Bait cars catch thieves: Calgary police

More car thieves are being arrested in Calgary thanks to "bait cars," Calgary police say, but they won't release the number of people arrested or say how many cars they used to catch them.

The bait cars are left in parking lots, side streets or private driveways, police say. In some cases, the doors are locked. Other cars are left with the keys in the ignition. Some are even left running.

The Calgary Police Service has been using the cars since last November as a key part of the effort to tackle auto theft.

In one recent instance captured by a hidden camera inside the car and released to the CBC, a man searched around the car's interior and removed the vehicle's key, but didn't take the car.

"He may have the intention to steal that vehicle at a later time, or maybe got scared away that day," said Staff Sgt. Colin Adair of the Community Response Unit at the CPS.

"It's hard to say, but it's a good example of, you know, these bait cars are around and they'll catch you, whether you're trying to steal the car or if you're trying to steal the property inside the vehicles."

Armed with information from the hidden camera, police will watch out for the man, said Adair. "We'd like to know who he is so we can have an opportunity to speak with him about where our key might be."

Along with other police efforts, the bait cars are resulting in more arrests, said Dave Jennings of HEATT, the undercover police unit that targets car thieves with increased patrols and intelligence-gathering.

"We know from talking to informants in the jails that we're a hot topic of conversation, because we've made an awful lot of arrests over the last year," he said.

"We think a lot of car thieves are passing on stealing vehicles simply because now they don't know where the police are," he said. "Before it was fairly easy to spot them, now not so much," said Jennings.

The CBC filed a freedom of information request to find out how many vehicles are in the fleet of bait cars, how often they're deployed and how many arrests have been made as a result. The request was denied by the police department.

"It's an operational choice," said Adair. "The program is meant to be covert. So we don't want to disclose what our vehicles are, how many there are and even the successes."

It's important to keep the thieves guessing because that makes the bait cars more effective, he said.

The bait cars and undercover teams are having an impact, said a former car thief who spoke to CBC on the condition of anonymity.

"The different teams and stuff that have collaborated to combat this problem or whatever, I think they're definitely a big part of why it's not as prevalent," he said.