Once an auto theft capital, Spokane is at its lowest car thievery in a decade

Walking outside to your car in the morning, coffee in hand, but your car is nowhere to be found.

Instead, it’s 20 miles away and being stripped for parts. Or abandoned somewhere in the city, maybe with stolen goods or drug paraphernalia in the back.

In the 1990s and early 2000s , that was a common experience in Spokane.

The city and metro area were among the worst car theft hot spots in the country for years. It’s practically a Spokane initiation ritual that those moving to the city would have their car broken into or stolen. Residents who have lived in the city for a long time are well-versed in parking their car in lighted areas, removing belongings from the back seat and always locking their car doors. Or they don’t bother to lock the doors so thieves can rifle through their vehicles without breaking windows.

“Just don’t leave anything in your car,” a business owner told The Spokesman-Review in 2022. “Anything.”

Spokane was ranked as the fourth worst car theft hot spot in the nation per capita by the National Insurance Crime Bureau more than 15 years ago. Even in the ’90s, police were spending their days chasing cars, said downtown precinct Capt. Kurtis Reese.

“We used to have Honda Civics stolen and we’d go and recover it,” Reese said. “Then it would be stolen again that night.”

Spokane-area thefts have plummeted, however. FBI data shows the city recorded 1,746 motor vehicle thefts in 2015. In 2025, the total dropped 70% to 837 .

For Spokane and Spokane Valley, data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau shows both cities recorded 2,430 car thefts in 2015. In 2025, the two cities recorded 1,285, a 62% drop.

The trend is expanding statewide, according to data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau. Washington saw the largest decrease of any state in 2025 with a 39% drop in car thefts compared to 2024. Nationwide car thefts have also plummeted – Colorado, Puerto Rico and South Dakota all saw around a 30% decrease in car thefts last year, NICB data shows. The declining stats across the nation are “historic,” the NICB says on its website.

What’s the reason for the drop? It could be technology, police believe. Older cars without the more advanced anti-theft equipment like newer vehicles have, were more susceptible to being stolen a decade or two ago. Reese said it was easy for people to target Honda Civics or similar models because car thieves could shave down a key to access any car. Sometimes they’d just use a screwdriver, he said.

“Nowadays, people are driving cars with key fobs or computer chips. That has probably helped,” Reese said. “All those top -five stolen cars are now in the junk yards.”

Hyundai Elantras, Honda Accords, Hyundai Sonatas, Chevrolet Silverados and Honda Civics were named the top -five stolen cars of 2025, according to the NICB.

Car theft in Spokane and Spokane Valley began to decline in 2019 at 1,970, but surged again in 2021 and 2022. In 2022, the city and the Valley had 3,135 car thefts reported. A reason for the jump was possibly fueled by a social-media trend that began in 2021 known as the “Kia Challenge.” Teens attempted to steal Kias and Hyundais with a USB cord. It played a role in nationwide vehicle thefts rising above 1 million at the time, said NICB spokesperson Nicholas Zeitlinger. Another possible explanation for the brief jump could be the economic strain during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trends have fallen to where they were prior to the Kia Challenge.

Reese said a lot of times cars are stolen just for someone to travel from “Point A to Point B.” Other times, they’re stolen so people can dissect the car for parts. Police refer to a complex group of people who steal cars for parts and then sell the cars for profit as a “chop shop.”

“Some get recovered immediately, some never get recovered,” Reese said. “We would find a lot of skeleton cars because someone would be taking the parts and putting them on the car they initially bought. (They) could turn the cars with thousands in profit.”

Stolen cars were so prominent more than 10 years ago that people seeing their vehicles disappear from their driveways and street corners decided to turn to something more than just calling the police: a Facebook page.

“PNW Stolen Cars” is a page headed by Washington resident Dan Glidden, who wanted to help victims of car theft. He started the page in 2012, the first Facebook page for stolen cars, Glidden said. The page has “pretty much set the ways” for other stolen car pages to operate.

In the 13 years since its start, the moderators of the Facebook page are believed to be partly responsible for over 2,000 vehicle recoveries mostly in Washington and Oregon, Glidden said.

Alyssa Ross, who is a moderator of the page, said she and the team are most often seeing “duplicate thefts” – or stealing the same car twice in one day. This is because thieves often park the car at a certain area and come back for it, or the owner is not securing the vehicle properly once it’s home, Ross said. She’s also noticed thieves are more often making copies of key fobs equipped with anti-theft technology, something that has been able to deter them in the past.

“It’s pretty sad that regardless if it’s remote start or key start, the vehicles still aren’t safe,” Ross said in a Facebook message.

Moderators like Ross have built a strong relationship with law enforcement and U-Haul over the years, Glidden told The Spokesman-Review. The relationship has prompted some police departments to recommend that car theft victims post their vehicle on the page for more exposure and a better chance of getting it back. The group also makes it a point to work with law enforcement during the recovery of a vehicle, he said, sometimes spending hours working to recover one car.

“We help from the beginning to end when it comes to car theft with the owner. We provide vehicle information, vehicle photos, theft records and then if a vehicle is found, we connect the finder with the owner,” Glidden said. “We are not outlaws or anything like that. We are your everyday normal citizens who have a passion for what we do.”

In June 2022, Glidden was looking for a stolen boat in Oregon when he, by chance, took a side road and ran straight into it. The boat was parked and attached to a blue Ford 150. All of a sudden, the truck and the boat took off “like a bat out of hell,” Glidden wrote on Facebook in 2022. He started to follow them.

“I was on the phone with the owner, the poster, a few friends of the owner, 911 and a Multnomah Country Sheriff. I was told to stop following, they would search the area with the new location. A few minutes later I was told the truck and trailer were found, but the boat was no where to be seen. After asking a few people at the boat ramp, turns out they got the boat in the water and took off,” Glidden wrote. He thought it was over and he’d lost the boat.

The county sheriff was already waiting for the thieves. They chased down the boat and arrested the driver on the dock, Glidden wrote. After the arrest, Glidden posted on social media that he could use a tow to help the truck and boat get back to their owners. People on the page reached out to offer help. That day, he and his social media team ended up recovering nine vehicles.

“Every recovery makes spending hours of my time a day worth it all,” Glidden said in his post.