PolitiFact: Key facts (get it?) are missing in claim about car thefts

Jan. 20--Williamson County's sheriff posted a warning that led us to check some key facts and find them faulty.

Robert Chody, elected in 2016, said in a Dec. 27 tweet: "65,000 vehicles stolen in Texas each year. Almost half of all vehicles stolen in Texas each year had keys left inside. That's a lot of preventable thefts #TakeKeysWithYou #LockDoors," his tweet said.

Chody told us he drew his claim from a webpage overseen by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles that said, "It doesn't matter what kind of car you drive, all vehicles are a potential target of theft. Nearly 65,000 cars and trucks are stolen in the state of Texas each year, and thousands more are burglarized. Almost half of all vehicles stolen had the keys left inside."

Bryan Wilson, director of the DMV's anti-theft division, pointed to data from the Texas Department of Public Safety saying that more than 65,000 motor vehicle thefts were reported each year from 2013 through 2016, when the agency noted 68,461 such thefts.

Wilson also shared a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration publication, "Vehicle Theft Prevention: What Consumers Should Know," which attributes 40 percent to 50 percent of vehicle thefts nationally "to driver error, which includes leaving vehicle doors unlocked and leaving keys in the ignition or on the seats."

Also, Wilson pointed out, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an Illinois-based nonprofit that says it's dedicated to fighting insurance fraud and crime, published an October 2016 report stating that over several years, Texas ranked second only to California by having 11,003 vehicle thefts with keys inside -- a figure drawn from the bureau's review of theft reports compiled by the federal National Crime Information Center. The bureau's report says: "Vehicle thefts with keys were identified by using the NCIC text fields available to NICB. Terms indicating the vehicle was stolen with the keys were used as search criteria."

Wilson, asked about relevant statewide data, said there hasn't been a systemwide "science-based empirical study to measure the sometimes surreptitious activity of leaving keys in the car or doors unlocked."

We made our own run at gauging the prevalence of Texans leaving keys in stolen vehicles by dividing the 11,003 Texas vehicle thefts with keys inside as noted by the crime bureau into the 200,503 vehicle thefts in Texas tallied by the DPS through the study period. That comparison suggests that 5.5 percent of vehicle thefts in the state from 2013 through 2015 involved keys left inside.

That's a far different percentage than is claimed on the Texas DMV's anti-theft webpage.

DMV spokesman Adam Shaivitz said the anti-theft authority's tracking of vehicle thefts with keys left inside came from reports submitted by 24 regional task forces or local police agencies awarded grants by the authority to combat vehicle thefts and burglaries. He said more than half the authority's grantees said a major factor in vehicle burglary and theft cases is "people leaving their vehicles unsecured and leaving keys in the interior, although they don't all report percentages."

He also provided a December press release from the Amarillo Police Department stating that 762 of the 922 cars and trucks reported stolen locally from December 2016 through Dec. 21, 2017, had the keys left in them -- a figure confirmed by the department's Cpl. Jeb Hilton, who told us that he couldn't guess why so many motorists had left keys in their vehicles.

Shaivitz also forwarded an email from Austin Police Department Sgt. Chris Vetrano stating that 51 percent of locally reported vehicle thefts in December 2017 involved keys left in vehicles. Department spokeswoman Anna Sabana told us that through 2017, approximately 32 percent of vehicle thefts reported to the department "had keys available" when the thefts occurred -- compared with about 41 percent the year before.

While we were researching this fact-check, Shaivitz told us the DMV had amended the authority's anti-theft webpage by removing the declaration that almost half of vehicles stolen in Texas had keys left inside. Revised text on the webpage says, "Many jurisdictions report that keys left inside and doors unlocked are major factors in stolen and burglarized vehicles."

Our ruling:

Chody said that almost half of all vehicles stolen in Texas each year have the keys left inside.

Surely some instances of keys left in stolen vehicles go unreported. Yet we identified no statewide data supporting this "almost half" assessment while our calculations rooted in a national group's research indicate that less than 1 in 10 reported Texas vehicle thefts from 2013 through 2015 involved keys left in vehicles.

We rate this claim False.

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