Simi Valley Police Crack Down in Wake of 79% Jump in Vehicle Thefts : Law enforcement: Out-of-towners are blamed for the summertime increase. Officers add late-night patrols.

Simi Valley police are cracking down on car thieves with new late-night patrols after a rash of larceny by out-of-towners boosted summertime auto thefts by 79%.

During July, August and September, thieves took 120 cars and motorcycles from Simi Valley residents, contrasted with 67 thefts in the summer of 1993, police records show.

Just last Friday, Simi Valley patrol officers arrested four Los Angeles County men as they drove out of town before dawn in two vehicles--one a just-stolen Toyota 4-Runner.

The department’s undercover Special Enforcement Services unit has been cruising the high-theft midtown areas on a graveyard shift in recent weeks, Sgt. Bob Gardner said.

“(And) patrol has been given kind of a pep talk to pay a little more attention to auto theft, to look out for suspicious vehicles,” said Gardner, who investigates reports of stolen cars.

“Typically,” he said, “the way the thieves have been working is they’re coming into town, driving around in certain areas looking for what they want, ripping off cars and leaving again.”

Friday’s suspects fit the profile of auto thieves that has emerged in recent months, Detective Gene Hostetler said.

The suspects are from Los Angeles County--three from Inglewood and one from Pomona. They are young--none older than 34--and all are immigrants--Latinos in this case.

Authorities said the suspects zeroed in on one midtown neighborhood that has been popular with thieves--a densely populated area of apartment buildings bounded by Royal and Los Angeles avenues, Erringer Road and 1st Street.

And they apparently preferred imported vehicles.

First, a Patricia Avenue apartment resident saw men trying to steal a Hyundai from a parking lot, but they fled when someone startled them, a police report said. Police said they later caught the men with a stolen Toyota truck taken from the same complex.

“Some of the cars are left unlocked,” Hostetler said. “But most of them, the crooks are breaking into them, busting the ignition and driving them off.”

Most of the vehicles are stripped, he said, their shells abandoned on Los Angeles County streets and their parts resold.

Such freeway thieves have hit Simi Valley off and on for several years--stealing cars for a period and then shifting to other types of theft, Capt. Jerry Boyce said.

For the year ending Sept. 30, Simi Valley auto thefts were up 13% over the previous year, records show.

In the rest of the east county, auto thefts have dropped 22% in the past year--from 480 to 373, Ventura County sheriff’s records show.

The method of stealing cars in Thousand Oaks and Moorpark is a little different than in Simi Valley, because owners in the other cities tend to be more careless with their vehicles, Sheriff’s Detective David Ehrlich said.

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“You’d be surprised how many of them are (left) sitting there with the engine running,” he said. “And if the keys aren’t in it, it’s usually unlocked. It’s a very simple thing to start a car. . . . Any thief worth his salt knows how.”

Yet while most stolen Simi Valley cars feed the black market in parts, cars are taken more often for joy rides or temporary transportation in Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and other east county communities, Ehrlich said.

“(Owners think), ‘I’m not going to be in there a minute, this is Thousand Oaks, we don’t have crimes here,’ ” Ehrlich said. “It’s false security. . . . It’s always going to happen to someone else.”

While some Thousand Oaks car-theft suspects cruise over the border from Los Angeles County, many are locals, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Simon, who prosecutes grand theft auto cases.

Most of those arrested in Ventura or Ojai live in the cities they steal from, he said.

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But in Simi Valley, most thieves have come in from outside Ventura County, Simon said.

Simi Valley’s Sgt. Gardner said the imported thieves are mining midtown apartment complexes because there are more cars and fewer risks of being seen than in other areas.

Parking areas around the apartment buildings are “not necessarily all that visible from the condos, and people walking around in there at all hours don’t necessarily attract a lot of attention,” he said.

Car owners should do whatever they can to frustrate the thieves, Hostetler said, such as installing a hidden engine kill-switch or using a steering-wheel lock.

Ehrlich advised motorists to lock their car doors, take the keys and avoid hiding spare keys anywhere on the vehicle, since they are easily found, he said.

Also, avoid putting too much faith in alarms, Ehrlich said. “How many times have you heard an alarm in a parking lot, and how many times do you pay attention?” he said.

Thieves can break or bypass most anti-theft devices if they want the car badly enough, Gardner warned.

“It’s pretty hard to stop the pros,” he said. “They’re real talented.”