Don’t Bother Locking in Logan
Las Vegas, NV has the nation’s highest per capita rate of vehicle theft, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau’s annual ranking of 361 metropolitan areas. It may not surprise you that Sin City would win this title. But things get a little more interesting when you dig into the details.
The other nine places with the highest per capita vehicle theft rates are pretty much where you’d expect them to be. Four are in California’s San Joaquin Valley (Stockton; Visalia-Porterville; Modesto; Fresno), and the other five (Sacramento, CA; Phoenix and Tucson, AZ; Seattle and Yakima, WA) are also western towns where homeless people are still called “drifters” and there are plenty of young men who know how to hot-wire an engine. Men were 82 percent of those arrested for motor vehicle theft in 2005, according to the FBI, and 53 percent of thieves were aged 15 to 24.
The lowest rates of vehicle theft were all in smaller places – only one metro area in the bottom ten, Appleton, WI, had more than 200,000 people. Five more on the list have populations that are aging rapidly, with relatively few young men (Elmira and Glens Falls, NY; Owensboro, KY; Fond Du Lac, WI; Lewiston-Auburn, ME). Now here is the surprising thing — four of the bottom ten are places dominated by state land grant universities, including #361, State College, PA (the home of Pennsylvania State University); #360, Logan, UT (Utah State); #358, Ithaca, NY (Cornell); and #352, Ames, IA (Iowa State). These four places are loaded with young men who are prone to misbehave. So why aren’t they stealing cars?
Maybe the answer is something a cop said to me years ago when I was a beat reporter covering the annual street riot that used to happen in Ithaca right around Cornell’s graduation. The cop was standing on the sidewalk placidly observing frat boys who were having shouting matches, urinating on lawns, and engaging in several other forms of drunk and disorderly behavior. He told me he wouldn’t do anything unless someone threw a punch or broke someone’s property. No matter how drunk they got, he said, the guys usually didn’t do that. “They’re good boys who know not to cross the line,” he said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here.”