Entrapment or Smart Policing? Using Bait Cars to Catch Career Criminals

FORT WORTH, Texas – It's nearly midnight on a dark stretch of freeway on the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas. A pickup truck has been sitting by the side of the road for several hours, apparently broken down. The bed contains some high-end lawn equipment. 

From all appearances, some hard-working landscaper must have had a pretty bad day. But it's about to get worse.

A  car stops behind the vehicle and the driver decides to help himself to a valuable yard trimmer in the back of the pickup.

Several miles away, an undercover police detective gets a text message. Moments later, he's on the move.

A tracker embedded in the trimmer is signaling the location of the thief, and police soon track it to a home halfway across town. With permission from the homeowner, they search the premises and find the trimmer and take the thief into custody.  A background check reveals a lengthy criminal history spanning decades and nearly 60 prior arrests – the kind of career criminal police often see in cases like this one.

It's a nuisance most people will confront at some point in their lives – burglary of a motor vehicle. Even if you haven't been robbed, anyone who pays for car insurance is affected as rates increase to cover the rising cost of these crimes.

But the insurance industry is partnering with police departments across the country to deter auto burglary and theft and is seeing tangible results. Here in Fort Worth it's known as the COBRA program.

Taking Career Criminals Off the Street

Jerry Allen is a liaison between the Fort Worth Police Department and the National Insurance Crime Bureau, a non-profit organization funded by the insurance industry.

"They're trying to reduce insurance fraud; they're trying to reduce paying claims obviously that they don't have to pay if we can take these guys off the street," Allen told CBN News. "If they don't have to pay claims, obviously that reflects on lower premiums for the American people."

Law enforcement wants to reduce crime. "By taking these people off the street, we are preventing them from committing other crimes on a daily basis," Allen said.

The day CBN News was there, the operation started by looking at a heat map of high-crime areas around the city. From that map, officers decide where to deploy more than a dozen bait cars. They were short-staffed so I (Chuck Holton) got to go along and help with a drop.

The car I drove to the drop-off location was made to look as realistic as possible. There was trash on the floor and a laptop computer in a case on the seat. My role was to follow the officers to the drop site and then just pull over and get out of the car, leave it running and just walk away.

"By doing this, law enforcement's able to put vehicles and property out for potential thieves, giving them the ability to steal a city vehicle and city property instead of a citizen's property," Allen explained.

Detective JC Harter added, "If they hit mine and they get put in jail then they're not going to hit somebody else's."

Hi-Tech Means for Catching Old-Fashioned Thieves

Detective Harter helped start the COBRA unit in Fort Worth more than a decade ago and has helped to develop many of the technologies used in the program, making it one of the most successful program of its kind.  

"Bait cars is just a different tool to catch people that don't normally get caught." Harter said.

"We use small micro-type trackers and we hide them very well. When the items are being tracked, we are on a website watching a GPS map and then we send officers out to find it and we give them a location, the traveling location of the property," Harter explained.

Most of the vehicles used by the COBRA unit are donated by insurance companies through the National Insurance Crime Bureau.

After a few hours of putting vehicles out around the city, the garage is empty and police simply wait. Each one of the bait cars is equipped with multiple, tiny cameras. They're almost impossible to see, but they record everything that goes on in and around the vehicle.

Answering Accusations of 'Entrapment'

Sometimes people have a problem with using this method, saying it seems a little like entrapment. But these cops disagree. That's because people who burglarize cars are often the same criminals responsible for a host of other crimes.

"They always have the ability to pass that vehicle up, just like you or I would, and go home," Allen said.

"You can see why the insurance industry would have a vested interest in stopping, or mitigating, auto theft, auto burglary," he added. "They are paying out large dollars that are in the end being passed on to the consumer."

"What kind of society would I want my children to live in? We would rather them steal our vehicle then steal your vehicle," Harter said.

The program has been very successful. Since its inception, the Fort Worth COBRA unit has made more than 1,400 arrests.

"Hopefully, the criminals know that we have bait cars out there, so they might think twice about getting into a vehicle that looks too good to be true," Harter said.

"These guys are out there every day working for you and me – usually in the middle of the night," Allen said. "They work under cover to reduce auto theft, to reduce crime in your neighborhoods, and I've never been more proud working with an organization like the Fort Worth Police Department.