Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Former NASA engineer and YouTube sensation Mark Rober swore last year that the “GlitterBomb” legacy he began in 2018 was finished, but that promise went out the window this year when his own car window was smashed in by San Francisco thieves.
In just five short years, Rober used his creative genius to successfully take sparkly revenge on 167 porch pirates, 29 car thieves, and dozens of domestic and international scammers. When he “had the unfortunate realization that glitter and fart spray hadn’t solved all forms of crime worldwide when my own car was broken into,” however, Rober knew his fight wasn’t over.
Rober designed his 2022 GlitterBomb to teach California thieves a lesson about stealing stuff that didn’t belong to them, but said he “never got enough footage to uncover who was actually behind all the San Francisco car break-ins.”
Cue the creation of GlitterBomb 6.0, disguised as a backseat backpack: a 900 psi compressed gas-fueled glitter and fart spray pipe equipped with a circuit board, horn, countdown speaker, GPS, and camera phones to capture the chaos that ensues when the device is detached from a digital trip wire and camping battery in the trunk.
For extra measure, Rober schemed up a “bait car with impossible-to-break polycarbonate windows” and a clown mechanism that is triggered to scare any thieves when it senses the sound of an imminent break-in. The CrunchLabs founder also partnered with a local investigative reporter to make a GPS-armed glitter-free decoy backpack that they hoped would lead them to the perpetrators’ home base.
The results posted in Rober’s new YouTube video “Car Thief Gets Instant Karma (the FINAL Glitterbomb 6.0)” did not disappoint.
Do the Crime, Get No Time
San Francisco bureaucrats like Mayor London Breed complain that the city has become a “punching bag” for media outlets that cover the nation’s crime woes, but there’s no doubt that it is suffering from a crime “epidemic.”
In the first there quarters of 2023, thieves in the Golden Gate City burgled 15,000 vehicles. Increasingly popular smash-and-grabs at Bay Area stores have also forced retailers like Target and Walgreens to lock up their goods or even shut down.
Thanks to Democrat-led police budget reductions and soft-on-crime district attorneys, only a few of those vehicle burglaries resulted in arrests. Even fewer — only 45 by July 31 — ended in convictions.
As he demonstrated in last year’s viral video, Rober is well aware of San Francisco’s crime problem. So when the cars he set up all over the city were quickly covered with “gratuitous amounts of broken glass” as criminals tried to sneak the faux valuables away before ditching them, he was far from surprised.
What caught Rober and his ABC 7 journalist friend Dan Noyes off guard was how many of the 25 break-ins they observed seemed like crimes of opportunity by people who knew they wouldn’t get caught or punished, rather than a sophisticated or coordinated criminal effort.
“More than 80 percent of our steals were just individuals acting on their own, not some kind of organized gang operation,” Rober explained. “And the majority of the 80 percent that were individuals, honestly didn’t seem like they even did this very often.”
At least half of the steals, Rober observed, were committed on foot — sometimes in broad daylight. Others were attempted by people whom Rober said “would be a stretch to classify as seasoned professionals,” like the guy who tried to use a blowtorch instead of a glass-breaking tool to access the backpack.
Rober even quipped that there “actually is honor among thieves” after one man is seen taking the blame for the stench caused by the hidden fart spray. Another burglar is heard in separate footage dry-heaving from inhaling the foul odor emitting from the decoy backpack he just ripped from its perch.
Thanks to reporting from Noyes and a GPS tracker on one of Rober’s decoy laptops, the duo traced the stolen goods to a well-known “fencing operation” where San Francisco criminals can swiftly pawn their purloined treasures for cash.
Rober wondered why authorities, who are familiar with the street-selling scheme, haven’t taken action against the one thing that “would go a long way to stop car break-ins.”
“I can’t imagine I’m telling the city something they don’t already know, but when you have a public news report about a spot apparently everyone knows you can go to sell stolen items, and then one and a half months later, my laptop goes to the exact same spot to be sold, it certainly feels like more can be done here to remove the incentive for the break-ins and store thefts to occur in the first place,” Rober concluded.
Since its publication on Dec. 9, Rober’s video received nearly 17 million views and dozens of comments begging him to continue getting revenge on porch pirates and car burglars alike.
“This guy does more work than the authorities will ever do,” one commenter noted. His observation earned him 2,600 likes.
More can and should be done to curb San Francisco’s crime wave, but that won’t happen if the Democrats running the city continue their progressive purge of any and all forms of punishment for the people responsible.
Voters in the Golden Gate City have repeatedly expressed distaste for soft-on-crime progressives enabling the ruin of their community. Instead of stopping crime like vehicle break-ins, however, bureaucrats in San Francisco and other blue cities like New York and Los Angeles have opted to just stop reporting it.
Unless the people running San Francisco start arresting, prosecuting, and punishing crime, professional and amateur lawbreakers alike will keep smashing car windows, stealing goods, and praying that they didn’t just accidentally stumble across Rober’s latest retaliatory invention.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.