Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Welcome to City Hall’s Room 200, where the buck stops, interim Mayor Mark Farrell. Now put this issue high on your to-do list: Only 13 arrests were made in the more than 81,511 auto break-ins reported online over the past seven years, according to the district attorney’s office.

The number of reported burglaries won’t surprise anyone who has seen the pervasive coatings of tiny glass shards on the pavements of the city. That in itself is maddening — and by all accounts, getting worse. But the reality that the vandals and thieves are doing it with near impunity is simply unacceptable.

San Francisco clearly needs to be more aggressive in deterring, investigating and prosecuting car break-ins. The outrageously low arrest rate shows that the value of the online reports have been reduced to documentation for insurance claims. The overall arrest rate is also distressingly low. Police arrested just 446 suspects for auto burglary from January to November 2017 — even though there were more than 30,000 break-ins for the year.

In effect, the criminals are getting away with it unless an officer catches them in the act.

Some law-enforcement officials, namely the San Francisco Police Officers Association, would like to blame Proposition 47, a crime-reform bill passed by state voters in November 2014. They note that the measure raised the threshold for felony theft to $950. But that argument does not hold up to scrutiny. Auto break-ins can still be charged as felonies. And property crime rates have not changed significantly since the law took effect, according to a recent study by Californians for Safety and Justice.

There is no single solution to stopping this wave of break-ins. It requires commitment and teamwork between police and prosecutors. It also requires a tweak in the law.

District Attorney George Gascón has noted that one of the difficulties of prosecuting break-in cases as felonies is that it requires proof that the car doors were locked — otherwise a theft with a smashed window is treated as a misdemeanor. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, has taken up Gascón’s call with proposed legislation that would add the words “or when forced entry is used” in the penal code’s description of felony auto burglary.

San Francisco needs to treat this crime wave as the serious issue it has become.

This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.