The Mobile Police Department was clearing stolen vehicle cases at more than twice the national rate, a figure that reflected both hard work and, by the chief’s own account, an uncomfortable amount of practice.
Mobile’s clearance rate on auto theft cases stood at 28.8 percent, against a national average of 13 percent. The department outperformed national figures in every other major crime category as well — murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary and larceny — but nowhere was the gap so wide.
The numbers deserve their context. A clearance rate is the share of reported cases that police close, usually by arrest, and across American policing it has long sat at disheartening levels — barely a fifth of burglaries, roughly two-fifths of violent crimes, and, for motor vehicle theft, a national figure stuck near one in eight. A department clearing nearly three of every ten auto thefts was thus working at more than double the standard, a gap that does not happen by accident in a crime category where stolen cars are mobile, stripped for parts and rarely recovered intact.
The margin over the national rate in every other category is the second half of the finding. Departments that clear murders and robberies above the national average are generally ones with functioning investigative infrastructure — detective staffing, case review, follow-up discipline — and Mobile’s across-the-board showing suggested the auto theft number was a symptom of that infrastructure, concentrated in the category where the department had decided to push hardest.
‘We’re having more than we should’
Police Chief Phillip Garrett said the volume of auto thefts was the first thing that caught his attention when he took over the department the previous summer. “When I took over last summer, the first thing I noticed was that we had a lot of auto thefts,” Garrett said. “I asked people to step up. We meet every Thursday and that was one of the first topics to come up: auto thefts and what can we do to pay more attention to it.”
The weekly meeting Garrett described is the mechanics of command in a large department. A standing session where commanders review the week’s cases — and where a chief puts a category on the agenda and keeps it there — is how a department’s attention is actually allocated. Theft patterns shift with the seasons, with school calendars and with the economy, and a chief who reads the volume correctly makes it the department’s standing business rather than a periodic crackdown.
The chief was careful not to celebrate the statistic. “We’re having more than we should,” he said. “The rates are good but we would choose to have fewer cases.”
He allowed that working a large number of such cases builds a certain expertise. “When you work a lot of them, there is some merit to that,” he said. “But we do work hard at it. We pay a lot of attention to it to try to keep it down.”
His refusal to treat a high clearance rate as a win is the honest reading of the data. Clearance rates measure the portion of crimes police solve, not the amount of crime prevented; a city with heavy auto theft and vigorous investigation will post better numbers than a city with light theft and a complacent department, even while its residents suffer more stolen cars. Garrett’s framing — fewer cases preferred, expertise an unfortunate byproduct — keeps the statistic in its place.
Cars that were never stolen
Part of the picture, Garrett said, was that a share of the reports were not true. Some people, he said, reported a vehicle stolen when in fact it had been traded away.
“A lot of people are reporting a vehicle as stolen and it was not,” he said. “It was swapped out for drugs.”
The phenomenon he described is a recognized pattern in urban auto theft statistics: vehicles traded in drug transactions — informal, undocumented sales where a car changes hands for product or debt — then reported stolen by the former owner, either to recover the vehicle or to cover the loss to a lender or insurer. Each false report inflates the theft count, consumes investigative hours and pollutes the data the department uses to deploy officers.
In response, the department began requiring that a person filing a stolen vehicle report sign an affidavit swearing the vehicle was in fact stolen. Some declined to sign.
“That will drive down the numbers,” Garrett said. “We encourage our guys if they make a false report, we’ll prosecute them. That’s the only way to make a difference.”
The affidavit is a low-cost fix with a measurable effect. Under Alabama law, filing a false police report is a crime, and requiring a sworn signature converts every stolen-vehicle report into a document the filer is legally accountable for. The people who decline to sign — and Garrett said some did — thereby identify themselves as the source of the inflated numbers, and the department’s theft statistics begin to describe actual thefts. The practice also protects investigators from chasing vehicles that were never victims of a crime.
Drugs, in the chief’s telling, sat behind a good deal of what looked like ordinary property crime, and behind some violent crime as well. “Robberies, a lot of the time, it’s a drug transaction, and when the person gets home and has to explain to a spouse or the family why he doesn’t have any money, he makes up a robbery,” he said.
The chief’s observation reaches across the crime table. Drug markets generate violence directly — disputes over product, money and territory — and they also generate reported crime that is not what it appears: robberies that were bad deals, thefts that were trades, burglaries that were collections. For a police department, the practical consequence is that a portion of the caseload is a cover story, and the department’s ability to detect which cases are real determines how accurately it can read its own city.
