By james art 
Catholic converters are a hot item for thieves to strip off vehicles — and Virginia Beach police engraved them for free Saturday to potentially identify them if they’re stolen and recovered.
The Virginia Beach Police Department hosted its first free engraving earlier this year, Sergeant William Frederick said, and Saturday’s event is back due to popular demand.
Seventy-two people signed up to have their vehicle’s VIN engraved on their catalytic converters. The police also serviced several drive-in (or rather drive-in) encounters. At the first engraving event in April, police serviced 82 vehicles.
Volunteers from the police academy were directing traffic in the London Baptist Church car park. A police officer mounted vehicles on plastic wedges. A second officer crept underneath a mechanical creeper to etch the converters.
“If it’s stolen and we’re able to recover it, we can do some cross-checking with the VIN number,” Frederick said. “Then we have a victim we can connect to the theft.” And if we are lucky enough to identify a suspect, then we can press charges.
Catalytic converters convert engine gases into less toxic pollutants. Vehicles manufactured after 1975 have at least one. Larger vehicles, such as trucks and buses, may have four or more. Transducers contain metals such as platinum, palladium, and rhodium that can be sold.
Converter thefts spiked nationwide in 2020 and into 2022, but fell from about 60,000 to 26,000 a year in 2023. according to auto insurance experts.
In Virginia, 550 converters were stolen in 2023.
The Virginia Beach Police Department does not specifically track the number of catalytic converter thefts. They are included in wider motor vehicle theft statistics, according to a police spokesman.
Thefts from motor vehicles – including things stolen from inside and outside cars – are down from about 3,200 in 2022 to 2,100 next year. As of September 30, the police had recorded 1,200 thefts for 2024.
While the department doesn’t specifically track catalytic converter thefts, Frederick said anecdotally, the number appears to be decreasing in the city. Police have not identified any stolen converters since the previous engraving.
Frederick said that “even one theft is too many.”
He started offering catalytic converter etching in Virginia Beach after seeing similar events in Chesapeake and Newport News. He wrote a proposal and received grant funding from the Virginia State Police to purchase equipment to etch the converters.
Frederick plans to host engraving events as long as people are interested and the department continues to receive the funding.