Steamers, slim jims, and plain old hot-wiring: Revamped task force targets car thieves

In the world of cop jargon, a “steamer” is a running car left to warm up while the driver waits indoors.

Steamers offer tempting targets to would-be car thieves, which leads to more advanced jargon: a “steamer sting,” meaning a police trap using steamers as bait.

It’s one way to catch car thieves, according to Tukwila Police Commander Eric Drever, but the results are hit and miss.

The tradecraft anecdote cropped up this week as Drever spoke to Pierce County Council members, who later voted to join the Puget Sound Auto Theft Task Force, a multi-headed entity led by officers from seven law enforcement agencies, backed by prosecutors from Pierce and King counties.

The task force is not new. It’s more like a consolidated version of predecessor teams that have worked since 2008 in the two counties, rearranged six months ago. The roster of police agencies in the new version comprises Tacoma, Bonney Lake, Lakewood, Auburn, Federal Way, Tukwila and Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. All the agencies rely on information shared by the Washington State Patrol.

County Council members agreed Tuesday to spend $135,000 for a spot on the team, which is backed by a larger $2.5 million grant from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.

What does the county get out of it?

“You’re getting a larger workforce focusing on this problem for Pierce County,” Drever said. “Because we’re focusing on areas that have been designated as hot spots for auto theft, we tend to see a residual impact.”

Auto theft ranks as one of the region’s most persistent property crimes. Historically, Washington consistently ranks among the top five states for auto theft, according to the FBI’s annual crime statistics.

Within that ranking, King and Pierce counties account for 57 percent of the state’s auto thefts, according to task force numbers Drever presented to council members. Drilling deeper into the statistics, Drever pointed to two cities: Tacoma and Kent, with 469 and 326 auto thefts in the first quarter of 2017, tops among the cities covered by the task force.

What accounts for the big numbers? Drever pointed to a variety of factors, including the convergence of highway corridors (I-5 and Highway 167), coupled with malls and park-and-ride lots: convenient targets for car thieves.

Drever referred to Tacoma and Kent as “guinea pig cities” for the task force’s enforcement experiments. Efforts in those cities will be shared with the others. Prevention techniques include talking with owners and managers of commercial properties and sharing strategies to combat the problem.

“We offer aid and assistance as well as do investigations,” he said. “We go wherever our investigations take us.”

Council members, curious about the finer points of auto theft, quizzed Drever at length about the tricks employed by car thieves and the strategies used to combat them. They wondered which types of cars tend to be stolen most often. Answer: Toyotas and Hondas.

Councilman Dan Roach, referring with a smile to “The Fast and the Furious” film series, wondered about the prospect of controlling cars by remote means. Drever replied that real technology hasn’t advanced quite that far yet, at least not enough to represent a serious threat.

Councilman Jim McCune invoked techno horror stories of thieves using remote methods to steal key fob codes that open doors. Drever said such methods are possible, but not that common; thieves have to be within a short range of the car to make the trick work.

More often, he said, organized auto theft rings simply load a car onto a flatbed truck, drive away with it, and open it at their leisure. After that, they harvest the car for parts, sell the body at a wrecking yard and buy it back at an auction, effectively “washing” the title and turning it into a legal purchase. After that, the parts are reinstalled, and the car can be sold without a trace.

Those organized efforts matter more to task force investigators than isolated smash-and-grab thefts, he said. Stopping prolific auto thieves engaged in organized theft takes the top off the numbers, and it appears to be working.

Drever cited significant reductions in auto-theft numbers from 2016 to 2017: 998 fewer thefts in King County, and 862 fewer thefts in Pierce County. Whether those numbers are the result of task force efforts remains to be seen, but the trend is positive.

“I’d love to take total credit for that with our teams,” Drever said. “But we’re still exploring the reasons.”

Tacoma Police spokeswoman Loretta Cool said the department’s membership in the task force pays dividends. One detective is assigned to task force duties, but the ability to leverage greater resources from outside the city is a useful tool.

“It’s like a force multiplier,” Cool said. “Obviously we can share the intel that everybody’s gathering, because people who steal cars steal cars everywhere. Definitely it’s a benefit for us.”

Under the terms of the interlocal agreement that provides the administrative framework for the task force, the Federal Way Police Department serves as the lead agency.

That means oversight of the task force will fall to Federal Way Police commander Chris Norman, who takes the reins from Drever this year.

“A bit mind-boggling,” Norman said of his new post, adding that the revamped task force is proving to be more agile.

“In the past, where there was a limited number of detectives, they might have something going, and they didn’t have the manpower to do it. That just doesn’t happen anymore. It’s a lot more fluid and they can move a lot more quickly and get through a lot more cases.”

This story was originally published January 26, 2018 at 10:19 AM with the headline "Steamers, slim jims, and plain old hot-wiring: Revamped task force targets car thieves."