A lot of San Francisco journalists who’ve covered this story have their own tales of woe. Sergio Quintana of the local ABC affiliate said that his car has been broken into three times in recent years. KTTV says its cars and news vans have been hit several times.

San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr had his car window smashed, too.

“Why San Francisco is suffering a unique spike in property crime hasn’t been fully explained,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “but the problem is at the center of a war between District Attorney George Gascón and the city’s police officers’ union over their respective crime-fighting competence as well as the impact of reforms favored by Gascón and other progressives designed to thin jails and prisons.”

The police particularly dislike Proposition 47, “a ballot initiative passed into law in November 2014 that reduced six nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.” But that was a statewide measure, while the smash-and-grab epidemic is local and predates 2015. What’s more, Gascón says that he still charges car break-ins as felonies.

After the San Francisco Fox affiliate had a vehicle broken into in broad daylight while staffers were eating lunch, they called police, but didn’t get much help. Then they tracked down security camera footage that showed two men breaking into their vehicle, including their faces and the license plate of the car they climbed into.

7 weeks later the SFPD still hadn’t identified or caught them.

Other local press outlets report that a great many “smash-and-grab” car burglaries are perpetrated by repeat offenders who are given light sentences by judges who don’t see the crime as a particularly serious offense. Is that judgment correct?

The cost to victims is highly variable. Some are like me and have nothing stolen. The only cost is replacing the glass. Others lose purses, laptop computers, and other valuables, sometimes including items with sentimental value that can never be replaced.

If we’re very conservative, and figure an average of $500 of economic damage to victims of car break-ins, these thieves cost San Francisco victims just short of $13 million last year. And that’s using the number of reported break-ins. Many more go unreported.

There are other costs, too:

A handful of guns stolen from vehicles in San Francisco and then used to kill people—including a muralist in Oakland, a backpacker in Golden Gate Park, a hiker in Marin and a woman walking on a city pier—have made headlines. But those high-profile cases represent just a fraction of the guns stolen from cars in a city that has seen a rash of auto burglaries. Through Nov. 20, 57 guns have been stolen from vehicles in San Francisco. That’s up from 48 in all of 2014 and 31 in 2013, according to San Francisco Police Department statistics.

In a related story, the New York Times reported, “Recent data from the F.B.I. show that San Francisco has the highest per-capita property crime rate of the nation’s top 50 cities. About half the cases here are thefts from vehicles, smash-and-grabs...”