Jump in S.F. car break-ins prompts frustration, finger-pointing

Tian Rong Zheng, an employee at In and Out Auto Glass, vacuums the remaining shards of glass from a broken in car belonging to Kelley Maulbetsch in San Francisco. Tian Rong Zheng, an employee at In and Out Auto Glass, vacuums the remaining shards of glass from a broken in car belonging to Kelley Maulbetsch in San Francisco. Photo: Brandon Chew, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Brandon Chew, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close Jump in S.F. car break-ins prompts frustration, finger-pointing 1 / 12 Back to Gallery

An alarming 47 percent spike in San Francisco car break-ins in the first half of this year has prompted a blame game between police, prosecutors and politicians while repeat victims like Kelley Maulbetsch are left feeling exasperated and helpless.

When Maulbetsch walked to her car one morning last week in San Francisco’s Mission District, her usual upbeat demeanor quickly gave way to sour frustration. Someone had smashed a hole in the rear passenger-side window of her Volkswagen Jetta station wagon and made off with the paltry haul — two camping chairs and a music stand.

Pea-size pieces of glass were strewn about her car’s interior while chunks of the window still broke away from the hastily punched hole as she pulled up later that day to In and Out Auto Glass in the city’s Bayview district.

“This is super irritating,” the 37-year-old professional cellist said while shelling out $256 to have the glass fixed. “When I saw the window this morning, I was thinking ‘not again.’”

But Maulbetsch’s experience is far from unique.

“We’ve seen an absolute explosion of auto break-ins,” said San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents District Eight, which includes the Castro, Noe Valley and parts of the Mission. “There are areas in my district where you’ll have 10 cars on a single block that have been broken into.”

Big spike in crime

From the beginning of January through the end of June there have been 11,917 reported vehicle burglaries in the city, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s most recent crime data.

That statistic is up a startling 47 percent from the number of reported car break-ins at the same point last year. It’s escalated 62 percent from 2013, during the same period. And it’s skyrocketed 171 percent from 2010, a year that had 4,396 reported vehicle burglaries between January and the end of June, according to city data. Statewide, however, property crime rates have dropped 6 percent from 2009 to 2014, according to a report by California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The real number of break-ins in San Francisco, though, is likely much higher because many victims — like Maulbetsch — have given up on going through the hassle of reporting the crime.

The marauders, who operate both under cover of darkness and in broad daylight, creep into nearly every neighborhood in the city from Nob Hill to the Marina, ransacking vehicles regardless of what they may find, and nearly always avoiding capture.

“It really doesn’t matter what neighborhood you’re in — they’ll break in,” said Ricky Villareal, sales manager at In and Out Auto Glass, which has seen a boom in business lately with 25 to 30 customers a day, often teary-eyed out-of-towners, coming in with shattered windows.

While experts identify a combination of possible reasons for the increase in property crime in general and auto burglary in particular, San Francisco police officials have pointed to two recent statewide criminal justice reforms as being at the root of the problem — AB109 and Proposition 47.

AB109, California’s Public Safety Realignment Act of 2011, generally referred to as realignment, was passed to thin California's overcrowded prison system. Those convicted of crimes that aren’t considered violent, serious or sexual — like theft or drug possession — are kept in local jails, rather than sent to state prison, and state parole violators now serve time in jail rather than prison.

Chief blames reforms

Prop. 47 was a statewide initiative passed in November that reduced many nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

In April, San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr called out realignment and Prop. 47 during a hearing with the city’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee addressing property crime. He said the reforms have contributed to an increase of low-level criminals on city streets and, therefore, a rise in property crime.

“These are changes that were voted for, and so it just is the new landscape and we will get a handle on it,” he said at the time. “It’s just going to take some time.”

Since realignment, property crime rates have been on a steady rise in San Francisco, climbing from a rate of 3,954 crimes per 100,000 residents in 2010 to 5,795 crimes per 100,000 residents in 2013, according to the most recent data available from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

After Prop. 47 was passed by voters, and 2,700 inmates were released from California’s prisons when their felonies for property and drug crimes were reduced to misdemeanors, auto burglaries shot up in San Francisco.

But, according to District Attorney George Gascón, who helped push the initiative, in San Francisco “only four people have been released from state prison and only 12 people have been released from County Jail due to Prop 47.”

Moreover, auto burglary remains a felony under the measure.

Arrests in property crime cases, though, are down 28 percent during the first six months of the year compared with the same period last year, while the number of patrol officers has remained about the same, according to city crime data.

“Nothing has changed under Prop. 47 as it relates to the prosecution of auto burglaries,” said Alex Bastian, a district attorney’s office spokesman. “We charge them as felonies. We did so before Prop. 47, and we continue do so today.”

Matt Gonzalez, chief attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office and a former supervisor, said crimes that were reduced to misdemeanors under Prop. 47 can still bring sentences of up to a year in jail, and prosecutors are as vigilant as ever in charging the cases.

“The myth that the cops catch a guy burglarizing a car and it’s not being prosecuted because it’s a misdemeanor — that just doesn’t happen. Not true,” Gonzalez said.

‘So many volatile issues’

Other experts warn that pointing to realignment and Prop. 47 as definitive causes for rising property crime in San Francisco may be misguided because the trends are not the same across the state.

“Nothing is harder to establish than causes of crime-rate changes — that’s especially true in the short run where there are so many volatile issues going on,” said Robert Weisberg, a professor of criminal law at Stanford Law School.

“It’s quite possible that realignment and Prop. 47 contribute to (property crime rates), but the data is sketchy,” he said. “They are state laws and the picture in terms of property crime rate is varied across the state.”

FBI data show property crime rates in many of California’s largest cities have been decreasing or have remained flat since realignment, while San Francisco’s rates have steadily shot up.

In Oakland, historically known as a high-crime city, property crime rates went up around 25 percent from 2011 to 2012, but then dropped over the next year. The same up-down trend was seen in San Jose.

In Los Angeles, the property-crime rate remained steady, and in Fresno, it dropped by 12 percent between 2011 and 2013.

Steadily declining crime-fighting resources in San Francisco are also being blamed. The number of cops in the city has decreased by 3 percent from 2004 to 2014 while the city’s population increased almost 12 percent as money continues to flow into the city, driving up rents and creating more lucrative targets for thieves.

To get more cops on the street, Wiener in June authored a nonbinding resolution to expand the police force. The resolution was passed 6-5 by a sharply divided Board of Supervisors, with some questioning whether more officers would mean less crime.

The lack of cops investigating auto burglaries became glaringly apparent when in June police did not assign an investigator to look into the theft of a gun from a federal agent’s car. The firearm ultimately was used in the Pier 14 slaying of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle, an innocent victim on a stroll with her father.

Suhr would not comment on why the June 27 break-in was not followed up on, but he issued a department-wide bulletin reminding officers to identify “cases that may require an immediate investigation.”

Priority on violent crimes

Department officials said that with fewer officers, their resources have been allocated to combatting violent crimes like assault, homicide and rape, where numbers have remained relatively steady.

“Property crimes are not a priority unless we have violent crimes taken care of,” said Officer Albie Esparza, a San Francisco police spokesman. “Once you have the additional staffing, then you can start doing foot patrols, putting officers on bikes and doing undercover operations going after car thieves.”

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky