Has Your Car Been Keyed Lately? Report It

If you’ve noticed a number of cars in the area have been getting keyed lately, you’re not alone — neighbor David tells us that he’s seen an uptick cars being vandalized, and is hoping that those car owners will report those incidents to the 78th Precinct, so that the police are better able to address the situation.

David said about a month ago he began noticing cars with long key scratches down their sides around 8th Avenue from 2nd to 3rd Streets and on 2nd and Carroll Streets between the Prospect Park and 7th Avenue. One thing he noted was that it seemed to be prevalent among Subarus, which his family happens to own.

“About a week after I began to notice this, I walked by my own car, and saw that it too had been vandalized,” David reports. “The key scratch went from the driver side door through the side fender panel all the way to the front left headlamp, and was so deep it went through to the metal underneath the paint. The police officers who filed the report onsite noted that it appeared to be a particularly aggressive keying — not just a superficial scratch, but one meant to do real damage that would be costly, yet necessary to repair.”

He’s says it seems to be getting worse, and tells us he counted 18 vandalized cars on a walk the other morning. When we looked around the area this morning, we also noticed quite a few — we spotted six keyed cars on the north side of 2nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues (closer to 7th), and another handful along 6th Avenue between 2nd Street and Union — affecting all kinds of makes and models of cars.

When David spoke to the police about it, they told him “there was really nothing they could do about it unless everyone who gets vandalized starts filing police reports about it,” he says. “That, the officer said, would get their attention.”

One thing that may discourage neighbors from filing a police report is a worry about it being a waste of time, or just taking too long, but David says his experience, at least, was a pretty easy one, and he hopes others will do the same.

“Fortunately, I called from my apartment and the police arrived in about 10 minutes to handle my report,” he says. “They seemed genuinely pleased that I reported the incident.”

David also offers some hopeful advice if you’ve been vandalized and think reporting it to the police will increase your insurance rates.

“Geico, my auto insurance company, told me that repairing a deep key scratch to prevent rusting and depreciation does not affect the rate of our policy because vandalism is not our fault,” he says. “They pay for the repair, but our rate remains unchanged.”

So if your car has been keyed in our area recently, make sure you call the police to report it, and hopefully they’ll be able to do something about it. And then, if you’d like to follow up with them to ask what they are doing about it, be sure to attend the next 78th Precinct Community Council meeting on Tuesday, January 28, 7:30pm at the Precinct at 65 6th Avenue.

Has anyone else noticed this happening in other parts of the neighborhood?