime, between - 9.3% within 7days (p < 0.001) and - 3.9% within 21days (p = 0.002). We found no consistent change in composite crime at a 0.5- or 0.75-mile radius. Hyperlocal decreases were driven by significant decreases in public disorder and auto theft, while crimes against persons increased and displayed high clustering post-displacement. There were no changes in any other offense type. Involuntary displacement is not consistently associated with changes in clustering of crime and may exacerbate violence in nearby areas.

Are There Non-Business Days for Crime? A Small-Area Bayesian Spatiotemporal Analysis of Crime Patterns

ABSTRACT Criminal behavior may be different on weekends and holidays compared to business days. Understanding the distinctive crime patterns on non-business days is useful for crime research and crime control. This study contributes to the literature by explicitly investigating the small-area spatiotemporal variation in five types of major crimes between business days and non-business days using a Bayesian modeling approach in Old Toronto, Canada. The results show that criminal activity varies between business days and non-business days, influenced by the types of crimes, geographic locations, and local neighborhood characteristics. Compared to business days, on non-business days, southern areas with high business and entertainment activity exhibit increased assault and robbery levels, while northern residential areas experience reduced activity of break and enter, auto theft, and theft over $5,000. Nonetheless, spatial crime hot spots generally remain consistent between the two date categories, with some hot spots presenting an exacerbation of criminal activity during non-business days. A few sociodemographic variables and built environment features are associated with the spatiotemporal variation in crime. These findings demonstrate the spatiotemporal variation in criminal behavior and crime patterns between business days and non-business days and highlight the need for customized crime control measures at the small area level.

How Crime Shapes Insurance and Insurance Shapes Crime

Abstract Crime creates demand for insurance but supplying insurance may promote crime. We examine five case studies of insured crimes (auto theft, art theft, kidnap and hijack for ransom, ransomware, and payment card fraud) and find a co-evolutionary process through which insurers engage with insureds, governments, and legal and extralegal third parties to mitigate losses, particularly when criminal innovations destabilize the insurance market. “Insurance as crime governance” stimulates demand for security, shapes criminal incentives, engages with the state to combat crime, and tolerates some crime in the interest of profitability.

Development of etching paste for serial number restoration on aluminum engine block.

Engine numbers, which involve information regarding the engine type, production number, and year and place of manufacture, are used for identification purposes. Comprising of unique alphanumeric characters, the engine numbers are fully or partially obliterated especially in auto theft and smuggling cases to conceal the origin, identity, and owner of vehicles. The limitations of the current restoration techniques such as the difficulty of using chemical liquid etching in vertical sites, the restrictions of magnetic and optical methods, and the applicability of several techniques like electron backscatter diffraction only in the laboratory environment prompt the development of new techniques. In view of these limitations and the importance of restoring engine numbers in criminal investigations, this unique study aimed to develop an etching paste that would restore the effaced characters on a real aluminum alloy engine block. The characters which were cold-stamped on the engine block were milled at varying depths and restoration attempts were conducted using etching pastes formed with different chemicals and materials. The analyses indicate that the etching paste formed with 200 mg of perlite, 400 mg of iron powder, and 450 μL of 20 M NaOH provided restoration to a good extent. The prevention of over-etching through the controlling of the chemical reaction and the cost-effectiveness appears to be the advantages of this technique. The success of recovery on the real engine block, the facilitation of restoration on curved surfaces, and the chance of on-site usage will likely make the etching paste a widely used tool in serial number restoration.

The Effect of the CARES Act on Property Crime

As a means of reducing the effects of COVID-19, governments implemented mitigation policies, including economic stimulus bills. Nearly all known research in the criminal justice literature examines the impact of local lockdown measures on different forms of crime. Studies have not been conducted on the effect of the CARES Act on crime. The purpose of the present study is to examine the impact of the CARES Act on property crime. The dependent variables were total property, burglary, larceny and theft, and auto theft rates. The control variables were the population structure, southern state, concentrated disadvantage, non-White, and lockdown. The independent variable was the CARES Act. OLS regression analyses were conducted to test for relationships between the CARES Act and property crime. The models indicated significant negative relationships between the CARES Act and the total property crime rate, the burglary rate, and the larceny and theft rate.

