The police are asking the townspeople for help in catching the criminals.
Catalytic converters are popular devices among thieves, often stolen for the precious metals they contain. And sometimes, for the sake of valuable details, attackers demonstrate miracles of arrogance. In San Francisco, thieves stole catalysts from four cars in the livery of the City Police Department (SFPD), and the cars were parked literally under the windows of the headquarters of the Special Operations Bureau, where special forces are quartered.
Catalysts were removed from SFPD-marked vehicles before 1:00 p.m. on Monday, September 12, according to local police. It was then that one of the officers discovered that his pickup truck was missing an important part that cleans the exhaust. After that, he decided to check the neighboring cars.
It turned out that another truck and two vans in police livery had lost their neutralizers. Stealing from several police cars at once takes a lot of courage, but the location makes the act of theft even more egregious: the cars were parked outside the building that serves as the headquarters for the SWAT unit.

"These people really don't think too highly of the police if they think they can steal catalytic converters from the best of us," an SFPD spokesman told local media.
However, some police officers are clearly not too optimistic: according to them, this is not the first time that parts have been removed from police cars in this place. “They can get away with it… This is not the first incident,” one of the officers said. Therefore, the police decided not to rely solely on their own strength and turned to the public with a request to respond if there was any information about the thieves.

Interest among thieves in catalysts in San Francisco is so great that the authorities even had to impose a ban on the transportation of used devices. The reason was the discovery of 14 catalytic converters in one car, the driver of which was suspected of stealing.