Cat-Scam

August 14, 2023 12:53 PM

Yet the case still might have fizzled if not for the presence, in Tulsa’s Riverside Street Crimes Unit, of an officer with the improbable name Kansas Core ... the cat racket was hardly a choice assignment. “There’s this ‘We don’t care about catalytic converters, because it’s a property crime’ ” camp at the department, Staggs says. “It’s not a sexy crime. It’s not the robberies and the homicides.” When the previous commander gave Core the case, it wasn’t exactly hazing, but it wasn’t far off. “I’m pretty sure that lieutenant basically was like, ‘Core, you’re the up-and-coming guy,’ ” Staggs says. “ ‘Your last name is Core, and all the criminals call these cores. Here you go.’ ” from How Tulsa cops brought down a $500 million catalytic converter crime ring [Bloomberg; ungated]
posted by chavenet (28 comments total)

That's fantastic - I had mine stolen and it was soooo expensive to replace.
posted by tiny frying pan at 2:06 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Honestly, metal thieves of all varieties are just a scourge on society, and it seems like for the most part, cops don't give a f**k. Good on this guy for not being a normal cop.
posted by jferg at 2:12 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]

→ It’s not a sexy crime

Not to the public, but to a police department, cash-heavy crimes like these are gold. Where does all the money seized go? To the PD, and it stays in the PD.
posted by scruss at 2:54 PM on August 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I feel like there's also a missed opportunity here for car manufacturers to design to tuck their catalytic converters away better. My hybrid is less of a target because it's a pain to get to the cat.

It's not like this is a new issue.
posted by emjaybee at 3:05 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Emjaybee, what kind of hybrid do you have, because the cat was stolen off my 2009 Prius twice in three years, including after we put in a shield to make it harder to get to, which it apparently wasn’t.
posted by lhauser at 3:09 PM on August 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I feel like there's also a missed opportunity here for car manufacturers to design to tuck their catalytic converters away better.

That’s a hard ask. Manufacturers already have to economize the use of the space underneath the car - there’s a lot of stuff that needs to go there and not a lot of space. Exhaust systems, including the catalytic converter, run *extremely* hot. There just aren’t a lot of good places to tuck them away.
posted by azpenguin at 3:17 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Obligatory: I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their pickups, or why.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 3:27 PM on August 14, 2023 [15 favorites]

From generation 4 onward, the catalytic converter is a lot harder to remove in Prius cars.

The earlier Prius' catalytic converters were easy to cut out and more valuable because they tended to have more precious metals (platinum) and got used less(because hybrids don't use the engine as often).
posted by eye of newt at 3:32 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

I say we nudge the cat thieves towards self driving taxis and and see what happens.
posted by loquacious at 3:44 PM on August 14, 2023 [13 favorites]

Not to the public, but to a police department, cash-heavy crimes like these are gold.

My extended family was recently in an uproar over the recovery of a relative's stolen vehicle. There was much shock and horror that...
a) relative had to figure out themselves that the car was in a towyard in [city];
b) relative had to pay towyard a ton of money to get the stolen car back;
c) [city] police knew it was there for days and said they'd called [town] police about it;
d) [town] police said their call records showed that This Was A Lie;
but most of the furor centered on how
e) the car was full of other people's stolen stuff and the police did not want to look at it, much less try to return it to the proper owners.

"There are hundreds of other victims out there! Someone should do something! Maybe you should go to the papers!"
I was shocked, then amused, then exhausted by this because... what's in it for the police. Whether or not an individual police officer takes "protect and service" seriously and at face value, the departments have other priorities. There's no money in tracking people down and returning their stuff. There's no real money in finding the specific people who do "little" opportunistic crimes. It's just not a priority.

But I wonder, how'd they all so seriously think the police were gonna help?
posted by Baethan at 3:50 PM on August 14, 2023 [14 favorites]

Loved the McLaren with the GD3 EA6 plates.
posted by shenkerism at 4:20 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

great read, thanks for posting
posted by glonous keming at 4:37 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

This makes me think about the guy I once interviewed who worked in scrap metal. I wonder if he dealt in this stuff.
posted by limeonaire at 4:51 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Get an EV and you wont worry about your cat. Or gas prices.

Just saying
posted by Windopaene at 4:54 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

“I call him Logan because I ain’t calling no grown man Lovin.”
The way the author uses this theme of names to anchor characters is enjoyable and effective. I've already forgotten the speaker's name because he's no Brad Staggs or Kansas Core, but the idea of "ain't calling no grown man Lovin" alone gives you quite the impression.
It's a really fascinating way of writing, maybe because I tend to forget names but some of these I'm remembering--and personalities to go with!

is kansascore a regional subset of prairiecore
posted by Baethan at 4:56 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also: It's rare to find an article so thoroughly reported from almost solely police sources. This is interesting, but police sourcing in journalism remains highly problematic. The logistics of investigating this sort of high-volume racketeering are interesting, and I myself had my catalytic converter stolen and potentially replaced with another stolen one (I didn't know the replacement's provenance), but that's still something to keep in mind.
posted by limeonaire at 4:57 PM on August 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

People think the police will help because they are conditioned to think so by repeated exposure to the idea that they will, including but not limited to the fact that some cop cars literally have "To Protect And To Serve" written on the side. Also, sometimes the police do help people- they have helped me twice- as long as it doesn't require risk or work.

