SAN ANTONIO -- While you're hitting the stores this holiday shopping season, thieves may be hitting your car.
Property crimes account for about 90 percent of all crime in San Antonio. The caseload can be overwhelming for the small number of San Antonio police detectives that investigate those crimes.
That means the rest of us need to be vigilant about not becoming victims in the first place.
"My truck has been broken into three times in the past year," according to Daniel Nino. He has a unique truck; one that has been attracting the wrong kind of attention.
"It's a little different," says Daniel of his modified truck. "It's got full air-bag suspension, body drop. I mean it sticks out like a sore thumb."
It wasn't the truck, but what was inside it that caught one thief's eye.
"Someone busted up the back window and stole a TV I used to have in there," says Daniel.
Daniel never got his TV back and that is true for most property crime victims.
Of the 100,000 property crimes in San Antonio last year, only 11,000 cases were solved and the property recovered. That's a rate of about one in ten.
"They can sometimes get in faster than you can with a key," says Sgt. Jeff Ward with the San Antonio Police Department unit which investigates property crime.
He says the most popular item thieves go after are GPS devices, followed by laptops.
Sgt. Ward says the best thing to do is to leave those items out of sight. If a thief doesn't see anything he wants, he may just move on to something else.
"It makes you more aware, so you're less likely to be a victim the second time," Sgt. Ward notes.
Daniel says he is taking precautions to keep his belongings safe. He put an alarm on his truck and now parks it by his bedroom window.
He says he learned a valuable lesson: "Like my dad told me, 'If you don't want it stolen, don't keep it in sight.'"
San Antonio police are also tackling another type of crime with a new task force.
SAPD's robbery unit, which is only a couple weeks old, consists of detectives who specialize in robberies and home invasions.
Lt. Jorge Suarez, who is in charge of the unit, hopes having the investigators in one place will make communication easier and help solve more crimes across the city.
"With this new unit, the aggressive, proactive approach that we're taking, I know we're going to make big strides toward putting these people in jail," Lt. Suarez says.
The robbery unit has only been around since mid-October, but in that short amount of time, they've already made at least 17 arrests.
