Why thieves love to steal catalytic converters

I'm privileged enough that if someone puts my car out of service, I can swear gratuitously, call my boss to tell him that I'll be late to work, and get a rental while my insurance handles my car. As frustrated as I might be, it's not a life-and-death situation for me.

By contrast, Jimbo the night-shift line cook at Waffle House has significantly less margin for error. If he doesn't show up to work, he at best doesn't get paid and at worst gets fired. If he gets fired, he's now behind on his rent, plus he has to fix his car with money he doesn't have. He might need to take out a payday loan, or sell something important, or borrow money from family who is just as poor as he is.

With this in mind, I'm not going to say that Jimbo is morally justified in whacking a criddler who's messing with his car, but I'm not going to say he's not, either.

You see the same thing in action with immigrant-owned bodegas. It's just entries on a spreadsheet to Walgreens and CVS, but that's rent and food to Mr. and Mrs. Kim's family, and it's not surprising that they're significantly more inclined toward the shotgun-and-bat approach to loss prevention.

First of all, they are ready to damage your property to the point where it puts your life in imminent danger. A car without the converter might still drive, maybe with a light on the dashboard and a loud noise, while ejecting hot exhaust gases under the passenger section and straight towards the fuel tank. Some diesel cars periodically inject unburned fuel to clean the filter at temperature over 900K. A fire in the passenger section is a distinct possibility, but imagine even just the panic response of someone who thinks they are on fire while running on the freeway.

So whoever is interfering with the safety of your car already has little regard for your life.

Secondly, they are risking a long prison sentence for something that's worth a few days of unskilled labor. So they have decided they won't even spare a few days of their life for the value they can steal in 10 minutes - let alone years in prison. If caught in the act, they will most certainly not put their tools down and say "Oh, you got me, darn, I guess we need to call the police now". They are by definition ready for violence, and they WILL use force against whomever attempts to retain them.

So a law abiding individual has a choice between confronting a violent criminal, by all accounts ready to kill them, and not protecting their property. It's a violent blackmail, and one solution, unless we want everybody's catalitic converter to be stolen, is to balance the violence disequilibrium and make it much more riskier for the thieves.

In the USA there is what in known as the castle doctrine. If someone tries to break into your home you may defend your home no different than a lord defending a castle. Pouring boiling oil on their soldiers scaling your walls ... Or more appropriately the modern equivalent action with your AR-15.

Texas goes one step further, they allow you to use force to protect your property from nightime theft or criminal mischief. It's not about retaliation, it's a matter of protecting what is your property.

"Property and freedom are the past and future of a human life"

People invest nontrivial amounts of their life into the acquisition of property. The theft of property is a theft of that proportion of their life. All you need is a sufficient punitive multiplier to said theft, or a sufficiently valuable item stolen, before lethal force becomes an option in said moral calculus.

Where I am, theft is punished severely, thus I see no need to take things into my own hands. The social contract is that the state handles such crime, and in response citizens forgo vigilantism. If repeated thefts of my property were met with no response, or a consistently ineffective response, you'd probably see a very different reaction from me.

Generally speaking, it works just like it works everywhere else--we don't execute people on the street. We sometimes have the legal grounds to use lethal force in defense of our safety or that of our property (rarely, but apparently in Texas), and we very rarely choose to actually use it.

Intrinsic morals don't have a whole lot to do with laws.

People who do wrong should be punished. Otherwise, they will continue to do wrong. The wrongdoers, most likely, aren't going get prosecuted by the relevant government officials and the police aren't going to investigate. The best way I have to punish them and prevent further crimes upon the area in which I and my friends and family live and work is to use a gun, as this is quick, highly punishing, can be explained by self-defense, and used with minimal danger to myself.

https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._penal_code_section_9....

IANAL, but it seems you can shoot someone in Texas for stealing your catalytic convertor if you "reasonably believe the deadly force is immediately necessary" and the catalytic convertor "cannot be protected or recovered by any other means."