Smart Automotive Security Control with Accident Alert System

Vehicles are becoming advanced by combining the greater power to achieve connectivity solutions and the advancement in software visions. In modern vehicles automotive designs are interfaced with these features. The system includes keyless entry system and immobilizer system as the main weapons to prevent the vehicle theft. But these type of systems provide or detect the unauthorized access of vehicles to a measurable limit only. These security systems have straightforward. So car burglary has been a persevering issue far and wide and a greater test from the proficient criminals. This project proposes an aim to design efficient security control for auto theft prevention system by adding notable enhancement features such as a fingerprint system, password. It is also included with some rationalizing security features like GPS fencing and conveying location of vehicle as a message using GSM module. It deals with accident detection system when the accident occurs it uses Tilt, Smoke Sensor and Buzzer and alerts the Emergency team for help by reading the exact latitude and longitude of the vehicle involved in the accident.

DriverRep: Driver identification through driving behavior embeddings

Driver identification has emerged as an active field of study to further personalize the integrated advanced driver-assistance systems into intelligent vehicles, provide security and safety for ride-hailing services, and prevent auto theft. Several studies, within recent years, have investigated non-intrusive identification approaches, focusing on driving behavior analysis to characterize drivers' driving behavior, in which a considerable volume of labeled data is required. This paper develops a deep learning architecture, namely DriverRep, to extract the latent representations associated with each individual, called driver embeddings. These embeddings represent the unique driving characteristics of drivers. To this aim, we introduce a fully unsupervised triplet loss that selects triplet samples from data in an unsupervised manner and extracts the embeddings using our proposed stacked encoder architecture. Dilated causal convolutions are used to make residual blocks of the encoder. To perform the task of driver identification, we leverage the classification accuracy of SVM on top of the obtained driver embeddings. The evaluation results over two datasets, each of which contains ten drivers, reveal that the DriverRep can successfully capture the underlying features within the data and outperform benchmark driver identification schemes, obtaining an average accuracy of 94.7% and 96% for two-way and three-way identification, respectively. We also investigate the ability of the DriverRep in handling sparsely labeled data. The results represent substantial improvements in comparison with the supervised approaches when applied to highly sparsely labeled data.

Strengthening Disaster Response Through Analysis of Crime During Hurricane Ike

AbstractThis study uses time series analysis in an effort to inform disaster response efforts by identifying changes to Houston crime during Hurricane Ike. The results indicate that Burglaries increased significantly by 305% during Ike. Aggravated Assaults also increased significantly, but Theft and Auto Theft decreased by 37% and 16% respectively. Several other crimes revealed no significant differences during Ike. These findings, when combined with other research, show that Burglaries consistently increase during natural disasters, and Emergency Support Function 13 (ESF-13) responders should plan for that reality. This study also provides some other considerations for ESF-13 management related to disaster preparedness training and exercises. Additionally, the study provides evidence of the need for ESF-13 responders and reinforces their importance as a key form of capable guardianship under Routine Activities Theory.

Vehicle Anti-Theft Tracking System Based on Internet of Thing(IoT)

Owing to the growth of cars, auto theft has become a major problem in developed countries. A vehicle-anti-theft monitoring(vat) device may then play a critical role in ensuring its safety. Vehicle theft has been a big concern in recent years, and it must be tracked and identified. The vehicle’s safety and protection are critical. And if there are several current mechanisms, they all have drawbacks and are expensive. As a result, an effective protection framework is needed. This project identifies auto theft. The feature that links the dc motor to the GPS is the GSM. The location of a vehicle was pinpointed with the aid of the wireless-module ESP 8266 and the GPS as well as GSM communication. a GPS system can accurately point out a vehicle at any climate which is a Satellite-based-navigation system, a GPS device gives the latitude and longitude position.

Change-Point Analysis of Houston Crime During Hurricane Harvey

This study used time series analysis to identify statistically significant changes to Houston daily reported crime totals during Hurricane Harvey. The results indicate that burglaries increased by 287%, which likely reflects instances of looting. Additionally, thefts decreased by 54%, robberies decreased by 48%, and auto thefts decreased by 32%. Routine Activities Theory appears to explain the changes to crime totals and this study reinforces the importance of security personnel and systems as key forms of capable guardianship during disasters. Security managers might apply these findings and prepare for the potential for increased burglaries or looting as a reality of disasters.

