Surrey, B.C., woman calls for change after catching catalytic converter thieves in the act
A Surrey woman who recorded video of thieves stealing a catalytic converter from her truck in broad daylight is calling on the city and local scrap yards to keep better records as a deterrent to these types of thefts.
In the video, a man can be seen getting up from beside the truck. The woman recording shouts "excuse me," but the man doesn't answer, instead running to a car parked on the street. He can be seen carrying a power saw and a large metal part from the truck's undercarriage.
The driver of the parked vehicle gets out and shouts something that's unintelligible on the recording. Then he and the man with the saw get in the car - a black Ford sedan with no rear licence plate visible - and drive away quickly.
The woman who recorded the video - who asked CTV News to refer to her as Megan and withhold her last name out of concern for her safety - described what happened in the lead-up to it.
She said she happened to look out the window of her Guildford home and notice the black car driving slowly up the street.
"What I found odd as I was looking in the car was both the guys were staring right at my house and they both had sunglasses on, and they both had masks on, and they were just staring at my house," Megan said.
"I said, 'That's weird,' and I saw the car go and it was lost behind my truck, from my view, and it didn’t come out (on) the other side of the truck, so therefore it would have had to stop on the road."
She stepped out onto her patio to see what was going on, and saw "a shadow" moving toward her truck, then she heard the sound of the saw starting up.
"I knew that was happening," Megan said. "So, my intention was to grab my phone, have that on hopefully for protection, right? And then basically be as loud as I possibly can to stop it before it happens, so they don’t take my converter."
As seen in the video, the thieves were not deterred by Megan's presence, and carried on with their brazen act.
"The driver got out of the car, which was, for me, the most terrifying part," she said. "He was obviously very angry. I don’t know if you can hear it in the video, but there was, you know, swearing and such and just his body language was what scared me the most."
Catalytic converters are part of a vehicle's exhaust system. They've become a target for thieves in recent years because of the precious metals they contain, as well as the relative ease and speed with which they can be removed from a parked vehicle.
Megan estimated it only took about 30 seconds for the thief to remove the part from her truck.
"That was the most shocking part to me: that it was done so brazenly," she said. "I think the thought was they were just in and out as quickly as they were, and, 'It doesn’t matter if someone’s home, by the time they get downstairs we’ll be gone.'"
She said she'd like to see cities across the Lower Mainland require scrap yards to check ID whenever someone attempts to sell a catalytic converter, and then share that information with police regularly.
At the provincial level, such transactions are regulated under the Metal Dealers and Recycling Act, which was passed in 2011 and regulates some metals - including copper wire - but not catalytic converters.
Last year, Alberta closed a similar loophole in its provincial law.
When CTV News Vancouver asked the Ministry of Public Safety about changing the law in July, the ministry said in a statement that it would “continue to work with police and assess the responsiveness of current legislative, enforcement and program tools to deal with emergent criminal trends.”
So far, no changes to the law have been made.
As for the theft from Megan's truck, Surrey RCMP say they have an ongoing investigation into the case and are "following up on several leads" in hopes of identifying the suspects.
"We encourage anyone who has information on the two suspects depicted in the video to call Surrey RCMP," a spokesperson said in an email to CTV News.
Megan said she's hoping the attention her video has garnered will lead to action, and that she plans to petition officials at the municipal level to do something to address the issue in Surrey.
"I know it's never going to go away because it’s a valuable item and, you know, that’s the world we live in, but I feel like if we can slow it down or save some families from going through this, then I think that’s important," she said.
With files from CTV News Vancouver's David Molko
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