Vroom, bzzz, chop chop, FARRRT
Feb. 8th, 2022 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteWhen I got back from my big bike tour last year I returned to Oakland without a car. I had Alice, my trusty bicycle, but I didn't have a way to move big things around or make trips to see family, and I wanted to do both immediately. I'm pretty financially conservative (except for bike parts and snacks) and I hate renting things and I hate debt, so I set out to buy a decent used vehicle.
I set my sights on a Honda Accord, since I wanted something that would last longer than the hapless Civic I'd bought last time. Not new, but not too old. Craigslist gave me a 2002 Accord with about a hundred thousand miles on it. I took Bart down to Fremont and test drove the car. It looked great under the hood and drove straight and the brakes were strong. I paid $3500 cash for it and drove it home.
For several months I drove it all over the place, visiting family. It was an excellent car, as I knew it would be. I went down to Southern California to visit relatives in late December, and stayed away for a few weeks. I left the car parked outside my house. When I came back, it was street sweeping day and I needed to move the car across the street.
First thing I noticed was, the driver side door was unlocked and very slightly open. The dome light wasn't on, so I knew the battery was dead, or possibly missing. Then I noticed that someone had pulled up the carpeting on the passenger side just under the glove box. Four large connectors, with many wires on them, were hanging down from beneath the dashboard there, disconnected from something. Just behind them I saw a metal box anchored to the inside of the dashboard, with four large exposed sockets on it. It was the Emissions Control Unit for the car. Someone had disconnected all the wires to it, then left them there.
The radio wasn't missing. The glove box still had the usual paperwork in it. I popped the hood of the car, expecting to find the battery stolen at least, but it was still there.
I ducked back down into the passenger seat and grabbed the cables, and reconnected all four of them to the ECU, then pushed the carpeting back into place. Then I fetched my car jump-starting kit, and hooked it up to the battery. I pressed the button, and turned the key, and the car started up.
... And as it did, it made a horrendous noise, like I was running a giant weedwacker instead of a polite and mild-mannered Honda Accord.
I talked with a friend of mine about the incident. He came out and looked under the hood and under the car, and gave me a breakdown of what happened:
Some time in the last few weeks, a criminal went driving through my neighborhood and spotted the car. Shortly afterwards, probably in the middle of the night, that criminal returned with a portable metal saw and a jack. They shoved the jack under the car and lifted it, then scooted underneath with the saw and chopped off a large segment of my exhaust pipe. Then they ripped off the oxygen sensor further along the pipe. They probably had an accomplice waiting nearby with a running car, and they tossed the pipe and the sensor and the saw into the trunk and sped away.
The segment of pipe they took had my car's catalytic converter right in the middle of it.
Honda Accords have relatively fancy catalytic converters. These devices contain precious metals that have become extremely valuable over the last five years or so, as auto makers work to comply with stricter emissions standards. Palladium and rhodium, for example, are now more valuable per ounce than gold. The crooks probably brought the part to a fencer, who gave them a hundred bucks for it. The fencer then unbolted the wrecked bits of pipe from the catalytic converter, and tossed the converter into a pile, which they then brought to a crooked parts recycler who melted down the components to extract the metals. The material from my catalytic converter probably got them three or four hundred bucks on the metals market.
Meanwhile, my car sat there. Some time in the next few days, the same crooks - or perhaps different ones - came by and jimmied open the driver's side door. Not content to steal the radio or the battery, these crooks wanted to steal the entire car. They brought with them a bootleg Emissions Control Unit. They pried up the carpet to reveal mine, disconnected it, and connected their own.
The ECU is responsible for interpreting the signals coming from the ignition. When you turn your key to start a modern car, it reads a coded signal from a little chip inside the handle of the key, and sends that signal to the ECU. If it's the right code, the ECU allows the car to start. Plug in a hacked ECU, and - in theory - you can get a car to start just by jamming any key into the ignition and turning it.
Well, something must have gone wrong, because they didn't steal the car. Two possibilities: Either the car didn't start at all, and they took back their bootleg ECU and moved on, or they did manage to start the car, at which point it made a horrendous noise and they knew someone had already stolen the catalytic converter, making the car much less valuable and much more noticeable to the police. Either way, they left the car door cracked open for future assaults, and by the time I came back the dome light had drained the battery.
Who knows how many days went by with the car door cracked open, sitting in the street. Or maybe it was just hours. It hardly mattered. It would need serious repair before I could use it again.
With Rachel's help, I managed to get it to a repair shop in Alameda. That was a bit harrowing. The repair shop went looking for a replacement catalytic converter that fit a 2002 Honda Accord and was legal in California. The cheapest one available right now costs over a thousand dollars. Between replacing that, the wrecked exhaust pipe, and the missing O2 sensor, the total cost is over two thousand dollars. It will cost me 2/3 of the price I paid for the entire car to get it drivable again.