Exploring Contemporary Security Issues Near Sarawak-Kalimantan Border

Stringent border control is one of the methods to secure national security across the world. Securing the border is essential for both economic and political reasons. In Sarawak, border security is one of the most discussed topics on the social media domain when it comes to state security concerns. Due to the porous Sarawak-Kalimantan border, a worrisome number of illegal activities had been recorded. Throughout the years, cases such as illegal crossings, drug syndicates, kidnapping, auto theft, smuggling, infiltration of illegal immigrants were reported to local authorities. These are among many other cases that highlight the gravity of the security issue near the Sarawak-Kalimantan border. Despite the continuous effort to increase security by Sarawak government through establishments of five new guard posts in Sarawak in 2018, security issues near the borderline is still a great concern. Sarawak is vulnerable not only along its border with Indonesia but also its shore and airspace. This research aims to explore the contemporary security issues near Sarawak-Kalimantan borders and efforts taken by the authorities to minimize security threats along the borderline. Through content analysis of Facebook discourse on security issues in Sarawak and in-depth interviews with eight informants - the findings of this research are hoped to be able to provide more updated data on Sarawak security issues with particular focus on border safety. Keywords: Sarawak, Kalimantan, security issues, border, national security.

Did Connecticut’s “Raise the Age” Increase Motor Vehicle Thefts?

In 2010, Connecticut followed the pattern of most other U.S. states by raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction from 15 to 16. This was further raised from 16 to 17 years, 2 years later in July 2012. This sweeping change meant youth were no longer automatically prosecuted as adults in the criminal justice system. Following the change, crimes in Connecticut steadily decreased in line with nationwide trends—However, a subsequent increase in motor vehicle thefts prompted concern among critics of the “raise the age” (RTA) legislation. This study examines the change in Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) county-level index crimes before and after Connecticut changed the maximum age of juvenile jurisdiction from 16 to 17 in 2012, focusing specifically on motor vehicle thefts. Using a weighted difference-in-differences design, we estimate that RTA played a minimal role on the increase in Connecticut auto thefts between 2012 and 2017.

The relationship between concealed carry permits and state-level crime rates

ABSTRACTThe purpose of the present study is to determine the relationship between concealed carry permits and state-level crime rates. Using pooled data for the period 2003–2014 and a least squares model with state dummy variables and a time trend, results of the present study suggest that the lagged value of per capita concealed carry permits had a statistically-significant and negative effect on the following crime rates: violent crime, rape, aggravated assault, and auto theft. For all other crimes examined, the number of active concealed carry permits had no statistically significant effects. These results somewhat corroborate the findings of Lott (2000).

Does the presence of professional football cause crime in a city? Evidence from Pontiac, Michigan

ABSTRACTUsing daily panel data from Detroit, we empirically explore the relationship between the National Football League (NFL) and crime in a city. We exploit the natural experiment of the Detroit Lions’ move from Pontiac, Michigan, to downtown Detroit in 2002. Pontiac is used as the treatment city and non-game day crime, other suburban cities, and other cities outside Detroit MSA are used as the comparison groups. Employing a difference-in-difference approach, we find decreases in assaults and vandalism on home game days in Pontiac relative to the control cities after the Lions’ move. We find weak evidence of a net decrease in larceny and vandalism in Pontiac on home game days following the loss of professional football. No changes in assaults and auto theft are reported. While not conclusive, our results suggest that professional football leads to additional larceny and vandalism incidents but no effects on assaults and auto theft.

Reconciling Emotion and Rational Choice: Negativistic Auto Theft, Consequence Irrelevance, and the Seduction of Destruction

Objectives: We explore negativism in the context of auto theft and examine its broader phenomenological significance for Rational Choice Theory. Methods: Data were drawn from qualitative, in-depth interviews with 35 active auto thieves operating out of a large Midwestern U.S. city. Results: Negativistic offending is malicious, spiteful, and/or destructive conduct whose purpose is typically more hedonic (i.e., short-term gratification) than instrumental (i.e., resource-generating) or normative (i.e., moralistic). It is made possible by the notion of ownership without responsibility: Offenders controlled a vehicle that was not theirs, promoting consequence irrelevance which in turn unleashed reckless conduct. Conclusions: Consequence irrelevance clarifies negativism’s logic and permits linkage between affect-based and rational choice decision-making models.

