What is generally stolen is the entire wheel, which is then sold in the form of its individual components: tire and rim.

“All you have to do is jack up the car, remove the lug nuts and remove the wheels,” said Captain Joseph F. Schaller of the New Rochelle Police Department. “If you know what you’re doing it can be done pretty quickly — in a matter of a minute or two.”

Though law enforcement authorities say they do not have the statistics that show these types of thefts are on the rise — in part because many are not reported to the police or to insurers — many community leaders across the country say they are seeing a worrisome uptick. The resurgence, they say, has prompted car owners to take special protective measures, like organizing neighborhood patrols, outfitting houses with street-facing surveillance cameras and using locking lug nuts to deter thefts.

“It’s a crime we haven’t seen much of since the ’80s,” said Peter F. Vallone Jr., a city councilman who represents Astoria, Queens, where a spate of thefts has prompted residents to train volunteer “block watchers” to patrol the neighborhoods starting this weekend. “And it unfortunately, I believe, is a harbinger of a return of crimes we thought were in our past.”

Wheels are taken from cars parked on sleepy streets, in unattended parking lots, or even in private driveways. But large-scale thefts like the one in New Rochelle, where thieves cut their way into the lot through a chain-link fence, have been occurring around the country, in places like Jacksonville, Fla., Oklahoma City, and Harrisburg, Pa., where over a hundred were stolen on a single night last year. In Michigan, tire thefts have risen significantly over the past five years, said Terri Miller, the executive director of Help Eliminate Auto Thefts, which provides law enforcement agencies with crime reports gathered through its statewide tip line.