I'm not american but I agree with his views. Being the victim of a break-in, I want nothing more than to cave in the fucker's skull with a metal rod to this day. These people will continue to get away with it ad infinitum unless someone teaches them a lesson. It makes me so irrationally angry that it's among the top 3 issues when I'm voting.

If the police won't do anything about this issue who will?

It is not about execution or killing someone. In fact, the very first thing I was taught in the CHL class - never think about shooting someone as killing someone, but rather as "stopping them". In the court, such a small detail of intent will matter.

The idea of letting shooting someone who is stealing at night is again - stopping them, because otherwise in nighttime it will be nearly impossible to find them (hence limitation of night time).

I don't hear many cases like that. It is certainly not widespread. People are given a right, but not a requirement to stop criminals stealing property.

These thefts mostly effect poorer people who are least able to absorb the loss, for someone of my income, it's an inconvenience, for a poor person, it may knock them back down the economic ladder.

Something to note, the US existed in a space for much of its existence particularly out here in the West, where the nearest law enforcement might be hours away, where I am in my county, the county seat is a half a days ride by horse - and our county is a PLSS county, so its not particularly large, they get larger - because of that, we have a permissive culture in allowing people to defend themselves and their property from others, because once its gone, you will likely never get it back again. This only changed with the invention of the automobile and the two way radio, but the culture was formed before that, and culture adapts to technology slowly.

Many Texans conceptualize government and state uses of force (ie prosecution that can lead to imprisonment) as restrictions on their rights. This "negative rights" conceptualization is pretty common in the US, but especially common in Texas.

In the specific case of using deadly force to prevent somebody from stealing your property at night, the idea is something like the following. Absent any government intervention, you have a "property right" which allows you to prevent the thief from taking the property. In some cases, the balance of public policy concerns should lean in favor of government restrictions on this property right, to protect potentially innocent people or to prevent nonviolent criminals from dying, or to sustain an orderly justice system without vigilantes.

However, many Texans believe that the government should not intervene in this case because the restriction on an individual's right to protect his/her property is more important than the other policy goals.

Like I said, this is just my attempt to articulate the way I'd guess many Texans feel about this. I don't necessarily agree with all of the above.

It's like a spectrum: on the one hand we have countries like Singapore, where all the laws and the people they apply to are the same pretty much anywhere you go, and on the other hand we have loose multi-national confederations like the E.U. where laws change significantly, but there are some generalities.

A U.S. state is much more like a country in the E.U. than the U.S. is like a country in the E.U. Further, there are huge differences in the makeup of populations in different parts of the United States, in terms of economic stratification, ethnicity, race, education, and most importantly local culture.

As for intruding into my house, you are going to be killed if I see you. I have a 13 year old daughter to protect and there is no debating why you are in my house uninvited.

How do you feel that your lack of action with an intruder may have emboldened the criminal to do it again? Maybe next time the home owner gets hurt, raped, killed, or has to watch a loved one get hurt, raped, or killed.

I respect that you see things differently than I do, but you come across as someone who does not respect other's views and would restrict those if possible.

From another perspective, why should you value the life of a person more than said person values his own, e.g. why would I value your life, as clearly you value it less than you do the parts on my car, or items in my house?

When society permits people to hold you hostage via your "superior morals", so they can take advantage of you, your work, your family etc, isn't this a major breakdown?

Consider the (stupid IMHO) duty to retreat laws in some places. You are locked inside your safe place, your home, or your car, likely with your family. A person decides they want your property, or possibly your life. And these laws require you to retreat, to possibly vacate your home or car, pulling your family out of harms way if you can. Because these bad people are what? Misguided?

In some sense, it’s implicit in the concept of self-defense. As others have pointed out, property crime is not automatically a victimless crime. You aren’t really obligated to execute criminals in the commission of a such crime. The purpose of the law is mainly to preclude an uninformed assessment (or malicious assumption by a prosecutor) of e.g. “she was just stealing a catalytic converter, she didn’t mean any harm” which implicitly excludes the exposure of harm to the property owner, whether immediate or consequent. The perpetrator is actually a predator, an outlaw who views others as prey and imagines an entitlement to theft.

