- cross-posted to:
- canada@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- canada@lemmy.ca
A police operation at the Port of Montreal led to the recovery of 598 stolen vehicles since December, many of them stolen from southern Ontario and slated for sale overseas.
The operation, dubbed Project Vector, involved more than a dozen police forces from across Ontario and Quebec.
As part of the project, police conducted hundreds of inspections on shipping containers in the Port of Montreal. They recovered stolen vehicles, most of them taken from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
[…] though police hailed the recovery of nearly 600 vehicles as significant, in 2023, car thefts in Ontario and Quebec topped 45,000.
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How do these criminals even move that number of vehicles on a regular basis without being caught? It’s not like you can hide cars.
I see you never reported your stolen car to police. They literally do not care. As for the port authorities, they’re being paid a lot of money to ignore all the stolen stuff.
Why are you calling us, call your insurance company.
When my GF’s CRV was stolen.
It’s easy enough hide cars when you have garage and shipping containers, border patrol is more concerned with things entering the ports than leaving, falsify some paperwork, etc.
But aren’t containers inspected to confirm it matches their manifests, or to make sure they’ve paid any (if any) fees involved with exporting certain types of goods?
I mean, holy hell. You can get stopped at a border as an individual who has a few pieces of contraband fruit in your backpack. But the car theft industry seems to be getting away with exporting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stolen vehicles. It’s infuriating.
The government shouldn’t have to put in $100+ million to assign a task force to catch these guys. Literally the port authority has a job they already get paid to do!
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Brutal. So, it’s basically a win for criminals, even if they get caught that one out of 1000 times, and only if they are unsuccessful at bribing the person responsible for the inspection.
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Even if they inspect, all they would find is that it matched the paperwork anyways.
The police and port authorities have to care first. Some donor to an influential political party probably had a car stolen.
Boy, I wish I could do 1% of my job and call it a success.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Project Vector disrupted criminal networks that profit from the Canadian export market to sell stolen vehicles,” Marty Kearns, the deputy commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) said at a press conference in Montreal.
Police hailed the project as an important step in their fight against organized criminal networks which they say are behind a recent surge in car thefts in Eastern Canada.
Kearns said the vehicles, valued at $34.5 million, were to be sold on foreign markets around the world, in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and in South America.
Mark Hemmerick, an OPP inspector involved in the project, said many of the seized vehicles were connected to violent crimes.
“One of these vehicles that was recovered was connected to a carjacking using a firearm and another one was stolen and used for a home invasion in a residence a few hours later,” he said, adding stories like those are “concerning for everyone.”
In January, police forces in Ontario received $121 million from the federal government, in hopes of targeting the rise of stolen vehicles and carjackings in the GTA.
The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
