As I noted in a previous post from June, on one of my jobs I'm the police in a fairly quiet village of 7300 people.
About 0400 one morning last week, we received a report of several individuals possibly going through some parked cars in a neighborhood on the north side of town. We checked the area, the witness stayed on the phone, and directed us to the suspects as they were getting back into their car.
Two 18 year olds and a 17 year old reported as a runaway, from the big city 20 miles away. As people woke up to go to work, many discovered that their UNLOCKED vehicles had been ransacked. By 0830 we had 18 reports of UNLOCKED vehicles that had been entered.
Interestingly enough, the car burglars only kept small change they found in the vehicles. They didn't want anything of greater value because they didn't want to be caught with such items. A laptop was one item they found in an UNLOCKED car. They tossed that in somebody's yard a few houses down.
In another case, they found a guy's rifle in a gun case in his UNLOCKED SUV. (an M1891 Mosin Nagant in 7.62 x 54R). That was also discarded in somebody's front yard.
After the suspects were arrested the Chief put out a press release about it (which he rarely does) in ANOTHER (probably futile) attempt to get people to start paying attention to locking their vehicles. After the news story went out, in the next few days three more people called to report that their vehicles had been searched on Wednesday morning, although in those cases it seems that nothing was taken.
It doesn't matter where you live. Lock your house. Lock your car. Don't leave your keys or garage door opener in your vehicle, locked or not.