Vehicle theft dropped in 49 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico during the first half of 2025, part of a broader decline that’s cut the national theft rate nearly in half over the past two years. Alaska went the opposite direction entirely. While the rest of the country posted a combined 23 percent drop in stolen vehicles, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, Alaska’s theft numbers climbed 26 percent, and the surge is concentrated almost entirely in one metro area: Anchorage.
A Genuinely Historic National Decline
The scale of the national turnaround is hard to overstate. NICB’s data shows 334,114 vehicles reported stolen nationwide in the first half of 2025, down from a rate of 126.62 thefts per 100,000 people in the first half of 2024 to just 97.33 per 100,000 a year later. That builds on an even bigger shift the year before: full-year 2024 thefts fell 16.6 percent to 850,708 vehicles nationwide, according to Insurance Journal, down from a 2023 peak of roughly 1.02 million and marking the largest single-year decline in four decades.
A big piece of that turnaround traces back to two specific automakers fixing a specific problem. Hyundai and Kia thefts fell about 37.5 percent in 2024 after the companies rolled out free anti-theft software updates, ignition cylinder protectors, and reimbursement programs following a wave of thefts tied to a viral social media trend targeting vehicles that shipped without engine immobilizers. Hyundai reported that 68 percent of its vulnerable vehicles had already received the software fix. When two of the industry’s most-stolen brands close a security hole that big, the national numbers move.
The breadth of the decline elsewhere makes Alaska’s number harder to explain away as a fluke. Washington state posted a 42 percent drop, North Dakota and Louisiana each fell 32 percent, Colorado dropped 31 percent, and Florida fell 30 percent, all according to the same NICB release. Even California, one of the largest and historically theft-prone markets in the country, posted a 26 percent decline, the same size as Alaska’s increase, just running in the opposite direction. Washington, D.C. still carried the highest theft rate in the country at 842 per 100,000 residents as of the 2024 full-year data, but even that number fell 18 percent year over year, per Insurance Journal. Practically every large market with a real theft problem was heading down at the same moment Alaska was heading up.
Alaska’s Numbers Are Moving the Other Way
None of that fix reached Alaska’s problem, because Alaska’s spike isn’t following the national pattern at all. NICB’s own release is blunt about it: Alaska was “the only state to report an increase in thefts, with a 26 percent rise, largely driven by theft trends in the Anchorage metropolitan area.” Every other state and territory in the report, from Puerto Rico’s 43 percent drop to smaller declines across the South and Mountain West, moved in the same downward direction Alaska didn’t…