If you look to the right you'll see a link to a story about a specialist national police unit set up to counteract vehicle crime: "Stolen V5C etc".
{here's the link as it won't stay on the RH side of your screen forever:-
www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/item.htm?id=6023 }
The story says that the unit has recovered 1200 stolen cars since it was set up in December 2006. The Home Office website says that in 2005, the most recent year for which the data is easy to exctract, there were more than 200,000 cars stolen.
So 1200 recoveries seems a bit inconsequential and another fine example of attempted spin.
Or am I being unfair and, writing from deep within my armchair, failing to appreciate all the problems?
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 16/04/2009 at 13:40
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It is spin and Soviet-style state jobs created for the sake of it. For example the unit which recovers criminal's property which is deemed to be the proceeds of crime and then gives it to victim's charities and the Police, costs more than twice as much to run as it recovers, yet publishes weekly releases of spin.
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Without knowing what happened to the 200,000 cars and how many of these were actually stolen, it's impossible to know if 1200 is a good or bad return.
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The story says that the unit has recovered 1200 stolen cars >>
In different places, it says:
"... AVCIS has recovered vehicles in excess of 700 vehicles with a total value exceeding £6.5 million .. "
"... AVCIS have recovered in excess of 1,200 vehicles .. "
Or am I being unfair and, writing from deep within my armchair, failing to appreciate all the problems? >>
I am no fan of the AVCIS or the numerous other bureaucratic bodies it mentions - especially when its press release use language such as " ... operates within a complex and dynamic environment where national priorities are changing and high-level strategies require constant interpretation and reinterpretation. AVCIS works with partner agencies and all stakeholders ... ".
So I will not comment on how efficient it is in using the money that it consumes.
However, as for Optimist being "unfair" or otherwise, he should bear in mind this piece of data released by the Home Office:
This information relates to cars stolen in England, Wales and Scotland, and does not include the thefts of vehicles which are not cars.
Year, Cars stolen, Cars recovered, Cars not recovered;
2000, 342000, 260000, 82000;
2001, 342000, 263000, 79000;
2002, 315000, 256000, 59000;
2003, 283000, 223000, 60000;
2004, 238000, 177000, 61000;
2005, 200000, 149000, 51000.
[Table layout amended by me to fit forum's structure, but columns still misaligned!].
{Columns now sorted}
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 16/04/2009 at 19:25
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I think the 700 and 1200 figures are because 700 were recovered in the last year and 1200 since the unit was set up at the tail end of 2006, so in two years.
If 149000 cars stolen in 2005 were recovered (and we don't know what proportion of that figure represents police action) the contribution of 600 or 700 a year made by this new unit seems not much of an addition to the recovered figure of 149000.
I liked the language of the press release too and the complete absence of any numeric context in which to place the trumpeted figures of recoveries.
700 cars worth £6.5m is less than £10k a car, so not exactly prestige vehicles stolen to order to go to some funny country in eastern Europe, either.
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... operates within a complex and dynamic environment where national priorities are changing and high-level strategies require constant interpretation and reinterpretation. AVCIS works with partner agencies and all stakeholders ... ".
sorry but doesent this say "we dont have any plans or goals"?
no
Reading it again it actually says " we dont know what we are doing"
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Success or otherwise might be better judged if we knew how many staff were in this unit. 'Spin' may be used but these would be good figures for a handful of officers. You may note that the unit does more than simply actively recover stolen vehicles aiming, by the look of it, to address trends and advise the nations forces accordingly. Increasing knowledge nationwide might have a long term benefit on the overall figures. An example might be gathering national intelligence into thefts of hire cars, and then using that intelligence to arrest offenders and prevent further crimes utilising the same methods.
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this unit is surely better than not having one at all
vehicle theft has been neglected for many years, with some of the large forces having specific units to tackle it, but they can only scratch the surface of the problem and tend to concentrate on the organised crime or top marques/ high value ones only
there should be a dedicated unit at every container port/ferry port....with Tracker equipment...they'd recover thousands
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Since the vehicle identity scheme was brought out for category c vehicles most local stolen vehicle squads were disbanded,i dont think my local dvla office has officers checking chassis numbers anymore on vehicles that dont match up
Thing is proper criminals are now exporting cars as said so unless we have better port checks with more manpower and then the situation will just get worse.
Spare a thought for the poor insurance companies though,they write off a car and pay the customer say £30,000 payout, then the insurance company farm this vehicle to sell as salvage via a salvage internet site to the highest bidder who is usually a foreign concern for lets say £5000, this concern then has the paperwork to export a vehicle of such and such registration as salvage,this paperwork isnt properly checked if the thing goes out in a box so you could literally send out 100 vehicles with this registration,as i say i feel sorry for the insurance company as they will have to pay out 100 times for all these disappearing cars of the same type.
Just think if they crushed the original vehicle,they might have lost £5000 less fees at auction but probably saved £1,000,000 in the bigger picture
bean counters hey
im not even going to mention cat b vehicles that need a waste licence in this country
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Until I was made redundant from my role as risk manager for a car finance company last year, I worked closely with a team within AVCIS, called VFU (Vehicle Fraud Unit). They dealt with finance agreements where there was a fraudulent element to the application that was not spotted until the vehicle had been released. The AVCIS unit worked nationwide and replaced a Met based VFU at Chalk Farm (as an aside, I've walked around the multistorey used by them and the Stolen Vehicle Squad - wow, exotica galore!).
Funded by members of the Finance & Leasing Association, the VFU did a great job in recovering fraudulently obtained vehicle. You would be surprised at the type of vehicle involved, run of the mill 3-4 year old Civics, Corollas, Focusses(ii) that were obtained purely for the purpose of being exported to Algeria et al. I had a Corolla take a lovely trip from Tilbury to Marseilles, on to Algeria where it was impounded, then back to Tilbury via Spain!
Anyway, enough ramblings. I would expect that most of the recovery figure claimed by AVCIS is from the VFU - this cannot be compared with the number of vehicles stolen throughout the whole of the UK.
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DieselBoy said >> I would expect that most of the recovery figure claimed by AVCIS is from the VFU - this cannot be compared with the number of vehicles stolen throughout the whole of the UK. >>
But since, as he also says, the Vehicle Fraud Unit within AVCIS is funded by members of the Finance and Leasing association and recovers cars obtained on dodgy finance agreements, the stats are meaningless in terms of wider policing of stolen cars, and putting them in a press release just makes the whole thing more of an exercise in spin than it seemed at first.
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