The National Insurance Crime Bureau's (NICB) 2010 Vehicle Theft Study, "Hot Spots," contains vehicle theft rates and rankings for Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States from 2008.

The United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas according to published standards that are applied to Census Bureau data. The term "core based statistical area" (CBSA) became effective in 2000 and refers collectively to metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas. The 2000 standards provide that each CBSA must contain at least one urban area of 10,000 or more population. Each MSA must have at least one urbanized area of 50,000 or more inhabitants.

To calculate the overall theft rates of cities and regions, the NICB matched ZIP code data to the corresponding CBSA code. This data is then used to create a table of theft records from the time period using the data from the above step to identify thefts within CBSA. The resulting table contains CBSA/MSA names, number of thefts, and population. A calculation is then performed (number of thefts/prior year's estimated population *100,000) rounded out to two decimal places. The data is then ranked from highest to lowest.