There's a tendency to view car theft as a relatively "minor" crime.

For instance, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has 24 detectives assigned to the homicide unit, handling an average of 12 slayings per month. But it assigns only 13 detectives to handle an average of 1,800 car thefts per month. With that kind of allocation of manpower, the pathetic 7 or 8 percent of local car theft cases that ever see an arrest grows easier to understand.

Well, murders are indeed more important than car thefts. But an attitude that says "Kids will be kids; hot-wiring a car and taking a joy ride is just a youthful rite of passage" is far too widespread, and has allowed this crime to balloon to a point where it seriously erodes such old and necessary shared values as civility, respect for property, and a feeling that we're safe in our homes, parking lots, and driveways.

Las Vegas is now the second worst locale in the nation for car thefts -- and moving up fast on the embarrassing top ranking still held by Modesto, Calif. A whopping 7,240 vehicles were stolen here during the first quarter of this year -- a 23 percent increase from that same period a year ago.

The costs of tolerating a high rate of car theft are considerable. The most obvious, of course, are the high insurance rates paid by all Las Vegas area drivers -- even those who have never had a car stolen.

But there are other costs, very real if harder to measure. If the hard work it takes to acquire and maintain an attactive property -- be it a house, a fence, or the car in the driveway -- deserve neither respect nor protection, why should anyone bother? As the rich withdraw inside their gated compounds, are the rest of us to be left to be picked clean?

A car thief deprives a wage-earner of his or her means to get to work. Even among the 80 percent of cars recovered, most have sustained thousands of dollars worth of damage, and a quarter are stripped to the frame. The costs of such interruptions of our peaceful lives go far beyond the initial dollar signs. It's hardly a recipe for civility when the victims of such crimes start day-dreaming of acquiring the Model SUX-6000 depicted in the 1987 film "Robocop" -- a car which electrocutes the would-be car thief, dumps him out the side, and then serenely re-locks itself.

But the problem here doesn't start with police officers who now urge us to "just call it in." Judges who consider themselves overburdened by such "petty" crimes and thus don't treat such an offender seriously till he's been caught the 10th or 12th time feed the dangerous notion that this is all "no big deal."

On the bright side, Lt. Robert DuVall, the newly installed commander of Metro's auto theft detail, vows to borrow the "bait-car" program that's been effectively collaring more habitual car thieves in Dallas, as well as the multi-leveled approach which has proven such a success in Anaheim, Calif. -- proactively concentrating on chop shops, professional car thieves, and the like.

Good. And about time.

But it all does little good if the punks in question get treated like 6-year-olds pocketing an apple from the fruit stand ... again, and again, and again.

Yes, the prisons are crowded.

And yes, a first-time offender who "stole" his dad's car without permission may deserve a break.

But most such offenders have to be taught the real meaning of "$4,000 in damages and lost wages" by being made to work and pay it all back, for as many months as it takes.

If our courts can't accomplish even that, the battle for civility and property rights -- the battle to remain a system of law and not of anarchy and/or vigilante justice -- is going to be lost.