The technology-thwarting car thief has become as advanced as the cars themselves. As early as 1910 Americans recognized that cars were easy to steal and, once stolen, hard to find, especially since cars looked much alike. Model styles and colors eventually changed, but so did the means of making a stolen car disappear. Though changing license plates and serial numbers remain basic procedure, thieves have created highly sophisticated networks to disassemble stolen vehicles, distribute the parts, and/or ship the altered cars out of the country. Stealing cars has become as technologically advanced as the cars themselves. John A. Heitmann and Rebecca H. Morales’s study of automobile theft and culture examines a wide range of related topics that includes motives and methods, technological deterrents, place and space, institutional responses, international borders, and cultural reflections. Only recently have scholars begun to move their focus away from the creators and manufacturers of the automobile to its users. Stealing Cars illustrates the power of this approach, as it aims at developing a better understanding of the place of the automobile in the broad texture of American life. There are many who are fascinated by aspects of automobile history, but many more readers enjoy the topic of crime—motives, methods, escaping capture, and of course solving the crime and bringing criminals to justice. Stealing Cars brings together expertise from the history of technology and cultural history as well as city planning and transborder studies to produce a compelling and detailed work that raises questions concerning American priorities and values. Drawing on sources that include interviews, government documents, patents, sociological and psychological studies, magazines, monographs, scholarly periodicals, film, fiction, and digital gaming, Heitmann and Morales tell a story that highlights both human creativity and some of the paradoxes of American life.

The technology-thwarting car thief has become as advanced as the cars themselves. As early as 1910 Americans recognized that cars were easy to steal and, once stolen, hard to find, especially since cars looked much alike. Model styles and colors eventually changed, but so did the means of making a stolen car disappear. Though changing license plates and serial numbers remain basic procedure, thieves have created highly sophisticated networks to disassemble stolen vehicles, distribute the parts, and/or ship the altered cars out of the country. Stealing cars has become as technologically advanced as the cars themselves. John A. Heitmann and Rebecca H. Morales’s study of automobile theft and culture examines a wide range of related topics that includes motives and methods, technological deterrents, place and space, institutional responses, international borders, and cultural reflections. Only recently have scholars begun to move their focus away from the creators and manufacturers of the automobile to its users. Stealing Cars illustrates the power of this approach, as it aims at developing a better understanding of the place of the automobile in the broad texture of American life. There are many who are fascinated by aspects of automobile history, but many more readers enjoy the topic of crime—motives, methods, escaping capture, and of course solving the crime and bringing criminals to justice. Stealing Cars brings together expertise from the history of technology and cultural history as well as city planning and transborder studies to produce a compelling and detailed work that raises questions concerning American priorities and values. Drawing on sources that include interviews, government documents, patents, sociological and psychological studies, magazines, monographs, scholarly periodicals, film, fiction, and digital gaming, Heitmann and Morales tell a story that highlights both human creativity and some of the paradoxes of American life.

Fifteen-year-old, suburban high school student Kelleigh, who has her learner's permit, recounts how she began stealing cars one summer, for reasons that seem unclear even to her.

Stolen Cars is an innovative ethnography of urban inequalities and violence in São Paulo, Brazil. Organized around the journeys of five stolen cars, each chapter discusses a specific theme, such as the distinctions between violent robbery and the more commercial non-violent theft or the role of national borders interconnecting illegal and legal economies Provides an original theoretical framework for a rarely studied urban and transnational supply chain Draws from empirical data and a combination of different methodologies to demonstrate mechanisms of urban inequalities and violence reproduction Highlights how everyday life is entangled with structural urban transformations Uses an ethnographic narrative to show how urban development produce various forms of illegality and violent crime

The working class in New York City was remade in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1820s a substantial majority of city artisans were native-born; by the 1850s three-quarters of the city's laboring men and women were immigrants. How did the influx of this large group of young adults affect the city's working class? What determined the texture of working-class life during the antebellum period? Richard Stott addresses these questions as he explores the social and economic dimensions of working-class culture. Working-class culture, Stott maintains, is grounded in the material environment, and when work, population, consumption, and the uses of urban space change as rapidly as they did in the mid-nineteenth century, culture will be transformed. Using workers' first-person accounts--letters, diaries, and reminiscences--as evidence, and focusing on such diverse topics as neighborhoods, diet, saloons, and dialect, he traces the rise of a new, youth-oriented working-class culture. By illuminating the everyday experiences of city workers, he shows that the culture emerging in the 1850s was a culture clearly different from that of native-born artisans of an earlier period and from that of the middle class as well.

Crime analysis has become an increasingly important part of policing and crime prevention, and thousands of specialist crime analysts are now employed by police forces worldwide. This is the first book to set out the principles and practice of crime analysis, and is designed to be used both by crime analysts themselves, by those responsible for the training of crime analysts and teaching its principles, and those teaching this subject as part of broader policing and criminal justice courses. The particular focus of this book is on the adoption of a problem solving approach, showing how crime analysis can be used and developed to support a problem oriented policing approach – based on the idea that the police should concentrate on identifying patterns of crime and anticipating crimes rather than just reacting to crimes once they have been committed. In his foreword to this book, Nick Ross, presenter of BBC Crime Watch, argues passionately that crime analysts are 'the new face of policing', and have a crucial part to play in the increasingly sophisticated police response to crime and its approach to crime prevention – 'You are the brains, the expert, the specialist, the boffin.'