National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

drop in the number of reports to the police and the measures that have been
announced, cargo theft is qualified as a threat for the next four years.
4.5 Car theft
4.5.1 Introduction and scope
There are various motives for car theft. Stealing a car may solve a temporary
transport problem or a car may be stolen for fun (joyriding). People might also
steal a car with the intention of committing another crime, such as a robbery
or a ram raid. These types of car theft will not be discussed in this section, which
focuses instead on systematic and organised car theft. New and expensive cars
are the favourite targets, and they are quite often stolen to order. These car
thefts are committed for financial reasons, namely to sell the cars to the
customers or to strip the cars and sell the parts.
Lorry theft falls outside the scope of this section; such thefts have already
been discussed in section 4.4.
4.5.2 General context
Due to the use of security systems, most new and expensive cars are almost
impossible to steal without the original key. As a result, car thieves nowadays
focus more on obtaining the car key than used to be the case. For example,
they might break into the owner’s house or the dealer’s showroom. Car theft
also occurs with some regularity in the form of rental cars not being returned or
cars being taken for a test drive but not brought back. Furthermore, the police
are also facing violent forms of car theft, such as carjacking and ‘homejacking’.
‘Homejacking’ is when violence (or the threat of violence) is used in a home,
office or other building to force the owner or resident to hand over the keys to
a vehicle or to hand over the vehicle itself. Carjacking is when violence (or the
threat of violence) is used to force the driver of a car to hand over the car keys
and the vehicle on the public highway.
According to experts, car theft combined with domestic burglary in which the
car keys are stolen (theft aided by burglary) is a frequent form of organised car
theft. A total of 694 cases were recorded in 2005, 424 in 2006 and 360 in the
first half of 2007. These numbers presumably represent a lower limit, as the true
reason for a car theft often remains unclear or is not specified in statistics. New
and more expensive vehicles in particular are stolen using this method and they
represent a major export item in the illegal car trade in Europe.
chapter 4 – Supraregional property crime
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