I remember seeing what looked like basically every city in the San Joaquin Valley seemed unusually highly ranked on a per-capita car theft list of US cities (e.g. Bakersfield, Stockton, Merced, Modesto), and further north into the Sacramento Valley (Redding, Yuba, Chico).

Is it just sort of size effects of California, or is there something like systemic cat theft that is a particular thing? The major cities are also there, but the crazy part to me was it is basically like, the entire central valley.