A stolen Audi that had been carjacked in Los Angeles crashed near 2nd Street and Colorado Avenue last Tuesday, touching off a chain of events that ended with four people in custody and three loaded handguns recovered, two of them untraceable ghost guns. Santa Monica police say the case started as a routine catalytic converter patrol near Ocean Avenue and quickly turned into a multi-agency carjacking investigation.
According to the Santa Monica Police Department, officers conducting a targeted catalytic converter enforcement operation spotted the black Audi near Ocean Avenue on August 25. The vehicle later crashed near 2nd Street and Colorado Avenue, and several occupants fled the scene on foot. A coordinated police response ultimately detained several people connected to the vehicle, and four individuals, including two juveniles, were taken into custody, the department said.
As officers converged on the crash, one unaffiliated individual removed a black backpack from the abandoned Audi and later discarded it in a nearby alley, per the department's account. A second unaffiliated person then picked up the discarded backpack and attempted to conceal it at a nearby construction site. Police say they used SMART Center resources to locate that second individual, who was then taken into custody. Officers recovered the backpack and found it contained three loaded handguns, two of which were unserialized ghost guns.
How the SMART Center Tracked the Suspects
The real-time tracking that led officers to the backpack came from Santa Monica's newly operational Santa Monica Analytical Real-Time Center, known as the SMART Center. The facility launched in April, backed by a $6.125 million grant from the California Board of State and Community Corrections awarded under the state's Organized Retail Theft Prevention Grant Program, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press.
As of this month, the center pulls live data from roughly 962 city surveillance cameras, 79 Automated License Plate Readers, 325 body-worn cameras, live 911 audio feeds, and aerial drones into a single command hub, the Santa Monica Police Department detailed in a video posted to Facebook. That array is what allowed dispatchers to watch the discarded backpack move through the neighborhood and direct ground officers to the person trying to hide it.
This is not the department's first high-profile use of the technology. Hoodline previously reported that Santa Monica police used SMART Center video feeds and real-time tracking in March to locate and arrest a 26-year-old suspect accused of brandishing a handgun at a Lincoln Boulevard 7-Eleven after employees confronted him and he fled.
Ghost Guns and a Statewide Legal Crackdown
Two of the three recovered handguns were unserialized ghost guns, weapons without traceable manufacturer markings. California has banned the possession, transfer, sale, and manufacture of such unserialized firearms and build kits since Assembly Bill 1621 took effect in 2022, according to the Giffords Law Center.
Under California Penal Code Section 29180, possessing an unserialized firearm can be charged as either a misdemeanor carrying up to a year in county jail or a felony carrying up to three years in state prison, per Rogers | Beltran LLP. State law requires anyone building a firearm to first apply for an official serial number from the California Department of Justice.
A Case That Started With Catalytic Converters
The operation that led police to the Audi in the first place was originally aimed at a different kind of theft. Santa Monica's city council criminalized unlawful possession of catalytic converters under Municipal Code 4.08.830 back in May 2023, after police reported handling roughly 50 such thefts a month with a 99% unsolved rate, according to the Santa Monica Lookout. That local ordinance gave officers explicit authority to inspect unattached converters, and it dovetailed with three statewide laws — Assembly Bills 641 and 1519 and Senate Bill 55 — that took effect in January 2024 mandating VIN markings on converters and penalizing possession of altered ones, per Telesis, amid California's status as the nation's leader in these thefts.
The Audi itself traces back to an armed carjacking investigated by the LAPD's Rampart Division, a 5.5-square-mile patrol district near Downtown Los Angeles roughly 12 miles east of Santa Monica, according to LAPD Online. The vehicle's path from a Rampart-area carjacking to a crash in downtown Santa Monica illustrates how stolen-vehicle cases increasingly cross jurisdictional lines across Los Angeles County.
Part of a Broader Enforcement Surge
The arrest lands amid a marked rise in proactive policing across Santa Monica this year. Year-to-date arrests in the city were up 69% compared to the same period in 2025 as of late August, following five consecutive weeks with more than 100 arrests, according to municipal data published by santamonica.gov. Calls for service citywide have also risen 7.5% over the previous year, the same city data shows.
Santa Monica police have leaned on cross-jurisdictional partnerships before. In January, the department coordinated with LAPD and California Highway Patrol task forces across three counties, resulting in multiple property theft arrests and the seizure of more than $100,000 in stolen goods, Hoodline reported at the time. Whether the two unaffiliated individuals who handled the gun-filled backpack had any connection to the carjacking suspects beyond opportunistic scavenging remains an open question that police have not addressed publicly.
