With over 15,000 car break-ins since January, it’s not new for San Franciscans to be, or know, a victim of an auto burglary. If they live in a tourist area, it is even more likely they have watched from their windows as thieves arrive in stolen cars, by daylight, breaking windows, grabbing the vehicle’s contents and speeding away to do it again.

A crime heat map of San Francisco shows numbers of auto burglaries between January and July 2023. (SFPD via Bay City News)

With a goal of finding new avenues to address the epidemic, Supervisor Dean Preston called a public hearing of the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee on Thursday.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.