This holiday season, shoppers may see San Antonio police officers scanning rows of parked vehicles in the city’s busiest retail areas. It’s part of an effort to deter vehicle burglaries, where officers say the most targeted items aren’t gifts or a bag left on a seat, but firearms stored inside cars.
A special holiday task force deploys SAPD officers to major shopping center parking lots between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Officer Daniel Casas, who is a part of that task force, says the initiative is meant to address an increase in crime that typically accompanies the holiday season.
“There’s definitely an uptick around this time, right before the holidays and during the holidays, just because they know everybody’s out and about shopping right now, especially buying the valuables, buying gifts, putting them back in the car, going back in the stores,” he said. “They’re looking for that easy spot where they can just get in, get out, and not be seen and take off.”
Casas said thieves look for whatever they can take quickly, but officers say the pattern behind many of these burglaries is more specific. Officer Levi Talamas with the task force said criminals often have a target in mind when they break into cars.
“Their main target, typically, that we see are firearms and those guns are used in crimes that we have to encounter on the street and that’s just one of those things,” he said.
That concern is reflected in a newly published study examining how often firearms are stolen from vehicles in San Antonio. Researchers at the San Antonio campus of UTHealth Houston’s School of Public Health reviewed vehicle thefts reported to SAPD in 2024 and found that 2,465 guns were taken over the course of the year — nearly seven per day.
The analysis, led by associate professor Alexander Testa, mapped hotspots across the city and found that firearm thefts clustered around large shopping centers, hotel parking lots and major highway corridors — many of the same areas targeted by SAPD’s holiday enforcement efforts. Downtown corridors, North Star Mall, Park North, Westover Marketplace and the La Cantera–Rim area all stood out with high concentrations of thefts.
“When it comes to those areas, what we’re hearing from law enforcement is it’s just a really strategic target because the parking lots are so big, there’s so many vehicles for opportunity, and it’s so hard to surveil that it becomes kind of a low risk environment to try to break into cars,” Testa said.
But the study also revealed a pattern that surprised researchers.
“What was unexpected is that almost 25% of the addresses associated with firearm thefts were associated with hotels. And so that was kind of a surprising finding that wasn’t on our radar,” he said.
Victims told researchers they left guns in their vehicles because they didn’t want them unsecured in hotel rooms or weren’t sure of local laws and regulations, Testa said — a decision that, in many cases, made the guns more vulnerable to theft. His team found that many thefts occurred overnight, when parking lots were lightly monitored and vehicles remained unattended for long stretches of time.
Findings also indicated the type of vehicle also played a significant role. According to the study, nearly 70% of stolen firearms were taken from pickup trucks, far outpacing their share of vehicles registered in Bexar County. Researchers couldn’t determine in this study whether thieves intentionally target trucks or whether truck owners are more likely to store firearms in them, but Testa said the imbalance was clear.
”The belief is that there is some calculated decision by the person trying to steal or trying to break into the car, especially if they’re looking for a firearm,” Testa said. “There is a stereotypical persona that is being drawn, that a pickup truck owner is more likely to own a firearm, and if you show up in front of a sports bar and there’s a Ford F150 and a Toyota Prius, and you’re looking for a firearm, you’re probably more likely to try to break into that Ford F150.”
Casas echoed the trend, saying that while burglars will target any unlocked vehicle for valuables, trucks are often the priority when it comes to guns.
“For guns, honestly, it probably would be trucks,” he said. “But as far as burglary of vehicles for valuables and stuff like that, it’s just anything, because it’s quick smash and grab.”
While deterrent initiatives like the task force are aimed at the holiday season, researchers say the underlying problem is more consistent year round. Testa’s team found that firearm thefts from vehicles remained consistent month to month throughout 2024, with no major spikes linked to shopping periods, Fiesta or major holidays.
“We couldn’t identify any discernible pattern that was explaining why things were going up in certain months, why things were going down,” Testa said. “ It really does seem kind of stable.”
That stability is part of what has put San Antonio on the national radar. A 2022 analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety, using FBI data, ranked the city fifth in the nation for guns stolen out of vehicles — one of the highest volumes among major U.S. cities.
Testa said many firearm owners he interviewed didn’t realize how common these thefts were until after their own gun was stolen. Several victims told researchers they might have changed their storage habits if they had known how frequently guns are taken from vehicles.
To address that gap his team is now working with Bexar County’s “Bexar Responsibly” gun safety initiative to develop a campaign aimed at raising awareness among firearm owners about the risk of leaving firearms in their vehicles.
Ultimately, both researchers and officers say the most effective step is also the simplest: not leaving a gun in a car in the first place.
“In Texas, you’re allowed to carry your gun with you in most places,” Talamas said. “If you don’t want to carry it, I would suggest just leaving it at home rather than your car. If you leave the gun in your car, you’re just making it accessible to criminals.”