We put up with outlaws to a certain degree for "minor crimes", but the specific law is founded on the the premise that the outlaw predator is significantly ill-intentioned and potentially violent. The assumption is the thief is committing a crime with potentially serious consequences to the victim or proximate others. It’s not always obvious in the moment that such a criminal attempting a disengagement is incapable of or has no intent of further harming the victim.

There are capital crimes where it is obviously clear that great harm is prevented by killing the perpetrator caught in the act, but predators are willing to push the boundaries to obscure the issue for other crimes. Thus the people of the State of Texas (from whom government authority flows) decided to clarify it.

With respect to the benefit to society, diminishing the class of people who prey upon others specifically when they’re caught in harmful acts is often viewed in Texas (and by many Americans) as a social good and moral responsibility. You are not obligated to participate if you think it repugnant, but obviously predators caught in the act can’t be relied upon to be bound by your concerns, or sense of morality, or by laws.

We used to hang horse thieves and for the same reason. Theft of someone's transportation is a serious matter. It's not about the theft itself, or the 'auto parts' it's about depriving someone of their ability to be employed. To feed their families and themselves. To maintain their residence.

These are not small things. Try to take these from another and there is a common law right to stop that theft by force if necessary. Choices have consequences.

This is a peculiarity of Texas property law. It would not be legal in the other 49 states. It's a relic of cattle rustling in the 19th century, when the population density of Texas was too low to properly police and its primary industry required more protection than could be afforded by local law enforcement.

As opposed to, someone who does a bad thing is a person in a bad situation and society should help them.

I don't understand how people can just handwave away this stuff. I would genuinely rather have my arm broken than my bike/phone stolen. My arm will heal in a few weeks, but my bike won't.

After the civil rights era, southern democrats were politically isolated and ended up in a coalition with western resource people (oil, big agriculture, etc). This coalition ended up as this thing that focuses on a few key, hardened issues like “low taxes”, abortion and guns.

Nobody likes taxes, but the farmers and the resource people hate taxes as it is just an overhead. So you end up with these weird scenarios where small farmers passionately support a platform that puts them out of business.

Guns are another similar issue. Gun companies made a FUD business model in the 90s about the “government is taking your guns” that was very impactful on rural folk and eventually became a mainstream thing.

When you architect a political movement around fear and grievance, you create a culture of aggrieved people who thing “they” are coming to get them.

If you gamble with your life, you're bound to lose eventually, and I just struggle to feel sympathy for those who knowingly ruin their own lives with full conscience of the consequences.

I have the right to defend my property.

I would guess that many Texans who support the use of deadly force in this situation accept this difference. Personally I feel there should be no death penalty, but also believe individuals should generally be allowed to use deadly force to protect themselves and their property. I'm worried about cases or mistaken identity or collateral damage, but that should be an empirical question rather than one of justice.

whoa, easy there fella! Don't go giving this guy any more zanny ideas. He'll call another special session just for it (no governor has called this many). The wackier the idea, the better he'll like it.

I live in a neighboring state and we get a lot of Texan tourists. You can't get them to honor a stop sign or even drive on the right side of the road with anything less than the threat of deadly force. It's utterly exhausting.

edit: in the interest of a having worthwhile discussion, let me acknowledge that there's an over-generalization here. Sorry about that. But, in the interest of valuing expertise, let's also keep in mind that Texas has to be experienced to be understood.

"turned livable, attractive cities into dangerous slums." Weird as I have not seen housing prices slump in value, they just keeping getting more costly.

These criminals are also not helpless victims - they are most typically lazy bandits who are breaking down society when they could very easily go get one of the millions of jobs available today and make an honest living through hard work - like the rest of us. If these people want to operate outside what a just society requires, then we need real, harsh consequences so that we have an effective deterrent that will put an end to this. Citizens being able to defend their property without expensive or time-consuming legal complications seems like a great way to have a distributed policing force at no cost, to uphold the very laws that our society has already put on the books.

