America's car theft problem

It goes without saying that stealing your car is not an experience that many people will enjoy. Unfortunately, car thefts still happen all over the world and all too often. After briefly discussing the rate of car theft in the United States in our previous article, Which State is the Most Dangerous to Drive?, we thought it would be worth delving into the topic.

In addition to each state's car theft rates, we examined other data, including US cities with the highest car theft rate, US holidays ranked by car theft rate, and countries ranked by car theft rate. Read on to find out more…

State auto theft rate (1967–2017)

To look at the rate of auto theft in the US, we took the number of cases in each state and converted it to a standardized rate of auto theft per 100,000 residents.

First, we wanted to see how much the car theft rate had changed in each state over the past fifty years.

Topping the list is New York, where the number of car thefts has decreased by 85%. The state has clearly been working hard to bring down the theft rate since 1967, dropping from 456.9 to 67.6.

We then wanted to look at the states that saw the least improvement over the last fifty years, and in the cases described below, they actually got worse.

At the other end of the table is North Dakota, where the car theft rate has risen 185% to 234.7 per 100,000 people over the course of fifty years.

US cities with the highest theft rate

Looking at the data at the state level, we can get a big picture of what's going on across the country, but what about a deeper level? We went in more detail to find out the urban areas with the highest theft rate.

Albuquerque, New Mexico came in first, followed by Anchorage, Alaska in second (again confirmed by our previous study of the most dangerous states in the US, in which Alaska and New Mexico were in the top two places in terms of car counts) ). theft rate).

What was particularly striking was that California had at least five cities in the top ten. None of these five cities has a particularly large population: one would expect densely populated areas like Los Angeles or San Diego (3.9 million and 1.4 million respectively), but instead the largest California city on the list is Bakersfield ( with a comparatively small population of 380,874 people).

US theft rate by year

By now, we have studied car theft in the US in some detail at the state and city level, but what about the country as a whole? How has the overall rate of car theft changed in recent years?

It is encouraging to see that the total is well below the 2008 result of 959,059 car thefts. However, it is somewhat disappointing to see that the number of car thefts in the country has been on the rise over the last few years from 2014 when the total number of thefts was 686,803 in 2015. We can at least take some comfort in the fact that the rise seems to be slowing down - growth in 16/7.6 was 2016%, and in 17/0.8 the growth was only XNUMX%.

US vacation theft rate

The holiday season is usually busy enough not to think about being the victim of a car theft, but what's the worst day for it?

New Year's Day proved to be the most popular car theft day, with 2,469 reported cases. Maybe it's because people sleep in after a late night spent celebrating the New Year, leaving thieves too happy to steal unprotected cars.

At the other end of the ranking, Christmas had the fewest car thefts at 1,664 (followed by Thanksgiving at 1,777 and Christmas Eve at 2,054). Apparently, even thieves like to take a day off when Christmas approaches...

Theft rate by country

Finally, we have expanded our ability to compare car theft rates globally. Although the figures below are for 2016, they are from the highly respected United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The first two countries on the list come from America (Bermuda in North America and Uruguay in South America). Both countries have fairly low theft rates compared to many other countries in the table - they make up for this with particularly low populations. In particular, there are only 71,176 people living in Bermuda.

At the other end of the list, the two countries with the lowest car theft rates are in Africa. In 7, Senegal had only 2016 reported car thefts, while Kenya had only 425. If you want to see the full results and tables, as well as data sources, click here.