By John F. Di Leo -
I had an interesting experience at the car repair shop this weekend. Nothing big; it was just due for an oil change… but I was able to include one of the services I can't usually use: the free tire rotation. (I usually buy tires one at a time, thanks to potholes and nails, but for once, I actually replaced them as a set, so they could be rotated).
No such luck. I couldn't get the rotation this time, because we appear to have lost the wheel lock key.
That's not such a big deal in itself; I can do without the tire rotation. But it does mean I have to contact the manufacturer to order the right key, and I should do it quickly, in case of a flat tire (as previously mentioned, I am prone to such bad luck with cars).
And I got to thinking. A key to protect each tire. Why? And at what expense?
Modern cars come with locking lug nuts – just one per wheel – because there are people who steal tires right off your car. Crime gangs, whether related to the drug gangs or those with an automotive specialty, prowl our big cities, so that dozens (or more) of residents wake up each morning to find the car up on blocks, in the parking lot or even on the street, all four tires having been stolen in the night.
Gentle Reader, when my parents were young, this was unheard of. People stole cars, sure – either for joyrides or resale, or for disassembly in chop shops – I'm not saying there was no car theft 60 or 70 years ago. But if people back then stole just the wheels, to resell these steel or aluminum "rims" and tires, it certainly wasn't a frequent enough problem to be a source of constant fear for us drivers, or for our insurance companies.
But it is a very real problem today… enough of a problem that the auto industry found it necessary to switch this technology from an option to a standard, and a whole mini-industry of companies arose to manufacture these clever, expensive little wheel locks and keys. I wonder how much this risk – the risk of chop shops sending out their goons to steal wheels each night – costs society.
We are all aware, of course, of the complexities involved in protecting the rest of the car from theft.
We used to have a simple lock in the door handle, operated by a simple key. But they found that insufficient, years ago.
Now we have ever more complex electronic keys, costing $150 to $300 each. Yes, each. Buy a new car, you get two of these. If your family has more than two drivers, you'll need to shell out for the additional keys yourself.
This makes it harder to break into the car… and harder to operate it once you break in. This reduces the odds of someone getting in and driving it off, but it also appears to increase the odds that someone will smash in your window at night in hopes of finding your keys in the vehicle and stealing it. Even if you took your keys with you, so they can't start the car, you still have a $250 to $500 expense (almost certainly below your car insurance plan's deductible), to clean up the mess and replace the window.
And that's not even counting the other things criminals steal from cars: the car radios, groceries, presents, clothes, or personal electronics that might have been "safely locked" in the vehicle when the criminal hit. Or even the catalytic converter underneath, stolen for crooked metal reclamation projects.
The auto industry already had a simple lock installed in the doors; this new electronic key requirement adds to the complexity of designing the doors as well as the ignition system. How much has all this added to the cost of your car?
Lug nut locks. Electronic door keys. Window replacements. Crime creates enormous expenses, which may be paid at first by the manufacturer, and then by each individual victim, but which all add up to pose a cost to society.
Various anti-theft devices contribute to the purchase price of the automobile; every car, van, or SUV you buy would be cheaper if they didn't need these expensive devices. And they contribute to your lifetime cost of owning the vehicle as well, if you're a few years into the vehicle, and find you need to order expensive custom-made replacements for those wheel lock keys and car keys. (just think of how many cars you will have bought over the course of your life, and imagine each one of them having been $500 cheaper, if crime had not necessitated all these anti-theft elements).
The most recent stats published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that about 800,000 cars are stolen in the United States every year. That's not counting how many radios, wheels, and catalytic converters are stolen, how many tow trucks and taxis are hired, how many people have to burn a half day of vacation/PTO time to deal with the burglary.
The insurance industry has to calculate these costs, and assess these risks. They build them into our auto insurance premiums; they have no choice. I once moved from a safe Chicago suburb to an apartment in downtown Milwaukee; my insurance nearly doubled. We tend to think of auto insurance as being driven by crashes, but when you live in a city, crime plays just as big a part in your risk profile.
