An Inside Edition crew looking to document the phenomena of “smash and grab” crime in the San Francisco Bay Area found themselves the victims of the very same crime.
Lisa Guerrero and her news team had the windows of their crew truck smashed, while thieves made off with valuable video equipment.
“Thieves came out here and they broke into our crew truck,” said Guerrero in a segment that aired last week. “They stole thousands of dollars worth of our equipment.”
Guerrero led cameras to the scene showing shattered glass around the Inside Edition vehicle.
Ironically, the news organization had been in San Francisco to document the very same type of crime. They had set a trap for some would-be thieves in San Francisco’s famous Alamo Square by loading a decoy car full of goodies including a designer handbag and a speaker. Both items were hooked up with GPS tracking devices.
When the car was inevitably broken into, Guerrero and co. tracked down one of the thieves in a BART subway station and confronted him on camera. Eventually, the criminal left the speaker and called his mother as a triumphant Guerrero exited the station.
But while the team later reviewed the footage, Guerrero spotted a second break-in happening and realized it was actually their crew car.
“Hey, wait a second, that car looks familiar. It’s our crew car,” she said. “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.”
According to the segment, San Francisco suffered through 31,000 such crimes in 2017 with only two percent of cases ever being solved.
You can watch the segment above