HOUSTON – Houston police are preparing to put officers to work on overtime to try to cut down motor vehicle burglaries, which they say has become the most commonly committed crime in the city.
An area especially hard hit is the Willowbend Subdivision in southwest Houston.
In the two decades Steve Martin has lived there, he estimates his personal vehicles have been hit about 25 times.
“And we’ve caught 'em, we’ve caught 'em out here in the act of it,” Martin said. “They ransack the vehicle, get everything out, call their buddies, throw everything in and go on to the next one.”
He has the pictures to prove it. Video from a neighbor's security camera shows suspects nonchalantly going through his truck last March.
“They tried to steal the truck, couldn’t steal the truck, so they went and got the tailgate. The tailgate on this truck, Ford Platinum, is $7,500 at the dealer,” Martin said.
If the neighborhood has been a cornucopia for thieves in the past, it got even worse this spring.
Between March 7 and April 3, the same time period Martin’s truck was burglarized, there were 16 vehicle burglaries in the neighborhood. That’s a 128 percent increase over February.
Houston police responded with increased surveillance in the neighborhood, but so far the thieves who hit Martin and his neighbors’ vehicles haven’t been arrested.
“These guys know exactly what they’re doing. They know where the police are. Somehow they know where they’re at,” Martin said.
He believes the best way to catch the crooks is for the city to install surveillance cameras on every street that are capable of reading the bad guy’s license plates.
But that’s not likely to happen soon, if at all.
So for now, Martin isn’t laying out another $7,500 for a new tailgate.
“It’s pointless to replace it 'cause they’re going to come back and get it again,” Martin said. “So until something changes I replaced it with a 350 tailgate. Deal with it."