It takes just 15 minutes of scouring a few adjacent parking lots in Schaumburg [Illinois] to find five sitting targets.
Perched above the dashboard, GPS devices spied in vehicles in parking lots outside a health club and office building are prime picking for smash-and-grab thieves.
Tapping into satellites, global positioning system devices have been a boon for drivers.
But as they have grown more affordable and increasingly common, they also have become more prone to theft. The portable units range in price from about $200 to more than $1,000.
Schaumburg police Sgt. John Nebl drove a reporter in a crime enforcement van to tour a few area parking lots on a recent weekday morning.
His mission: To show just how common it is for people to leave out GPS devices despite police warnings to hide them.
“It’s just as simple as driving through a parking lot and looking in people’s windows,” Nebl says from behind the wheel. “It takes all of 10 seconds to grab it and walk away.”
Schaumburg police alone logged 21 reports of stolen GPS devices in the first two weeks of May. Des Plaines police took reports of five thefts in a single day, May 27.
Parking lots for apartments, hotels and shopping centers are the popular prowling grounds, Nebl said.
Other suburban police departments are seeing the same trend.
While CDs and police radar detectors used to be the “it” thing for car thieves, now it’s more about laptop computers, GPS devices and satellite radio portable units.
“People need to exercise a little more common sense. They should secure it and other valuables,” Naperville police Cmdr. Dave Hoffman said. “Oftentimes, the damage to the car is more than the items stolen.”
With summer approaching, Buffalo Grove police spokesman Todd Kupsak said it’s a good time to remind people to remove both the device and its holder when…