Three unlocked cars outside two homes on Patton Drive in Noroton Heights were entered overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, May 20 to 21, police said.
Meanwhile, police in Stamford and New Canaan have noted that more vehicles are being entered in those towns.
The owner of a Toyota Corolla parked outside 5 Patton Dr. told police at 6:42 a.m., May 21 that the car was entered. Items from storage compartments were strewn on the front seats, but nothing seemed to have been stolen, police were told.
At 4 Patton Dr., a Fiat 500 and BMW 3 Series were also entered, with items from storage compartments strewn about inside. Again, nothing appeared missing from those vehicles.
Police announced no other reports of vehicles entered that night either on Patton Drive or elsewhere in town.
Thefts from Vehicles Recently Up in Stamford
A “crew” of juveniles has been running around at night in Stamford, checking vehicle doors to see if they’re unlocked, Stamford Police Lt. Tom Scanlon recently told the Stamford Advocate. They’ve been seen on security camera videos, he said.
According to Scanlon, the first thing they do when they get in an unlocked car is try to start it. If it starts, the thief drives off with it. Then they look for valuables and take what they can find. If a car door turns out to be locked, the thieves just go on to the next car, he said.
“What we are seeing is cars are stolen because the key fob was left inside. If the car owner doesn’t leave the fob, the car won’t get stolen,” Scanlon told the newspaper.
The number of vehicle burglaries has gone up recently in Stamford, he said, with 36 reports of thefts from cars in Stamford during the first half of May, compared with 22 thefts in the entire month of April.
When teenagers doing the thieving get caught, current state law is so lax that the same teens return to the same crimes, repeatedly, Scanlon said.
Locking a vehicle overnight appears to be an almost foolproof way of preventing the mischief: Only one vehicle was broken into recently in Stamford, Scanlon said, with all the other cases involving unlocked doors.
New Canaan Experiences More Car Thefts
An excerpt from an article published Wednesday by NewCanaanite.com:
New Canaan has seen a dramatic increase in thefts from motor vehicles through the first four months of 2020, officials said last week.
The larcenies increased from two in 2019 to 17 this year, according to Police Chief Leon Krolikowski.
“People are just not locking their cars and [they are] leaving their keys in cars that are getting stolen,” Krolikowski said during a May 20 meeting of the Police Commission, held via videoconference.
“We did have a window broken on a vehicle and a lot of items stolen in it. I suspect because the thieves came in and saw so many valuable items in the car that they decided to break the window and take everything. But that is not the norm. The norm is the car is locked, they move on to the next driveway for easier pickings, so to speak.”