As the social media blame game heats up between the UK’s police and tradesmen as to who is not doing enough about thieves damaging their vans to steal the huge amount of tools and equipment that is daily reported missing, one could be forgiven for not perusing the relevant social media sites realising a ‘Catch 22’ situation exists and offering what could be a solution to this epidemic, writes Ken German.
No doubt our tradesmen are indeed suffering huge losses of the very apparatus and paraphernalia they need to make a living, often incurring severe damage to their vehicles, due to forced entry and they are now seeking to vent their feelings on social media sites about the lack of attention shown by the police at their loss. The police they believe have clearly done nothing about either arresting the culprits responsible for busting their vehicles or organising a manhunt for their missing tools.
Bizarrely however the police in the UK now use social media a lot themselves and both their individual and collective websites seem to be awash with photographs of countrywide police station yards and stores containing hundreds of thousands of pounds of stolen tools and equipment all seized from individuals needing to account for their ownership of these suspect items.
Interviews are usually based, as one officer suggested, on a suspect’s reasonable explanation for simply being in possession of 93 electric drills, saws and hammers, 44 jet washers, 27 MIG/spot welders and 17 compressors etc all stacked into their living room.
The problem the police have is they desperately want to restore these items to their original owners quite often to prove they are stolen and a theft occurred just to enable them to charge those responsible. Clearly more often than not they can’t simply because most of the items recovered will have no identification marks on them.
This ‘Catch 22’ situation does appear to have a simple solution. Owners must mark their items, establishing provenance and then if they are stolen the police can recover, identify and restore them to their rightful owners whilst at the same time charging the suspects and hopefully getting a conviction for theft.
For sure some identification marks will have been removed but today’s invisible DNA type markings are inexpensive, easy to use and have been proved to be effective.
There is however a worst case scenario in which the police, having failed to find owners for any of their acquired stolen property could be forced to return all items back to the thieves themselves who would now boast that this property was returned to them by the police having been through their identification process and they are therefore entitled to declare they are the new legal owners.
About the writer: Ken German is a past president of the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators (IAATI) UK branch; visit http://www.iaati.org.uk/our-board/.