So let's review: Crime adds to the original cost of your vehicle… it adds to your cost of maintaining the vehicle… it adds to your insurance rate… and when it happens, when you have the bad luck to wake up to see that your window's been smashed or your car is up on bricks, you have the additional costs associated with fixing it all; the new windows or keys, the new catalytic converter or radio or wheels, the tow truck and time off work. It adds up all right.
Crime hurts, even if you are never personally the victim of a crime. Crimes like this hamper a person's livelihood – working in a city may mean shelling out for secure garage space downtown during the workday. Crimes like this hamper a person's financial well-being; That additional thousand dollars or so per year slows down one's ability to save for a house, or to build an adequate retirement fund.
One would therefore expect this issue – crime – to be a bipartisan issue, the kind that absolutely everyone agrees on, regardless of party or philosophy.
But it's not.
For decades now, a movement has been growing within the Democratic Party that is no longer a minority position; it has become official party policy. That movement was once simply referred to as being "soft on crime," but that name doesn't do justice to its current iteration.
Dozens of counties have state's attorneys – and some states even top this, with state attorneys general – who have published lists of crimes that they simply will not prosecute. Known collectively as "the Soros state's attorneys," these people are elected to prosecute criminals, but refuse to grant resources for prosecution, even when they are caught, on the grounds that a broken window or four stolen wheels aren't worth the county's time. This is, as you would expect, a blank check to the criminal element, encouraging them to pursue ever more of exactly this kind of crime.
Numerous governors – including such blue state governors as
California's Gavin Newsom,
Illinois' JB Pritzker, and
New York's Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, among others – have thrown open the prison gates, again and again, releasing convicted criminals before their sentences were up, using such excuses as 'overcrowding', Covid-19 fears, and budgetary constraints as their justifications. The voters who put them in office might have thought that keeping the streets safe from criminals – the process of removing known, proven criminals from society for the common good – went without saying… but today's Democratic Party no longer shares that belief.
And the latest nominee to sit on the Supreme Court is on that side of the argument as well.
Ketanji Brown Jackson, the current nominee (at this writing) to replace Associate Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, has a long history of working to reduce the time that convicted criminals spend in prison. Her time on both the federal bench and on the U.S. Sentencing Commission has been spent in advocacy for the positions that mandatory sentencing is wrong, that three-strike laws are wrong, that locking people up is wrong. Her record is one of opposition to the removal of proven criminals from society.
We have long endured judges who focused on the position that the system didn't fully honor the Constitutional position that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty; while the pendulum may have swung too far recently, there is at least an honorable, republican principle in support of that position. Giving the benefit of the doubt to the accused, up until conviction, is the American way.
But this new position of the progressives – that sentencing of convicted criminals behind bars is itself a fundamental wrong – is an outrageous departure from the path of common sense, and more, a complete abdication of the fundamental responsibility of government.
Government exists to protect the law-abiding citizen from attackers, both domestic and foreign. It's as simple as that.
Even the most liberal of Supreme Court Justices have acknowledged the right – the obligation – of government to remove convicted criminals from society through the necessary tool of imprisonment. To add someone to that august body, the superior court of the nation, who doesn't believe in removing criminals from society, is a mockery of the criminal justice system, a mockery of our very form of government.
We have seen the cost of crime to our society – from its effects on individuals to its effects on neighborhoods and business districts, on industries, cities and states.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is the poster child for this modern war on criminal justice, this modern campaign to support the lawbreakers over law-abiding citizens.
The Biden-Harris regime should be shamed into withdrawing her nomination, but, failing that, the United States Senate should treat this insult with appropriate hostility, through a unanimous, bipartisan rejection of the nomination.
There is one position on which all Americans should agree: that the law-abiding people of the United States – poor and rich, black and white, blue collar and white collar, young and old alike – all deserve the protection of their lives and property that can only be achieved by removing convicted criminals from society.
Copyright 2022 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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