Back around 1994 or so, I remember reading something in News Photographer Magazine that said that on average, 60 TV cameras are stolen each year in the United States. I remember hearing about one Dallas photog who was the victim of a smash-n-grab when she was inside a fast food restaurant for just 5 minutes, and during the OKC bombing, I think about 5 in total got stolen from various sat trucks during the international press coverage of that event.

But nowadays I hardly ever hear about this at all. I went to NPPA.org and entered "TV camera thefts" in their own Web site’s internal search field, and it yielded no results. If I do a google search with those words, or other variations of that phrase, the only internet articles that come up are things like "thieves caught on camera stealing TV sets…" -But I’m finding NOTHING on the World Wide Web about television broadcast cameras actually being stolen.

I’m wondering if some of you can shed some light on this. Maybe now that most news vehicle windows are tinted, it’s harder to just shatter the glass to get to the camera and make a run for it? Maybe the overall cost of quality video cameras has gone down so much that whatever the thieves were using them for back then, it’s not that expensive anymore to just buy a camera at Best Buy if they really want to make porn? (Yeah that was one theory I heard floating around, that the thieves were using the stolen cameras to make porn, which I thought was silly and baseless).

Or maybe it is just as prevalent as it was in the ’90s or more so, and I should remain just as vigilant as ever? I’m still not ambitious enough to build my own lock box (I still think that’s something TV stations should be in charge of doing, not me), but I do regularly secure my camera with a cable bike lock to at least slow a thief down.