CBS4 Employee Now Among The Many Catalytic Converter Theft Victims
DENVER (CBS4) - You always try to put yourself in their shoes.
Empathy is required of a journalist. It forces you feel the joy of a new parent, the fire of an athlete's drive for success, the pain of an innocent's injustice, or the wickedness of a criminal's lack of compassion. The job requires seeing the story from all angles.
You're only a conduit, I constantly tell myself. I'm only here to see the story from all angles and relay it wisely and accurately to everyone else.
Let the story be told and stay out of the way.
However, this incident ... this one threw me right into the mix. Now I am one of the victims. I feel it for myself this time. And I don't care for it.
At the end of a long day of work last week, I turned the ignition to my Hyundai Santa Fe, eager to get going with the driving portion of my commute home. As soon as an ugly, unfamiliar sound hit my ears, I turned the key back and paused.
I sat for a moment, evaluating, wondering if I'd caught road debris in the belt, if the pistons were flying out of the block, or if a small, unfortunate animal had made an untimely resting place under my hood.
But within seconds, I had other suspicions. I peered under the car and they were confirmed. There was an obvious gap in the exhaust system.
In that moment I realized I had become one of the hundreds of Colorado motorists who've had their vehicles' catalytic converter cut off and stolen.
Who needs empathy when you can experience it firsthand?
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When I parked my car at sunrise that morning, I realized I was the first car in the third deck of the Broomfield Park-N-Ride garage. That fact didn't cause me alarm.
What's alarming now is the $2,000 estimate for repair and five-week backlog in parts from the dealership.
Broomfield Police Department spokesperson Rachel Welte said my case was one of seven catalytic converter thefts reported in seven days. It was the second that occurred in the parking garage.
There, I mistook fire alarms for security cameras. The facility, I was told by the responding BPD officer, in fact only has one. The garage was built by and is owned by a private real estate company which has asked for increased patrols from the police department, Welte said. The garage is not owned by the Regional Transportation District or the FirstBank Center, though clearly it was placed and designed to serve consumers of both. A large number of consumers. All of them potential targets.
This particular crime has proliferated. In the city of Denver alone, 15 catalytic converter thefts were reported to police in 2019. The following year saw 257.
On Friday the Denver Police Department warned vehicle owners that a recent spate of catalytic converters thefts involved not only the saw-wielding person who crawled under the vehicles, but armed lookouts.
RELATED: DPD Warns About Armed 'Lookouts' During Catalytic Converter Thefts
A bill to address catalytic converter thefts is currently under consideration in the Colorado state legislature.
The same frustration is reflected by every person that CBS4 has recently profiled who have the same experience.
Like the families trying to recover from poverty and trauma at a transitional housing center in Arvada who had a fleet of vans hit, plus a personal vehicle: "This is a single mom who was really trying hard to be able to get to self sufficiency," said director Karen Allen. "She's working, she's looking at schools. All of a sudden she has zero transportation."
The community of older adults who were stripped of their catalytic converters on multiple occasions: "A new catalytic converter was $2,995," said resident Marv Slager. "We're seniors 60 and over and we're on a fixed income, so having to fix something like that is just devastating for us," said his neighbor, Connie Pope.
And Stephen Stauffer, whose Englewood fleet of box trucks and vans was incapacitated overnight, in a story I wrote: "We're given black eyes in life randomly. 'Well, that sucks. Now what?' You regroup and charge forward."
RELATED: Volunteers Donate Time To Protect Drivers From Catalytic Converter Theft
Nobody wants to be a part of this group. Nobody who is in it, asked to be.
So, since I (and the rest of the commuting public) cannot count on the criminals being caught and held responsible, it's my (our) behavior that has to change.
So it will.
With any luck, that will be enough to avoid this firsthand experience a second time.
