How many Yellowknife cars get stolen and how many are never found?

“Just from the window I saw the car pull out. My wife chased after it, but it was gone.”

Rajiv Rawat and his family could not believe what they had witnessed at 5am on Monday. Someone had stolen their Subaru Forester from their Yellowknife driveway.

“The thief was diligent enough to be prowling around early in the morning and just happened upon a car warming up in the driveway at that exact moment,” said Rawat.

His wife had turned it on at 4:55am, warming it up to take an exchange student to the airport. By 5:05am, the car was gone.

Though the family filed a report with police, the car has not been seen since.

For years, the accepted wisdom was that Yellowknife – with one road south, hundreds of kilometres long – presented a tough prospect for car thieves.

But RCMP data shows more than 400 vehicles have been reported stolen in the city over the past five years. One in every 25 is never found.

If you’re looking for some form of good news, the number of reported vehicle thefts in Yellowknife this year is down on 2023 and 2024.

There have been 73 reported this year, compared to 104 in 2024 and 121 the year before that.

April and May 2023 each recorded the remarkable figure of 20 Yellowknife vehicle thefts, though all but one was eventually found.

The bad news? More vehicles than ever are disappearing for good.

Police have been unable to recover six of the 73 vehicles reported missing in 2025. Prior to this year, the average was three or four.

While this is the first time Cabin Radio has requested the full set of data, some police records related to vehicle theft had already been reported.

For example, in the fall of 2024, another car taken from a Yellowknife driveway – apparently after the owner’s keys had fallen from their pocket – ended up in Enterprise, hundreds of kilometres away along the highway to Alberta, before police retrieved it.

Officers were able to find it in large part because its owner had a tracking app that pinged once the car returned to cell service in the South Slave.

Many vehicles are found far closer to home. This summer, for example, a youth reportedly took advantage of a fight to steal a vehicle while others were distracted. Within an hour, the vehicle had been found and an arrest made.

In 2021, reporting a spate of 11 car thefts inside two months, police said at the time that the keys had been left in the vehicle in five of those instances.

From 2024: Wait, they stole this VW convertible from where?

Suddenly deprived of their car first thing Monday, Rawat and his family packed off the exchange student to the airport using a cab instead.

He said his daughter was shaken by the incident and he’s unsure what the student made of the ordeal.

“Hopefully it did not leave her with a lasting impression of Yellowknife as some sort of crime capital,” he said.

“But that is becoming increasingly hard to hide.”