Apparently catalytic converter theft is reaching epidemic proportions in this area. It makes sense that drug-addled people looking for a way to score fast cash would do this: All you need is a contact, a getaway car, and a battery-powered saw. You don't need to string more than a few coherent thoughts in front of each other. In fact, you don't even need to come up with the idea. Your drug dealer will tell you what to do.
The worst of it though, is the aggression of the thieves. Last year in East Oakland, a 12-year-old boy was shot when he and his father tried to confront a theft in progress. This was after they scared away the thieves once before. That's right: To steal a $100 part, these people returned to the driveway of a poor family's home with a gun, and shot at their son as he tried to intervene.
That incident was five miles from my house. It's quite possible that this same group was responsible for the theft on my street.
What kind of horrible, horrible people gang together and shoot to kill at a 12-year-old boy, so they can make a hundred bucks by costing his poor family several thousand?
The repairs to the Accord will be finished tomorrow afternoon. The repair shop is going to weld thick cabling around the catalytic converter, which is a menace to try and cut with a saw. My next step is to get a vibration-based car alarm installed in that vehicle, so if the crooks have to spend 15 minutes cutting stuff, the alarm will ring the entire time. Hopefully that will be enough time for someone to call the police even if I'm not there... Assuming of course that everyone on my block doesn't just ignore the alarm. Even if they can't steal the part, it's possible they will make cuts in the exhaust pipe during the attempt, and rip off my O2 sensor again. Or they will be prepared for cables and have a set of hydraulic shears. So my only real choice is to hide the car somewhere, which means I cannot use it in Oakland.
It's standard practice around here to leave nothing valuable in your car. But what can you do when people just roll up and cut pieces off of it? I'm more prepared for this problem than the vast majority of Oakland residents: I can do almost everything I need by bicycle, including get to work. What about all the people around me who can't?
Either they need to create a deterrent so scary that even drug addicts won't risk it - like keeping a firearm ready and using it without hesitation - or they need to rely on law enforcement to confront the fencers and shady reyclers and shut the process down. Meanwhile I ride up into the Berkeley hills and still occasionally see - though less these days - signs posted in windows reading "abolish the police."
What a strange place this is.
I set my sights on a Honda Accord, since I wanted something that would last longer than the hapless Civic I'd bought last time. Not new, but not too old. Craigslist gave me a 2002 Accord with about a hundred thousand miles on it. I took Bart down to Fremont and test drove the car. It looked great under the hood and drove straight and the brakes were strong. I paid $3500 cash for it and drove it home.
For several months I drove it all over the place, visiting family. It was an excellent car, as I knew it would be. I went down to Southern California to visit relatives in late December, and stayed away for a few weeks. I left the car parked outside my house. When I came back, it was street sweeping day and I needed to move the car across the street.
First thing I noticed was, the driver side door was unlocked and very slightly open. The dome light wasn't on, so I knew the battery was dead, or possibly missing. Then I noticed that someone had pulled up the carpeting on the passenger side just under the glove box. Four large connectors, with many wires on them, were hanging down from beneath the dashboard there, disconnected from something. Just behind them I saw a metal box anchored to the inside of the dashboard, with four large exposed sockets on it. It was the Emissions Control Unit for the car. Someone had disconnected all the wires to it, then left them there.The radio wasn't missing. The glove box still had the usual paperwork in it. I popped the hood of the car, expecting to find the battery stolen at least, but it was still there.
I ducked back down into the passenger seat and grabbed the cables, and reconnected all four of them to the ECU, then pushed the carpeting back into place. Then I fetched my car jump-starting kit, and hooked it up to the battery. I pressed the button, and turned the key, and the car started up.
... And as it did, it made a horrendous noise, like I was running a giant weedwacker instead of a polite and mild-mannered Honda Accord.
I talked with a friend of mine about the incident. He came out and looked under the hood and under the car, and gave me a breakdown of what happened:
Some time in the last few weeks, a criminal went driving through my neighborhood and spotted the car. Shortly afterwards, probably in the middle of the night, that criminal returned with a portable metal saw and a jack. They shoved the jack under the car and lifted it, then scooted underneath with the saw and chopped off a large segment of my exhaust pipe. Then they ripped off the oxygen sensor further along the pipe. They probably had an accomplice waiting nearby with a running car, and they tossed the pipe and the sensor and the saw into the trunk and sped away.
The segment of pipe they took had my car's catalytic converter right in the middle of it.
Honda Accords have relatively fancy catalytic converters. These devices contain precious metals that have become extremely valuable over the last five years or so, as auto makers work to comply with stricter emissions standards. Palladium and rhodium, for example, are now more valuable per ounce than gold. The crooks probably brought the part to a fencer, who gave them a hundred bucks for it. The fencer then unbolted the wrecked bits of pipe from the catalytic converter, and tossed the converter into a pile, which they then brought to a crooked parts recycler who melted down the components to extract the metals. The material from my catalytic converter probably got them three or four hundred bucks on the metals market.
