Federal Way cracks down on car thieves, cuts car theft

(AP) – Getting tough with car thieves has cut automobile theft by more than one-fourth in this suburb between Seattle and Tacoma, police say. “We’re going after the bad guys and they’re going to go to jail,” Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said. After auto theft rose to 1,204 vehicles in 2003, police formed a team of five officers, two lieutenants and a crime analyst, Cmdr. Stan McCall said. The group compiled a list of the 15 people with the most car theft arrests and convictions and determined where they lived, what cars they were driving, who were their friends and whether they were sought on any warrants. Then officers contacted them, usually in person. “It’s meant to let them know we’re not going to tolerate auto theft in Federal Way,” McCall said. “If they commit those crimes, we’re going to catch them.” Five have been arrested since July on new auto theft, drug or other charges, and the number of stolen vehicles declined by 28.9 percent in that period, McCall said. Car thieves, usually males 15 to 30 years old, rarely get much jail time when they are arrested at random, so “they do it over and over,” McCall said. The five arrests “had a tremendous impact on the incidents of auto theft,” he said. A second step is to file the cases as misdemeanors in Municipal Court, rather than as felonies in King County Superior Court. As a misdemeanor, auto theft is punishable by up to a year in jail. Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the county prosecutors office, said the standard range for first-time felony car thieves is up to 60 days. “We share the frustration of law enforcement when it comes to these cases,” Donohoe said. “There’s not enough jail time.” Cases involving those from the top-15 list are pending in Municipal Court, so the effectiveness of that aspect of the crackdown remains undetermined, McCall said. Step three is to ask that those sentenced to jail for auto theft be required to serve their time in Yakima, where the municipality contracts for jail space to save money. “If you do the crime in Federal Way, you’ll do the time in Yakima,” Kirkpatrick said, “and I hope you enjoy it.”