The shredder problem
Garrett’s larger concern was a gap in the law that he said allowed stolen cars to vanish permanently. As matters stood, he said, a person could pick up a vehicle off the street, haul it to an auto shredder and sell it for scrap without holding title to it. If that car had been reported stolen, “we can’t find it because it’s in the shredder, crushed and gone,” he said.
The loophole he described is elegant in its efficiency and destructive in its effect. A stolen car driven to a shredding yard arrives as scrap metal — no title check, no VIN verification, no questions — and within hours becomes a bale of steel bound for a mill, untraceable by any means available to a detective. The car that would ordinarily be the evidence in a theft case is destroyed before the case is opened, and the thief is paid in cash for the privilege.
The chief said he hoped to see a city ordinance, a state law, or both, requiring anyone selling a vehicle to a shredder to actually own it. “There needs to be a change in the law that a person who sells a vehicle needs to be the owner,” Garrett said. “These are usually cars that aren’t worth anything, but the metal may be worth a couple of hundred bucks. That’s not bad if you’ve got nothing in it. At some point we need to look at the law and say if you purchase a vehicle for scrap or dismantling, you have to have title.”
His proposed remedy targets the transaction rather than the thief. Requiring title at the point of sale shifts the burden to the shredding yard, the only location in the chain where a paper check is possible. Scrap dealers who must record seller identity and verify ownership create a trail a detective can follow — and, more importantly, they create a filter: a thief with no title, faced with a yard that demands one, loses the easiest way to liquidate a stolen car.
A problem that later got attention
Garrett was describing a loophole that scrap metal prices had made lucrative. The mid-2000s commodity boom drove the value of scrap steel sharply higher, and law enforcement agencies across the Southeast reported a corresponding surge in metal theft — catalytic converters, copper wire, air conditioning coils and, as Garrett noted, entire automobiles fed into shredders with no paper trail.
The economics explain the timing. Global demand for steel — driven largely by construction in rapidly industrializing economies — pushed scrap prices to levels that turned junk into a business and made every abandoned vehicle, every piece of copper and every aluminum coil worth stealing. Police departments from Florida to Tennessee recorded thefts of highway signs, cemetery urns, church air conditioners and farm equipment in the same years, all of it convertible to cash at yards operating under rules written for an era when scrap was worth pennies.
Alabama eventually tightened its rules. The Legislature passed scrap metal legislation in the years that followed, imposing recordkeeping and identification requirements on dealers and restricting cash transactions for certain materials — measures aimed squarely at the kind of no-questions-asked sale the chief described.
The statutory approach Alabama adopted followed the model other states had converged on: registries of licensed dealers, photographed transactions, identity checks on sellers, holding periods for certain materials and payment by check rather than cash for regulated metals. Each element exists to make a scrap transaction reconstructible — a paper trail where none existed — and to move the market away from the anonymous, cash-at-the-gate trade that had made theft so profitable.
The measures did not end metal theft, which persisted as long as prices made it profitable, but they changed the environment in which it operated. Dealers operating under recordkeeping rules became, in effect, reporting stations for law enforcement; transactions that once vanished into a shredder’s daily tonnage became entries that could be matched against stolen-vehicle and theft reports. That is precisely the change Garrett had called for from the chief’s office in Mobile: a law that made the seller’s ownership the yard’s business to verify.
In the spring of 2007, though, the practical remedy available to Mobile police was the one Garrett named: work the cases hard, meet every Thursday, and make people swear to their reports.
The department’s tools, in other words, were administrative — agenda discipline, affidavit requirements, prosecution threats for false reports — while the structural fix waited on the Legislature. That division of labor is the ordinary condition of municipal policing: a department can manage its caseload and its data, but the market that makes crime profitable is regulated one level up. Garrett’s argument to the city and the state was that the shredder gap was costing the department solved cases it was otherwise winning — a car recovered intact closes a case with a suspect; a car converted to scrap closes nothing.
What the 28.8 percent figure ultimately recorded was a department performing above national norms in every category, with a chief candid enough to say the number he was proudest of was the one he most wanted to shrink. Mobile’s stolen cars were being cleared at twice the national rate, and the chief’s prescription for the city was the same as it was for his investigators: fewer of them, worked just as hard.