Chattanooga police recorded 86 cases of theft of motor vehicle parts or accessories from April through September 2026. In the same months of 2022 there were 437 (-80.3%), and 446 in 2021. The count has held at the lower level for three years: 102 in 2024, 80 in 2025 and 86 in 2026, the three lowest for that window in the twelve years the dataset covers (2015 to 2026). Before the 2020-2022 rise, the same six months never went below 284 (2018). Each case number is counted once, and cases marked Unfounded are excluded (no more than one a year since 2017).

The drop came quickly. From January through September 2022 the city recorded between 60 and 100 of these cases every month. That fell to 51 in October and 31 in November 2022, then 26 to 44 a month from December 2022 through August 2023, and 15 in September 2023. No month since has recorded more than 21. Full years: 918 cases in 2021, 758 in 2022, 322 in 2023, 185 in 2024 and 158 in 2025, the lowest of the eleven complete years (-82.8% from 2021).

Parts thefts fell much faster than nearby property crimes and police cases overall. Over the same April-September window from 2022 to 2026, car break-ins (theft from a motor vehicle) went from 1,062 to 630 (-40.7%), car thefts from 635 to 272 (-57.2%), all other larceny from 1,150 to 854 (-25.7%) and all recorded cases from 30,935 to 28,374 (-8.3%). Parts thefts went from 1.41% of all cases to 0.30%.

The decline is citywide. All six police zones fell from April-September 2022 to 2026: Baker South 90 to 13, Adam South 89 to 12, Adam North 80 to 10, Charlie North 75 to 22, Charlie South 55 to 17 and Baker North 48 to 12. The cases were spread across 334 block addresses in 2022 and 79 in 2026. The ten busiest addresses each year held 44 cases in 2022 and 17 in 2026, and everywhere else fell from 393 to 69 (-82.4%). Cases where parts theft was the only offense recorded fell from 396 to 74 (-81.3%), in line with the total, so this is not a change in how many offenses are listed per case. The offense code (UCR 23G) is the same in every year.

Few of these cases end in an arrest: 4 of 437 in April-September 2022 and 1 of 86 in 2026.

The dataset records incidents reported to or by police, so it cannot tell fewer thefts apart from fewer reports. It does not say which parts were taken or why the count fell. The comparison uses April through September because the published file has far fewer records for February and March 2026 than for the months around them.