Quest for drugs seen as main culprit in valley burglaries

For six years, smoking meth and stealing consumed W's life. His habit eventually cost $300 to $500 a day, and he supported it by taking other people's property from truck beds, garages, barns or businesses.

"I would drive around all night looking for garages left open. When I saw that, it was like, 'jackpot!' " he said. "I was raised not to steal, not to be like that, so there was a lot of guilt and shame behind it. But I would just get high to forget it. It's a vicious cycle; you feel bad about stealing something, so you go get high. Then you have to steal again to stay high. Toward the end, I didn't really care. I didn't feel anything."

The Bee agreed to refer to this reformed burglar as "W" because he feared other addicts and thieves would target him for sharing his experiences.

Authorities unanimously point to Modesto's drug addicts when asked to explain the area's high burglary rate.

A perfect storm of circumstances has contributed to the problem, experts say. Metal has become more valuable, making it a lucrative way to fund drug habits. Identity theft is on the rise, so personal documents have become more attractive to thieves. Not to mention the weak economy which, law enforcement agents say, leads people who normally would not commit crimes to resort to criminal behavior.

"Once they find out it's easy to do this, and they didn't get caught, there's nothing to stop them," said Gary Martinez, a Modesto Police Department property crimes detective. "Especially if (the theft) is drug-driven. They need to have heroin in their system maybe two to three times a day. They're stealing every day to support a habit. People say, 'I have a $500-a-day drug habit.' So they somehow steal $5,000 a day because they only get a dime on the dollar."

Last year in Modesto, there were 1,534 home burglaries, more than the city had seen since 1998, when thieves struck nearly 1,800 homes. Commercial burglaries, with 682 reported last year, were higher than in any other year reported by Modesto police, who provided numbers back to 1997.

Home burglaries showed significant increases from 2006 to 2007, with a 36 percent spike in Turlock, 26 percent in Modesto, and 16 percent in the parts of Stanislaus County covered by the Sheriff's Department.

Commercial burglaries also jumped, with 37 percent more in Turlock, 26 percent more in Modesto and nearly 10 percent more reported by the Sheriff's Department.

But incidents alone don't tell the full story, because the county's population has grown each year. The crime rate, calculated in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, compares the number of burglaries to population.

Stanislaus County had the third- highest burglary rate when The Bee compared 2006 data from eight simi- larly sized cities within similarly sized counties in the United States. The highest rate in the group belonged to Winston-Salem, N.C., where nearly 14 people per 1,000 became burglary victims. Stanislaus County's rate was about nine people per 1,000, almost twice that of Madison, Wis., which reported the lowest rate.

The burglary rate in Stanislaus County has been inconsistent over the past decade, according to RAND, a national research institution that provides historical criminal statistics based on Department of Justice data. From 1997 to 2001, the rate dropped steadily, from 15 burglaries per 1,000 people to nine. It's been up and down since then, but the county had a rate of about nine per 1,000 in 2006, far lower than the 1997 peak.

Though it may be better than it used to be, burglary remains a burden for its victims and for the law enforcement agents who investigate such crimes.