Social media fame driving surge in teens stealing cars, Victoria Police says

Teenagers who steal cars in aggravated burglaries are “looking for fun”, not profits, police say, as popular dumping grounds for stolen cars emerge.

New crime data shows teens stealing cars in aggravated burglaries do it for fun and that almost half the vehicles are dumped in three council areas.

Victoria Police statistics have revealed 43.5 per cent of the vehicles were later found abandoned in the Dandenong, Casey and Cardinia municipalities.

Operation Trinity figures from the past year show that 581 of 1337 cars recovered after being snatched in the youth crime aggravated burglaries wound up in those locations.

The figures indicate a high percentage of those stealing the cars are from those suburbs.

Police suspect the thefts are not profit-motivated but driven by the teens’ desire for notoriety on social media.

An extraordinarily high recovery rate of 94.2 per cent across the Trinity area appears to confirm they are being driven around the suburbs for kicks then used to get home by the teens.

Other areas where the stolen cars are turning up in big numbers are Boroondara, Manningham, Monash and Whitehorse (11.9 per cent) and Frankston and Mornington Peninsula 10.1 per cents.

Trinity, a special round-the-clock operation aimed at combating youth crime, covers almost all of the eastern and southeastern suburbs and is heavily focused on cutting the rate of aggravated burglaries.

It has made 2838 arrests in the past year, 604 of them for aggravated burglary and car theft.

The highest rate of car theft linked to those break-ins was in Boroondara, Manningham, Monash and Whitehorse, where 438 cars were taken.

Teens stealing cars in aggravated burglaries are doing it for fun.

Other top-ranked areas were Dandenong, Casey and Cardinia (321), Kingston, Glen Eira and Bayside (227) and Banyule, Darebin, Nillumbik and Whitehorse (163).

Detective Inspector Luke Kirton, the deputy commander of Trinity, said it was clear the thieves were zeroing-in on affluent areas of the east and inner-south east.

The vehicles were driven around town, those on board sometimes posting to social media as they travelled, before being dumped wherever was convenient.

“They’re recovered and they’re recovered really quickly. They’re not looking for profit. They’re looking for fun,” Inspector Kirton said.

Although a low number of the thefts involved confrontation with victims, the risk to the public was high because the young offenders were often rocketing along roads at “extraordinary speeds”.

Inspector Kirton said many may be driving a car for the first time.

“There’s not too many of these kids come from farms. That’s always been one of our biggest concerns,” he said.

The risk of a catastrophic crash made pursuing them perilous, despite not doing so running against a police officer’s natural instincts.

In some cases, Inspector Kirton said, those behind the wheel tried to “egg-on” the police to give chase.

Almost half of the cars stolen in the areas covered by operation Trinity were German-made prestige wheels.

The figures show vehicles manufactured by BMW, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen and Audi filled four of the top-five spots.

Those makes have been targeted by the thieves for years and are heavily over-represented in the aggravated burglary theft rate when compared with their overall sales numbers in Australia.

Many of the thefts were carried out after intruders entered through unlocked doors or windows.

Inspector Kirton reminded householders they could mitigate the risk by locking up, particularly the garage and rear doors of their properties.