More COPS, less crime

I exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of police on crime. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act increased funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grant program from less than $20 million over 2005–2008 to $1 billion in 2009. Hiring grants distributed in 2009 were allocated according to an application score cutoff rule, and I leverage quasi-random variation in grant receipt by comparing the change over time in police and crimes for cities above and below the threshold in a difference-in-differences framework. Relative to low-scoring cities, those above the cutoff experience increases in police of about 3.2% and declines in victimization cost-weighted crime of about 3.5% following the distribution of hiring grants. The effects are driven by large and statistically significant effects of police on robbery, larceny, and auto theft, with suggestive evidence that police reduce murders as well. Crime reductions associated with additional police were more pronounced in areas most affected by the Great Recession. The results highlight that fiscal support to local governments for crime prevention may offer large returns, especially during bad macroeconomic times.

Marijuana Dispensaries and Neighborhood Crime and Disorder in Denver, Colorado

Beginning with Colorado and Washington State in 2012, longstanding bans on the sale, possession, and use of marijuana for recreational purposes have been overturned in nine states and the nation’s capital. Consistent with the logic of routine activity theory and broken windows theory, critics of legalized marijuana argue that dispensaries are magnets for crime, attracting criminal offenders to the area with large sums of cash and valuable goods. The current study addresses this possibility by examining the effects of both medical and recreational marijuana dispensaries on yearly crime rates in N = 3981 neighborhood grid cells in Denver, Colorado, 2012–2015. Estimates from Bayesian spatiotemporal Poisson regression models indicate that, except for murder and auto theft, both types of dispensaries are associated with statistically significant increases in rates of neighborhood crime and disorder. The theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Policy Levels for Situational Crime Prevention

An organizing framework is useful for scientific progress as well as the application of knowledge in practical situations. This article advocates supplementing the classification of situational crime prevention methods, proposing seven levels of classification for how crime prevention policy is applied. The seven levels are organized by distance from the criminal event, and examples of application are offered in liquor control and auto theft reduction.

Effects of exposure estimation errors on estimated exposure-response relations for PM2.5

Associations between fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure concentrations and a wide variety of undesirable outcomes, from autism and auto theft to elderly mortality, suicide, and violent crime, have been widely reported. Influential articles have argued that reducing National Ambient Air Quality Standards for PM2.5 is desirable to reduce these outcomes. Yet, other studies have found that reducing black smoke and other particulate matter by as much as 70% and dozens of micrograms per cubic meter has not detectably affected all-cause mortality rates even after decades, despite strong, statistically significant positive exposure concentration-response (C-R) associations between them. This paper examines whether this disconnect between association and causation might be explained in part by ignored estimation errors in estimated exposure concentrations. We use EPA air quality monitor data from the Los Angeles area of California to examine the shapes of estimated C-R functions for PM2.5 when the true C-R functions are assumed to be step functions with well-defined response thresholds. The estimated C-R functions mistakenly show risk as smoothly increasing with concentrations even well below the response thresholds, thus incorrectly predicting substantial risk reductions from reductions in concentrations that do not affect health risks. We conclude that ignored estimation errors obscure the shapes of true C-R functions, including possible thresholds, possibly leading to unrealistic predictions of the changes in risk caused by changing exposures. Instead of estimating improvements in public health per unit reduction (e.g., per 10 µg/m3 decrease) in average PM2.5 concentrations, it may be essential to consider how interventions change the distributions of exposure concentrations.

Advanced vehicle security control and accident alert system

Vehicles are becoming smarter by the combining of greater power to compute connectivity solutions and the improvement in software visions. In modern vehicles automotive designs are interfaced with these features. This particular design includes keyless entry system and immobilizer system as the main weapons to prevent the vehicle theft. But these type of systems provide or detect the unauthorized access of vehicles to a measurable limit only. These security frameworks have straightforward also, lacking nature. So car burglary has been a persevering issue far and wide and a greater test from the profficient criminals. This paper proposes an aim to design efficient security control for auto theft prevention system by adding notable enhancement features such as a fingerprint system, password and OTP generating system. It is also included with some rationalizing security features like GPS fencing, remote engine cut-off, and conveying location of vehicle as a message using GSM module. These features are implemented with the help of fingerprint recognition module, GPS Receiver, GSM cellular modem. Along with these feature accident detection module is also added.