WASHINGTON — Jeff Pena contacted his father once he heard that police have been passing out auto monitoring gadgets to check out to stem a pointy build up in carjackings, auto thefts and different crimes within the country’s capital.
“It’s just getting crazy out there,” stated Pena, whose father, Raul Pena, drives for the rideshare app Lyft. “Especially now because Christmas is coming and nobody has any money.”
That’s why the pair just lately sat in a line of vehicles winding across the block close to Nationals Park, the town’s professional baseball stadium, ready their flip for a police officer to put in the tracker — actually simply an Apple AirTag — and display them easy methods to use it.
The elder Pena, 58, stated he normally loved riding and assembly new folks however had turn out to be a lot more wary in contemporary months and stopped riding past due at night time.
“I do get nervous sometimes,” he said. “It’s worse now because it gets dark so early in the winter. Right now I feel very unsafe.”
One week later, Faenita Dilworth told a similar story. The mother of three and grandmother of two was sitting in one of about a dozen vehicles waiting in the parking lot of the old RFK Stadium, the former home of Washington’s NFL team, for a city-sponsored handout of dashboard cameras.
“They told me to get a camera and make sure somebody installs it for me,” she laughed. “If a person knows they’re being recorded, they’re less likely to do anything silly.”
The cameras were free for any District of Columbia resident who drives for a rideshare company like Uber, Lyft or Alto — or for a food delivery service like DoorDash. The AirTag trackers were available to any resident who lives in one of several designated auto theft hot zones.
The parallel initiatives are just part of a multipronged anti-crime offensive launched by the Metropolitan Police Department and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s government. Violent crimes, particularly homicide and car theft, have risen sharply, and the deputy mayor for public safety, Lyndsey Appiah, flatly stated before the House Judiciary Committee last month that the city is in the midst of a crime crisis.
As of Nov. 14, homicides are up 34% compared with this time last year. Car theft is up 98% and carjackings have more than doubled — up 104%. Recent carjacking victims include a congressman and a diplomat from the United Arab Emirates.
“It is not lost on us that we need to do more to increase public safety,” said Salah Czapary, head of the city’s Department of Nightlife and Culture. His department, which covers issues relating to restaurants and food delivery, partnered with the Department of For-Hire Vehicles for the dashboard camera distributions. The initiative is funded by a $500,000 donation from DoorDash — enough to pay for about 2,500 camera kits.
“We do feel it will help deter crime. That camera footage can help police to close a case and help prosecutors to successfully prosecute that case,” Czapary.
Some like Jessica Gray, a high school administrator who was waiting in line for an AirTag, said they were happy for the initiative, although she questioned exactly how the whole process would work.
“When you think about the response time, by the time the police respond and start tracking down the car, will there be anything left of it by the time they find it?” she said.
Police Sgt. Anthony Walsh didn’t promise that police would immediately be able to recover a stolen car intact. But he said the tracker information would help police trace the route of the car thieves and possibly pull security camera footage from along that route to aid in an eventual arrest and court case.
“This is all about helping our investigators build a case that holds up in court and hopefully takes car thieves off the streets. That’s the idea,” he stated.
Walsh additionally discovered himself fielding more than one questions on whether or not the AirTag would permit the federal government to trace drivers’ actions. He identified that the citizens themselves can be doing the monitoring on their telephones and would flip over that information to the police in the event that they sought after to help the investigation.
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