Having lived, in the past five years, in Seattle, in a Seattle exurb, in a small city well north of Seattle (Bellingham), and now in London, I can say that this is just a problem -- not a Seattle problem, and urban problem, or a US problem. We had people prowling our secure parking garage in my Seattle condo building; my exurb house was in a development where summer days brought the smell of cow manure in through the open windows, but barely a week went by without cars being prowled; Bellingham is a college town and has had property crime issues for decades; and obviously London has loads of thefts and robberies, with a recent trend being masked robbers on motorcycles and scooters snatching phones from people's hands on the streets.

Everybody thinks this is a local problem, but the reality is that, in developed nations, property crime is quite strongly correlated with wealth inequality[1], which has been growing in most of the western world for the past couple of decades.

1. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/crime#:~:text=The%20link%20betw....

I don't know. I lived in a wealthy suburb outside San Diego and did not experience this problem (I used to leave my keys in my car with the car unlocked, which was obviously moronic but never caused me any problems), and I lived briefly in SF where it was substantially worse.