My dad tells stories of snowstorms back in the 70s & 80s where they would leave their truck at the end of the driveway with the keys in it and unlocked.
We live very rural (my grandparents were my neighbours growing up), and snowstorms could get bad. So everyone left their vehicles out with the keys in case someone broke down on the side of the road so that they could hop in the truck and turn it on to stay warm. Never had a vehicle so much as damaged, much less stolen.
I think your experiences are clouding your judgement. Just because you grew up then doesn't mean you have knowledge of everyone who grew up then, nor on everyone growing up now.
I am not much younger than you and I distinctly recall parents and police responding to several incidents. But same deal, just because i saw it doesn't make it universally true.
Maybe it was also local to where I was. It was just my general experience that it happened enough to be quite surprising that not one thing was done about it.
For example we had a neighbour when I was growing up who was known to have lost his teaching job for exposing his penis to his students. He exposed himself to my mother one day, and apparently to several other neighbours. His wife was a piano teacher, and despite what he had done pretty much everyone went to piano lessons with her. He would meet you at the door in nothing but his underwear. Nobody did a thing about it. It just seemed very normalized to me.
I did that well into the late 90s when I was staying with my grandparents. Nothing to do with snowstorms. If someone was stupid enough to risk walking that far out of the way, and getting shot, they probably deserved that old Honda.