Do you find yourself checking if your car doors are locked even while you’re idling at a stoplight? Or, trying your hatchback by hand after securing it with your key fob when you leave your vehicle in a parking lot?

Who could blame you for being overly cautious in a state ranked No. 1 in the nation for auto theft, and where violence associated with stolen vehicles – including carjackings – too often makes headlines? If your car hasn’t been stolen yet, you probably know someone whose has.

A big part of the blame lies with watered-down penalties for auto theft – brought to you by a Legislature bent on feel-good, soft-on-crime “justice reform.” The dogma has backfired, helping drive skyrocketing auto theft over the past several years.

This week, lawmakers came a step closer to fixing what they broke. A state Senate committee OK’d a bipartisan bill that would restore sanity to the law on auto theft – and put more of the thieves behind bars.

Current law bases the severity of penalties for auto theft on the stolen vehicle’s value. Stealing a vehicle valued under $2,000 is only a misdemeanor. That approach might make sense for some other kinds of theft, but it’s absurd for motor vehicles.

They typically provide essential transportation regardless of make, model or condition. If anything, an old car worth little represents an even bigger loss if stolen because its owner likely can’t afford a replacement – yet still needs to get to work.

Senate Bill 23-097, which unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, eliminates the state criminal code’s sliding scale tying the value of a vehicle to the penalty.

All vehicle thefts would be a felony. The vast majority of vehicles stolen in Colorado are valued at the lower end of the scale, says a 2022 report from Colorado’s Common Sense Institute.

The bill also imposes tougher penalties on repeat offenders. According to the Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority, most of the people arrested for auto theft in the past three years have an extensive record of auto theft.

A few critics in Monday’s committee hearing claimed the measure wouldn’t work because too few perpetrators are arrested for stealing cars in the first place.

There’s no doubt it would help if more auto thieves were arrested. A number of factors influence arrest rates for auto theft or any other crime. One factor is penalties so paltry that, amid limited resources, police and prosecutors have to prioritize which offenses to pursue first.

Raising the penalties for auto theft will help make it a priority once again.

Of course, the critics are being disingenuous. They simply don’t want more auto thieves arrested. They don’t want more criminals in general going to prison. In the never-never land of the justice-reform crusaders, the accused are merely hapless victims of an unjust society.

Meanwhile, back here on earth, and definitely, in Colorado, we need to take more auto thieves off the street, and SB 97 holds that promise. Its support base attests to it.

Supporters include the cities of Denver, Broomfield, Lakewood, Aurora, Greeley, Colorado Springs and Lone Tree as well as the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council, Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police, County Sheriffs of Colorado, Colorado State Patrol and the Colorado Municipal Judges Association.

Gov. Jared Polis called for a crackdown on auto theft in his State of the State address to lawmakers at the outset of the 2023 legislative session. Let’s pass SB 97 and send it to the governor.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board