See 9.42: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.9.htm#9.42

Not easy, just easier.

Pinpointing those companies that see large growth in an old, competitive or low-margin industry, is a risk-indicator that allows you to filter out many companies and investigate only a few. Seeing that some are selling large fractions of palladium, is a risk-indicator.

Appearing at these companies with fake offers to sell palladium, can give insight.

Requiring source-of-scrap forms to be filled in, can give a paper-trail that either leads somewhere, or is obviously fake and leads nowhere. If that happens routinely, licenses could be revoked.

Don't get me wrong, none of this solves the issue and none of it is easy. It'll always be a cat and mouse game. AML regulations have shown to be quite ineffective at rooting out the problem, it's very much alive and kicking and perhaps even bigger than ever. Yet it seems also obvious that, much, much more money laundering would be happening in absence of any such regulations. Regulations can be helpful without solving the entire problem, if well designed (AML is very much a clusterfuck for example).

Yes, the creation of a regulation with a civil (cash) and personal (imprisonment) penalty is required in order to create enforcement actions. Then you load up a van full of Catalytic converters and drive to metal places and offer to sell them, if they accept, they arrest who ever accepted and seize assets of the owning entity.

Eg. signed ownership document for every catalytic converter on premises (scrap yards,...), with a written 'source' - eg, removed from car with VIN 123...789, or replaced on care with VIN 123...789 with a proof of purchase of a new one (i'm guessing it's illegal to drive without one).

It's a pain in the ass to implement, but could work.

This kind of regulation already exists for pawn shops. Just expand it to cover more types of items and businesses.

Perhaps similar to pawn shops, which (I think) have to keep records of who sold you what. If you are a smelter, you should be able to account for where you get certain expensive metals that you are on-selling.

Sure, work to ensure prosperity. But don’t let that stop you from implementing faster, more tractable solutions.

To a large extent this is organized crime. These are not thefts of desperation caused by poverty, and the thefts are not perpetrated by individuals stealing one or two catalytic converters at a time. There are crews of thieves stealing dozens of converters in a night and selling them in bulk to unscrupulous purchasers.

[1] - https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/scie...

Some models even have a heater to get the catalyst working quickly after a cold start.

The article does suggest that bombé is made from conventional drugs and basically cut with converter residue, so perhaps the residue slightly modifies its chemistry. Or it might do nothing at all; I'd be surprised if there's been a blind study comparing the effects of bombé made with cat residue to the same made with, say, clay.

https://www.naopv.com/

Fascinating! I had not head of this before, and if that is in fact what you were involved in, good on ya.

The opposite is the black rat sticker: https://www.bennetts.co.uk/bikesocial/news-and-views/feature...

A better solution would be to add more surveillance sensors. Unfortunately this drives up the cost for people looking to protect their property.

I had my catalytic converter stolen as a college student, and it was a huge pain in the ass. Not to mention costly at the time to replace.

People from ZA tell me people there actually boobytrap their vehicles[1] and some carry flame throwers when they go on the road. That was a few yeasts ago and not sure if it’s still a thing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(flamethrower)

There are numerous catalytic converters for sale on Amazon around the $100 price point. If there’s $500 of rare metals inside, I think I’ll supplement my tech job and do a bunch of drop shipping from Amazon to a scrap metal place someplace.

Source I am a backyard mechanic who doesn't feel the need to be condescending to those who aren't.

He no longer drives a Prius.

Was in a nice part of Mountain View, CA

He's also done an attempt at getting the precious metals from the dust on the interstate

There is at least one case where this doesn't hold:

On a 3rd generation prius the coolant loops around the cat to warm up the engine faster, and the coolant will leak out if someone steals your cat. The engine would be destroyed pretty quickly if you run it without coolant I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

I would just straight pipe it if someone cut out my cats. Although, my cats have been dead for years, so I wonder if they would even get paid for them.

Turns out I've actually got a bunch of copper left over from the house too. I know it's just pocket change in the overall cost of a house, but feels like it'll be nice to get a little bit of cash back.