As a frequent traveler to San Francisco and the Bay Area in general, I can personally attest to the professionalism of car and property crime there. I’ve had customers mugged in the Tenderloin district (we moved our office out), colleagues, customers and suppliers have their rental cars broken into and a trunk load of laptop bags removed from right outside nice restaurants in Burlingame, and not to mention my own theft experience of my SUV being broken into right outside a restaurant in Emoryville even with a security guard in the parking lot. The later smash & grab was $50k of Alpa gear that we actually saw being taken by the crew waiting in the parking lot in a Cadillac Escalade which almost ran us down as it sped off to the freeway. (Police cared less about the scale of the loss but were bothered by the attempted hit & run).
I informed Alpa and all Alpa dealers with the serial numbers. I assume that the Alpa/Rodie gear got dumped or likely fenced off to markets less concerned about legality such as China/HK where there is a ready market for such gear. Who knows, maybe one day it’ll resurface?
Thieves target obvious rental & out of state vehicles. They literally sit and canvas the property watching for business, tourist and folks who even take measures to hide anything in the car. In my case I think I had the double whammy of obviously taking my work laptop rucksack with me, plus having an out of state expensive SUV sitting behind. The only saving grace was that they missed the bag with my Phase One gear in it ...