Meanwhile, my car sat there. Some time in the next few days, the same crooks - or perhaps different ones - came by and jimmied open the driver's side door. Not content to steal the radio or the battery, these crooks wanted to steal the entire car. They brought with them a bootleg Emissions Control Unit. They pried up the carpet to reveal mine, disconnected it, and connected their own.
The ECU is responsible for interpreting the signals coming from the ignition. When you turn your key to start a modern car, it reads a coded signal from a little chip inside the handle of the key, and sends that signal to the ECU. If it's the right code, the ECU allows the car to start. Plug in a hacked ECU, and - in theory - you can get a car to start just by jamming any key into the ignition and turning it.
Well, something must have gone wrong, because they didn't steal the car. Two possibilities: Either the car didn't start at all, and they took back their bootleg ECU and moved on, or they did manage to start the car, at which point it made a horrendous noise and they knew someone had already stolen the catalytic converter, making the car much less valuable and much more noticeable to the police. Either way, they left the car door cracked open for future assaults, and by the time I came back the dome light had drained the battery.
Who knows how many days went by with the car door cracked open, sitting in the street. Or maybe it was just hours. It hardly mattered. It would need serious repair before I could use it again.
With Rachel's help, I managed to get it to a repair shop in Alameda. That was a bit harrowing. The repair shop went looking for a replacement catalytic converter that fit a 2002 Honda Accord and was legal in California. The cheapest one available right now costs over a thousand dollars. Between replacing that, the wrecked exhaust pipe, and the missing O2 sensor, the total cost is over two thousand dollars. It will cost me 2/3 of the price I paid for the entire car to get it drivable again.
Apparently catalytic converter theft is reaching epidemic proportions in this area. It makes sense that drug-addled people looking for a way to score fast cash would do this: All you need is a contact, a getaway car, and a battery-powered saw. You don't need to string more than a few coherent thoughts in front of each other. In fact, you don't even need to come up with the idea. Your drug dealer will tell you what to do.
The worst of it though, is the aggression of the thieves. Last year in East Oakland, a 12-year-old boy was shot when he and his father tried to confront a theft in progress. This was after they scared away the thieves once before. That's right: To steal a $100 part, these people returned to the driveway of a poor family's home with a gun, and shot at their son as he tried to intervene.
That incident was five miles from my house. It's quite possible that this same group was responsible for the theft on my street.
What kind of horrible, horrible people gang together and shoot to kill at a 12-year-old boy, so they can make a hundred bucks by costing his poor family several thousand?
The repairs to the Accord will be finished tomorrow afternoon. The repair shop is going to weld thick cabling around the catalytic converter, which is a menace to try and cut with a saw. My next step is to get a vibration-based car alarm installed in that vehicle, so if the crooks have to spend 15 minutes cutting stuff, the alarm will ring the entire time. Hopefully that will be enough time for someone to call the police even if I'm not there... Assuming of course that everyone on my block doesn't just ignore the alarm. Even if they can't steal the part, it's possible they will make cuts in the exhaust pipe during the attempt, and rip off my O2 sensor again. Or they will be prepared for cables and have a set of hydraulic shears. So my only real choice is to hide the car somewhere, which means I cannot use it in Oakland.
It's standard practice around here to leave nothing valuable in your car. But what can you do when people just roll up and cut pieces off of it? I'm more prepared for this problem than the vast majority of Oakland residents: I can do almost everything I need by bicycle, including get to work. What about all the people around me who can't?
Either they need to create a deterrent so scary that even drug addicts won't risk it - like keeping a firearm ready and using it without hesitation - or they need to rely on law enforcement to confront the fencers and shady reyclers and shut the process down. Meanwhile I ride up into the Berkeley hills and still occasionally see - though less these days - signs posted in windows reading "abolish the police."
What a strange place this is.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-09 04:06 pm (UTC)Is it safe to walk these same streets where this happened? Really really strange.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 03:36 am (UTC)Safe to walk these streets... Honestly, it depends. Sometimes I feel on edge when I walk around here; sometimes not. Usually I'm on a bicycle, and that feels safe. It's easy to shoot past potential trouble when you're on a bike. When I'm in town I ride my bike every single day.
I'm amazed sometimes how the things I consider normal here, even tolerable, are things that sound terrifying to people living in other places. I grew up on the edge of a relatively small town. We didn't lock our car doors, and usually not the garage or house either. Over two decades, the only vandalism we suffered was from raccoons and deer. (A stag once head-butted the family car.)
If I was still living there, and you told me the story in this post, I'd vow never to set foot in Oakland, let alone live in it.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-22 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-24 10:14 pm (UTC)