There’s a narrative that Illinois is not a good place to be if you’d prefer to not have your auto stolen. The Land of Lincoln is making an effort to change that and just shared numbers from a recent crackdown and the results are a stunner.
I received an email today from Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias which included results from a taskforce in the state combatting auto and catalytic converter thefts. It said the Illinois Statewide Auto Theft Task Force did 1,854 investigations and found 1,346 stolen vehicles valued at around $30 million dollars. The movie Gone in 60 Seconds would be impressed.
The Illinois task force also ran audits of businesses and found over 2,200 violations with many being assigned additional investigations.
Just in Chicago alone, a task force there performed over 1,100 investigations and made 440 arrests and recovered 1,391 vehicles valued at over $28 million dollars.
The success of these auto theft recoveries is attributed to the grant program the state of Illinois oversees that includes funding for the Illinois State Police and technology including plate scanners that are being utilized to find these stolen autos and recover them. The press release said over $5 million in grants has been given to these task forces and law enforcement organizations that are trying to make Illinois a less perilous place to own a vehicle.
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