Estimating the number of U.S. vehicles stolen for export using crime location quotients

Introduction Motor vehicle theft (MVT) is perhaps the least studied of all Uniform Crime Report (UCR) index crimes (Clarke and Harris, 1992; Walsh and Taylor, 2007). The most complex and least understood of its many varieties is the theft of vehicles for export. This is a worldwide problem (Clarke and Brown, 2003), but in the U.S. it appears to consist of two main varieties: • vehicles stolen and driven across the Mexican and Canadian borders; • vehicles shipped overseas on ferries or on larger vessels. No studies have been published on the second problem, but some research has examined theft for export across the U.S.-Mexico border, including the organization of vehicle theft operations (Resendiz, 1998), the types of vehicles most likely to be targeted (Field et al., 1991; Miller, 1987), and prevention efforts in border communities (Ethridge and Sorensen, 1993; Plouffe and Sampson, 2004).