Senate Passes Senator Wiener Bills to Crack Down on Car Break-ins
SACRAMENTO – The Senate passed Senator Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) Senate Bill 905, which eliminates the “locked door loophole,” a senseless barrier to holding auto burglars accountable. SB 905 is part of the Senate’s Safer California Plan, a bipartisan legislative effort to address the fentanyl crisis and combat retail theft and community-based crime. The bill passed 38-0 and heads next to the Assembly, where it must pass by August 31.
“The level of auto burglary in California is unacceptable, and we need to remove senseless barriers to tackling it,” said Senator Wiener. “I’m grateful to Pro Tem McGuire for his leadership in advancing the Safer California Plan, a bold vision for improving public safety that tackles this critical issue in line with our values. The locked door loophole is a senseless and outdated provision of law and I look forward to working in the Assembly to eliminate it.”
Auto break-ins have long been a vexing problem in San Francisco, and despite recent progress by city officials reducing the number of break-ins, they remain a problem.
One barrier to consistent, effective enforcement is the locked door loophole. Under current law, convicting a suspect of auto burglary requires that prosecutors prove not just that the person entered the vehicle without permission or did so forcibly but also that the vehicle was locked. The mere fact that a window was broken is insufficient — prosecutors must prove that the door was locked, which requires that victims must physically come to court to testify as such. This requirement can sabotage clear cases of guilt, particularly for situations where someone is visiting San Francisco and is not going to return just to testify that they locked the car door.
SB 905 eliminates this needless requirement; instead, forcible entry will be sufficient to prove the crime of auto burglary, which may be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony.
As amended, the bill will also address the problem of organized resale of goods stolen from cars. Auto burglars seek valuable items such as laptops, cameras, and cell phones and then resell them. Under the bill, individuals could be prosecuted for holding more than $950 of stolen goods intended for resale, whether those goods were stolen in one or multiple incidents, and whether the individual played the role of thief, middleman, or seller.
Senator Wiener previously authored similar legislation: in 2019, Senate Bill 23 died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, and in 2018, Senate Bill 916 died in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
SB 905 is sponsored by the Office of San Francisco Mayor London Breed. Read more about SB 905 here.
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