If your cat gets cut, it would be nice if you could just replace it with a length of pipe. Unfortunately that is likely to bugger the EGR system and make the car run poorly.

I assume that thieves would use a "sawzall" tool instead of an angle grinder, as it's faster and would not make sparks. Also they don't care about preserving the flanges on the other pipes to which the cat is connected, so instead of cutting through tool steel they are just cutting pipe walls.

Ugh. Cars suck. Catalytic converters were never anything but a band-aid to a stupid problem we brought on ourselves collectively through laziness and cupidity. Electric cars and alcohol-burners don't need cats, and everyone who says those vehicles are "impractical" are ignoring the massive impracticality of cars in general.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 7:34 PM on August 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Electric cars and alcohol-burners don't need cats, and everyone who says those vehicles are "impractical" are ignoring the massive impracticality of cars in general.

Ethanol might burn "clean" but the way it's produced in the United States generates 40 percent more pollution per gallon than gasoline.
posted by jordantwodelta at 8:07 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ugh. Cars suck. Catalytic converters were never anything but a band-aid to a stupid problem we brought on ourselves collectively through laziness and cupidity

I don't want your stupid oxides of nitrogen killing me, thanks. So take this chemically* illiterate nonsense away from here.

*well, in terms of all efficient combustion in air making NOₓ; it's biological nonsense to say that NOₓ is not harmful.
posted by ambrosen at 8:18 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Pro tip: Park over a puddle.
posted by fairmettle at 3:50 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Friends of my parents confronted a cat thief going at their car in broad daylight in front of their house here in Portland and had a gun pulled on them.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:15 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

From jail, he’d been captured on a recorded phone line asking his parents to drive out to the warehouse and remove any incriminating evidence.

Not just evil, but dumb.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:18 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

The glib "uh just get electric cars" attitude here is pretty dismissive. When you're broke and suddenly the thing you need to get to your job is rendered unusable because of crime that advice feels pretty shitty. I know multiple people who had this happen to them and a few of them lost their jobs because of it.
posted by Ferreous at 9:46 AM on August 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

Thanks for sharing; that was a fascinating read; that reporter had some great touches to show (and not tell) the issues of the story.

I wonder how was DG able to pay more for converters than competing scrapyards: Was it because DG had a direct connection (and fewer middlemen, compared to other scrap processors) with the PMG refiner in Burlington? Did the PMG pay more because DG gave them such a large quantity?
DG's "decanning machines" and overall operations were more efficient (than competitors) ?
posted by fizzix at 9:48 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hippybear, if you think foreign wars for oil, crippling road-repair bills, and CO and NOx poisoning are more "practical" than animal husbandry, I question your view of practicality. It's not a god-given right to travel at 50+ mph.

Others: I never claimed either that ethanol "burns clean" nor that it pollutes less that gasoline. I stated that neither ethanol burners nor electric cars benefit from catalytic converters. Maybe I was wrong about the ethanol burners- I'm a mechanic and not a chemical engineer. None of the very few ethanol burners I've been under had cats. If you are that worried about NOx emissions, maybe ethanol burners are not where you should focus your attention, as there are relatively very few of them compared to gas burners without cats.

Do I really need to state that the problem for which catalytic converters are a "bandaid" isn't merely NOx emissions but the stupid practice of individual rich jerks flinging themselves around at 30+ mph in 2-ton steel boxes, only to have to come to an asbestos-belching stop, over and over again, to avoid killing someone, because they are in the middle of a fucking city? Cars suck and are stupid. Yes, farmers have a use case for big dumb pickup trucks, but there don't need to be 500 million of those. There never needed to be that many motor vehicles. Consumer culture removed several mountain tops and drained a bunch of shale to make shiny garbage and pump crap into the air. Peoples' knee-jerk, defensive, bad-faith arguments to the contrary, this was a bad thing to do. Putting catalytic converters on cars did not and does not solve the problems caused by cars.

It's embarrassing that, in the futuristic year 2023, I still have to explain these things.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 11:11 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

“Electric cars and alcohol-burners don't need cats, and everyone who says those vehicles are "impractical" are ignoring the massive impracticality of cars in general.”

Or maybe they acknowledge that and don’t want any more impracticality? For instance many electric auto companies expect you to be able to charge at home. If you live in an apartment, you can’t do that unless they have an on-site charging station which is uncommon.
posted by Selena777 at 11:14 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you are that worried about NOx emissions

I am. Which is why I'm angry my city only has emissions charging for commercial vehicles, not cars.
posted by ambrosen at 11:57 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

That was a really, really interesting article, chavenet - really well written, and very engaging.

Thank you so much for posting it, chavenet!
posted by kristi at 4:28 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]