(NewsNation) — Violent crime may have dropped in major American cities, but car thefts have not, and the spike may have to do with large-scale smuggling operations that ship stolen vehicles overseas.
According to the FBI, a car is stolen in the U.S. about once every 40 seconds. Many of them end up at ports like the Port of Baltimore, where they are put on cargo ships headed to West Africa.
But there is a team at Customs and Border Protection trying to inspect as many containers as possible to recover the cars and maybe eventually return them to their rightful owners. It’s not an easy job given the average cargo ship can hold roughly 15,000 containers and U.S. ports handle more than 50 million cargo ships per year.
The team spoke exclusively with NewsNation, showing the way thieves damage stolen cars.
“This car is a 2022 Mercedes Benz, it’s worth about $65,000. It was stolen out of Maryland, and it’s going to Togo, West Africa,” said Port Director Adam Rottman. “They went in, they removed this panel up here, they tore up all the electronics here.”
NewsNation toured the facility, a nondescript warehouse where CBP uses technology and algorithms to try to decide which containers will be inspected.
According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, 2023 is likely to be a record year for car thefts in the U.S., with more than a million thefts expected when year-end data is calculated.
Customs officials at the Port of Baltimore said they’re on track for a record number of seizures as well. NewsNation watched crews pull out two stolen cars from a container that was supposed to be packed with household items.
Many of the stolen cars recovered are high-end, like the Mercedes that Rottman found earlier.
“These criminal organizations are transitional. They’ll make a dollar in whatever they can,” Rottman said. “Whether it’s drugs, whether it’s terrorism, whether it’s human trafficking — the hot one right now happens to be automobiles.”
A NewsNation analysis of city data shows car thefts are surging in all six of the most populated cities in the U.S., with Philadelphia up the highest of those cities, an increase of about 70% over 2022. It’s likely a big chunk of what is driving up insurance rates, which have risen 20%.
While cars may be recovered, many of them don’t ever make it back to their rightful owners, ending up being crushed because insurance has already paid out for the car by the time it is located.