It’s gotten to the point where area residents have taken to leaving notes for would-be thieves, begging them not to smash their windows, as revealed in a tweet by ABC7’s Melanie Woodrow. They’re called smash and grabs, and in San Francisco, the problem has reached epidemic proportions, with car break-ins happening an average of every 17 minutes. Inside Edition’s Chief Investigative Correspondent Lisa Guerrero wanted to see first-hand how bad the thefts are, so she used a $250 speaker and a Michael Kors purse as bait to lure thieves to a car rigged with hidden cameras. What the would-be burglars didn’t know was that Guerrero and her team also hid GPS tracking devices inside the speaker and the purse. Guerrero then drove up and parked the bait car at the renowned Alamo Square in San Francisco, where tourists flock to take pictures of the famous "Painted Ladies" row of Victorian homes. “Hey, wait a second, that car looks familiar. The two allegedly fled to a bus before ending up at the 16th Street Mission BART station, where Inside Edition Chief Investigative Correspondent Lisa Guerrero approached the man. “Unbelievably, when we were inside conducting the interview (with the man who lives nearby), thieves came out here and they broke into our crew truck,” Guerrero said in the segment. “5 million people are going to see you steal that,” Guerrero warned the man in the video. "So you can choose to give it back or not." Instead, the Inside Edition camera crew vehicle ended up being another statistic. Be the first to know. The tracking device led her to a trash can, where Guerrero recovered the purse; the GPS device was still inside. “It all lasted maybe 20 seconds,” he said, adding that he sees smash-and-grab robberies every day. Remarkably, as Guerrero was conducting the interview, a car belonging to the Inside Edition crew was broken into, resulting in two broken windows and the theft of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. But it was while reviewing surveillance footage of the bait car break-in that Guerrero received an unpleasant revelation, according to the video. "We actually got hit twice in one day," Guerrero declared. The Bay Area is struggling with vehicle break-ins -- in 2017, there were more than 31,000 reported break-ins, with just 2 percent resulting in arrests, according to SFGate.
– They anticipated the first burglary, just not the second. While reporting on the epidemic of car break-ins in SanFrancisco, Inside Edition crew members watched as a man broke into a bait car fitted with hidden cameras. Reporter Lisa Guerrero began Wednesday's report by parking a car near San Francisco's Alamo Square with a designer purse and $250 speaker in full view. It wasn't long before a man smashed a rear window and grabbed the items, which had hidden GPS trackers. The purse, thrown to a female companion who slipped away at a subway station, was eventually found in a trash can, but Guerrero discovered the speaker still in the man's hand, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. "Five million people are gonna see you steal that," Guerrero told him. When he dropped the speaker and walked away, Guerrero went to interview a neighborhood resident whose surveillance camera captured the burglary, which he described as a daily occurrence. But Guerrero returned to the crew's SUV to find "we actually got hit twice in one day." The same surveillance camera spotted thieves smashing two of the vehicle's windows and making off with "thousands of dollars worth of equipment," Guerrero said. Per Inside Edition, "the problem has reached epidemic proportions, with car break-ins happening an average of every 17 minutes" in the city. Desperate residents have actually taken to leaving notes for would-be burglars, the Fresno Bee reports, via a reporter's tweet.