Rooster in Review: Attack of the Kia Boyz
Rooster in Review: Attack of the Kia Boyz
Your mom's Kia could end up on TikTok being driven by a teenager too young to hold a license.
If you’re bored in the Columbus area this weekend, be sure to check out the Arts Festival currently ongoing in the downtown area along the Scioto Mile and Franklinton.
Gotta say, it’s nice to see the area utilized like a downtown area should be, with merchants peddling their wares after the city closed various roads and bridges closed to car traffic.
If you’re not going to make it, feel free to browse The Roostore for a graphic t-shirt of your liking. Next week, I’m going to try to add a couple more items and designs. So stay tuned!
This week in Ohio Man….
This week’s saga isn’t about one specific Ohio Man, but rather a cultural subset organized around the idea of stealing Kias and crashing them on TikTok for internet clout.
I wish I was making anything about that last sentence up.
From Taylor Dorrell of theverge.com:
Let’s rewind to 2019 — a simpler time in the realm of stealing cars — when Columbus, Ohio, logged a respectable 3,500 car thefts. As of last summer, only halfway through the year, that number had grown to over 4,000. In just three weeks between July and August, an average of 17 Kias and Hyundais were being stolen every day in Columbus.
Milwaukee saw roughly 3,500 stolen vehicles stolen in 2019; only 6 percent were Hyundais and Kias. By 2021, there were almost 10,500 stolen; 67 percent were Hyundais and Kias.
“This year is the highest [in the city’s history],” says Detective Bruce Beard of Columbus Division of Police’s Property Crimes Bureau. “I think we’re around 8,000 stolen cars this year already,” he told me in November.
[…]
The Kia Boys aren’t a “gang” in the formal sense. They have no hierarchical bureaucracy, initiation rituals, or capital. The Kia Boys, sometimes referred to as the Kia Boyz (Milwaukee) or the Real Kia Boys (Columbus), are a decentralized crusade of underage car thieves. The label “Kia Boys” less implies an official organization as it does a blanket term for any teenager who steals Kias and Hyundais for joyrides. Most of them are said to be between the ages of 12-15 — too young to have a driver’s license or work and too energetic during the pandemic-era lockdown to be invigorated by Zoom classes.
I always assumed the Kia Boyz were stealing cars and taking them to chop shops to at least make some money on their crimes. No! These rowdy teens are simply doing it for internet views.
It’s hard for me to see the value in that, even as somebody who did a lot of dumb shit as a teenager. Hopefully, they find something more worthwhile than stealing working people’s transportation for internet clout because apparently, the city has zero answers to solve the problem.
Regardless, this is another example of how the lack of regulations only enables Big Business and hurts everyday people. Canada doesn’t have this problem because it requires car manufacturers to include an immobilizer in their products.
America didn’t, and now there are millions of cars on the street that can be stolen with a screwdriver and USB cord. Fun times in the big city!
This week in The Rooster…
As always, be sure to follow The Rooster on Twitter and TikTok for all of Ohio’s depravity, all the time.
THOSE WMDs. Why people watch TV with subtitles on… The smoke will get worse before it gets better… We found the 650,000 ways advertisers label you… Bettty Shannon, unsung mathematical genius… The big idea: Are cats really domesticated?
The hat left behind after the failed attempt at stealing mine was youth sized. Like for a 10-12 year old. We regularly have them running down the street at high speed half the time on a rim or brake rotor. It’s so bad that a local Cbus FB page about it has national members who were looking for a place to vent. The issue isn’t the cops (for once) not catching them it’s Ginther allowing Recs and Parks to go to shit during and after Covid, leaving kids with nothing to do, and judges doing absolutely jack shit. Moms have even met with judges begging them to hold the kids accountable and nothing has changed. Seems everyone understands that there needs to be harder checks on this behavior except the people in charge of handing down the accountability. One wreck on the east side cost at least one kid his life, three weeks later there was another wreck with the same kid driving, still in the fucking neck brace from the first acccident.
Took 3 months to get the parts for my car, the tow driver who picked it up said he knew most of the east side crew doing the thefts because he used to coach them in football before the city dropped the program during Covid. Said they don’t care if they live or die because no one cares about them. This is another failure to step up on Gunther’s part and shows the total dysfunction of the Democratic judges trying to broadcast performative allyship. Ginther announced an influx of summer funding to Parks, but we all know that’s only because it’s an election year and it’s the lowest hanging fruit he can muster.