Never Lock Your Car Again: An Argument

You always lock your doors. Always. But what if you stopped?

Leading up to the holidays last year, my wife and I were getting ready to take our two girls from our apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to Maine and Tennessee, back to back. We do this every year, by car—it's our holiday marathon. The doors on our 2004 Nothing Special started going haywire right before we left. They're the kind without automatic locks, and a couple of them wouldn't open from the outside all of a sudden. (Then they would, and then they wouldn't again.) The locks started acting up shortly after. We had a garage price a repair for us and it was way more than we could afford right before the December giftocalypse/travelocalypse. We decided we'd take our chances with the wacky doors and get everything fixed sometime in the new year, back in New York.

We never did. Since the start of 2014, this has been the situation: the driver's door locks from the inside, but won't unlock from the outside. Neither passenger door opens from the outside. (This part is super unsafe and we really do need to fix it. Donations accepted.) The rear door on the driver's side now has the inner lock covered in black duct tape so it will always be "the door that opens." For the first few weeks, we locked the front door from the inside; when it was time to drive somewhere, we'd open the back door, stretch to the front, and twitch the lock.

It was a pain in the ass. We stopped doing it. We started leaving the car unlocked. And no one has messed with it. Ever. At all. In New York City. Seriously.

Maybe this isn't a revelation to some people. I'm guessing, though, that a survey of NYC car-owners would find 95 percent or more saying, "Hell yes I lock my car up, what do I look like, a moron? Now get outta my face." (I'd estimate the national, non-NYC answer to be up there around...80 percent affirmative?)

New York is the city of The Club, that medieval-looking device that guarantees no one will steal your car. Probably. It's also a city where people don't just take their GPS off the windshield mount—some of them also remove the mount and buff away any residue, so The Crooks won't even know that car-owner has a GPS. These acts are time-consuming but considered "worth doing, just in case." I mean, did you ever see the video of guys stealing their own bikes while tons of people walked by and said nothing? A nice little post–Kitty Genovese reminder that you always expect the worst in New York.

We took some precautions with our car at first, once we decided to leave it unlocked. We'd take our E-Z Pass off the velcro mount and bring it into the house, along with the GPS. We'd do our best to clean our generally messy vehicle and make it look barren, like there was nothing inside worth taking. Sometimes I'd leave one of the kids' library books or toys on the back seat, or right up by the back windshield, and hope The Crooks would think, "Aww, a child. On to the next car, fellas."

Then, when nothing happened, we stopped worrying, little by little. We forgot the E-Z Pass and the GPS in the house a few times and decided to start leaving them in the car. We'd let our iPhone charger cables snake across the floor instead of jamming them into the packed glovebox. A few times, we've accidentally left our wallets or phones or house keys in the compartments in the sides of the doors. (I did this last week, for like three days.) Still: nothing happened.

So we started leaving the key in the car. As long as we've had this vehicle, we've had one key. It's the digital chip kind, and it's expensive to make a copy. My wife and I both use the car too much to be passing the key off all the time. You can only fight with your spouse about so many $45 parking tickets that would've been avoided if you or she had just left the key in the little thingy by the door as planned.

The biggest lessons have been You Aren't as Special as You Think, and People Are Better Than You Think.

And even with the key in the car—not in the ignition, but not so hidden that it's a pain to dig out every time—nothing has happened. And at this point, I don't think anything is going to happen. This has gone on too long to be a hot streak. We feel lucky, but it's not the main emotion. If luck was mainly what we felt, we'd be actively planning to get the doors fixed and/or to get a second key. The biggest lessons have been You Aren't as Special as You Think, and People Are Better Than You Think.

I remember how mandatory it used to seem to lock the car. I still experience that feeling when we're on the road, taking little trips or trekking to see relatives. When I'm alone at a gas station in a town I don't know, I eye the car cautiously most of the time I'm in the convenience store. "You didn't lock the car," my scared brain whispers, "and now someone is going to enter it and/or take things and/or find a way to hotwire it and drive away forever."

False. I'm not saying that can't happen, but I'm saying it doesn't happen as much as our fear-addled brains want us to think. The past year has reminded me that the world can be pretty cool sometimes. This key thing has lead to a lot of other previously unthinkable Brooklyn moments: we left our jack-o-lanterns out on the stoop this year for the first time, relatively confident they wouldn't get smashed by Those Damn Teenagers. I left my bike unlocked in a rack for half a day when I forgot my key. (Keys, ugh.) We left the car windows more than halfway down on warm summer days.

People can surprise you. Give 'em a chance. (That said: results may vary. You should probably always lock your car. Especially if it's even remotely nice. I guess.)

Published on Monday, November 10th 2014

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