Costly crime

Officer Travis Hansen was driving in Greenacres last week when he noticed a white pickup truck parked by the side of the road. Hansen used his in-car computer to check the license plate number. The truck had been reported stolen the previous morning.

Hansen, a Spokane Valley Police officer, wasn’t surprised a thief had chosen the 1984 Toyota pickup with a line of rust running down its body. The thief possibly has friends or lives near LaBerry Drive just east of Barker Road, where the truck was left, Hansen guessed. He sees the same type of thing all the time.

“The biggest reason I think (thieves) steal cars is just for the transportation,” Hansen said as he began filling out paperwork so that the pickup could be towed and stored until the owner could be reached.

Cars and trucks get stolen in Spokane Valley nearly every day. The good news is that 87.6 percent of stolen vehicles were recovered in 2003, according to data from the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office. Through the end of May, 139 cars and trucks were stolen inside the city limits of Spokane Valley this year. Police recovered 123 stolen vehicles during the same time period.

The high recovery rate leads police to believe that most stolen vehicles are used as “meth taxis.” These “taxis” ferry drug users around town for a few days.

Pickup trucks were the most common vehicles stolen in the Spokane Valley and in unincorporated Spokane County in May, followed by the Toyota Camry, Ford Probe and Subaru Legacy, according to data provided by Doug Silver, a systems analyst for the sheriff’s office. In 2003 and the first four months of 2004 thieves also seemed to target the Saturn SL, Jeep Cherokee, Honda Civic and Chevrolet Blazer.

Don Kiner parks his 1990 Chevy pickup truck behind Spokane Rain Gutter, where he works. The company is located amid East Sprague’s auto row near the Deja Vu Showgirls strip club, and Kiner doesn’t know of anyone else who has had problems there.

But Monday, during the middle of the day, someone stole Kiner’s Chevy.

“I was surprised that somebody would steal my truck. It looks like a piece of junk, really,” Kiner said.

Kiner said he’d recently spent a lot of money to make the truck run better and although his employers let him take his work rig to drive home, he wanted his Chevy back.

The story has a semi-happy ending.

Kiner got a call at 5 a.m. Tuesday from police. His truck had been found, abandoned, near Carnahan Road and Eighth Avenue. The thieves appear to have used a screwdriver to open the doors and start the truck, but didn’t trash it, Kiner said.

His stereo speakers and amplifiers, which will cost $400 to replace, had been stolen along with 10 CDs. The stereo itself had been left because it had a removable faceplate, which Kiner keeps in his lunchbox. His insurance won’t cover the loss.

Silver uses the data he collects to help Spokane Valley Police track trends in vehicle thefts. His maps show clusters, or “hot spots,” for both vehicle thefts and areas where a lot of stolen vehicles are recovered. Using May as an example, many vehicles stolen in one part of Spokane Valley ended up being found inside the city limits. Some make their way to north Spokane. Not many cars were stolen in Spokane and dumped in Spokane Valley.

Spokane Valley Police officers began focusing patrols in the Argonne and Montgomery area this spring, which had an outbreak of stolen vehicle activity. Officers checked license plates, talked to people who lived in the area and did preventative patrols, said Lt. Rick Van Leuven. It worked fairly well, Van Leuven said.

While things have calmed down in that corridor, the problems often shift to a nearby area, Van Leuven said. But police want to do more than move the problems around the Valley. They want to decrease theft.

The key is to figure out who the prolific car thieves are and arrest them, Van Leuven said.

“If we put a really prolific car thief in jail, our numbers will drop,” he said.

Valley resident Katie Frisby had given her car to a friend,Angela Palaniuk, who lives on North Hodges Road, not far from where the stolen white pickup truck was found. But before the title could be transferred, the car was stolen.

Frisby decided to report it to police, even though the 1992 Dodge Shadow wasn’t worth much money.

Frisby said she’s lucky she did. The thieves ended up getting in a wreck and tried to use her insurance information. The thieves then dropped the car back off at her friend’s house last week, but the Shadow had been vandalized. While Frisby has another car, she was still upset.

She has suspicions about who was responsible and said she plans to work with police to try and catch the thieves.

“You don’t take somebody’s stuff,” Frisby said. “People are weird.”