Less than 1% of stolen tools returned to their owner and over 21600 tool thefts reported between 2020-2021. Yet why don’t the police do more to tackle tool theft?

30 comments

1. Why don’t the police do more to tackle [insert literally any crime]. Understaffed, underfunded, overstretched. Plus some of them are busy being terrible rapists and that.

2. Because the time & effort vs the reward (conviction rate) is not worth it. The limited Police resources we have are better used elsewhere.

   Unless the owner has their name engraved on everything how do you prove it was yours? This is why we pay for good insurance!

3. Because unless there is visible blood, there isn’t much evidence on a van. The exterior is awful for fingerprinting and the thieves usually wear gloves.

   If there is no CCTV with a facial image or registration plate of a suspect vehicle there aren’t lines of enquiry.

   Tools are very hard to prove ownership of, a lot of people don’t take any serial numbers and register them, or engrave their tools so even if found, police cannot prove ownership.

   The realistic answer is sadly: stop leaving tools in vans.

   Police are massively overwhelmed. Hundreds of vehicles are broken into every day, hundreds of phones or bags stolen, and hundreds of minor public order offences and assaults. Usually all of this volume crime falls to the same team to investigate. There simply are not the resources.

4. There’s honestly not a lot you or the police can do, insurance is your main option with it being unreasonable to expect someone to unload and load a van worth of tools everyday.
   What I would do is hide one of those tracking tabs in one of the larger tools.

5. Because crimes like this are really hard to solve. You pretty much need to catch the robbers in the act, and chances of that happening are very slim. If there’s a pattern of robberies in a specific area, or the police have been tipped off they will probably mount some sort of operation but other than that its just luck if they catch them or not.

6. > How is it that the police can tell us this is our own fault when they are doing nothing to combat tool theft?

   Because tracing the thieves and getting a conviction is virtually impossible, no matter how much resource the police throw at it.

   The real question is given the high level of thefts, why are vehicle manufacturers not doing more to prevent the thieves breaking into the vans – didn’t it used to be that Ford Transit vans could just be opened with a screwdriver.

7. Because doing more with less is a tory myth. Do you want better services be it social care, police, NHS, fire bridge etc give them more resources

8. > On average, 59 people a day lost their livelihood from tool theft between 2020-2021

   Fucking hell, that’s a grim statistic.

   Not got anything to add here, but man I feel for you. That’s ridiculous

9. Sadly it seems there’s not much they can do with the resources they have apart from giving advice.
   That advice can be delivered with some compassion though, it sounds like the way it was done just left you feeling fobbed off and blamed.

10. In 2021 1% of rape claims resulted in a charge, the whole justice system is not fit for purpose, its been gutted and underfunded.

11. Police don’t typically actually do much solving of crime, sadly. I remember a lot of anger in 2021 because only 6% of crime had been solved. Then again in 2022 when it was reported only 1 in 20 were solved. 🤷‍♂️

12. I have a close family member who is a PC and they are the kind of nice conscientious, caring person you might hope would be in that job.

    I am struggling to think what she could practically do if your van was broken into and tools taken that would have any hope of recovering them. Unless there’s some evidence of who has done it, it’s a real wild goose chase. You would need to stumble across them while investigating other crimes which I assume is why the rate is not 0%.

13. Because people buy second-hand tools at car boots. They wouldn’t get knicked unless there was a market for them

14. I guess the general problem is they tell people with cars not to leave valuables in them – because the resources don’t exist to police every car – and a lot of valuable things are just not easily traceable and it’s easy for thieves to sell the stuff.

    So yeah, it sucks, but you have to find a better place to store either the tools or the van. Insurance might help, excepting that I imagine the insurance company are going to consider the risk high and either demand specific protection to cover the risk (look at the rules you need to follow for most bike insurance if the bike isn’t a cheap hybrid) or they won’t cover them at all.

15. Quite possibly because they are severely under resourced and have to prioritise things like attending murders, attempted murders, actively suicidal people about to harm themselves in public places, seeking vulnerable missing people, dealing with violent drunks kicking the shit out of one another, that sort of thing.

    That doesn’t make what you are going through an iota less shit.

16. [deleted]

17. Because we keep voting in the Tories who keep under funding them.

18. It really is as simple as understaffing and such a high demand.

    Police now priorities calls depending on their threat, risk and harm.

    Therefore, police are attending ‘more important’ matters than your van being broken into where no-one was hurt.

    Blame the cuts and the increased demand.

19. Moreover, why don’t tool companies do more to integrate anti-theft technologies into more expensive tools?

    I do a lot of home DIY, but I have a pretty considerable amount of high end equipment, and having serial numbers linked to a database or something would put my mind at risk slightly.

20. I honestly think it’s a class issue. My friend who was a Cambridge uni Don had their laptop stolen; they came and fingerprinted and gave her alarms. My grandparents lost their life savings (same city a mile away – THE SAME WEEK) no police were interested. They REFUSED to fingerprint even though I suspect I know the person who did it and know they have a record.. I’ve called the police 5-6 times. They’ve never helped me. Abused, raped, assaulted, once I was attacked in a road rage incident. They didn’t give me the option to prosecute just told me they weren’t taking it further.

    All my friends that are rich get a much better response. I don’t call them any more. I’ll probably be arrested when I take it into my own hands, which I will.

21. Ignoring the fact that the police are underfunded. Even if they could act, what are they supposed to do? Someone breaks into your van at night and steals your tools and leaves; unless you have CCTV footage of their face or they jizzed in the van whilst they were in there how is anyone supposed to solve that crime?

    Crimes like this need to be ‘solved’ further up the chain and by that I mean prevention. The police can achieve this by having a stronger presence but most of that lays at the feet of the van owner: better locks, not leaving the tools in the van start with etc.

22. Who is buying all these second hand tools. With that much theft there should be a ridiculous amount of second hand tools, I don’t know anyone who buys second hand tools so why they nicking them if there’s no one buying.

23. Because the police have been systematically broken down by the government to the point where there isn’t a single cop left to patrol the streets, let alone the kind of numbers to pro-actively deter widespread tool thefts which can occur literally *anywhere* somebody decides to park a van.

    Next question

24. Years a go when I was ‘on tools’ I once tried to get compreheisive insurance on the my tools. Most insurance companies just laughed and said “next!” I eventually found one company prepared to offer insurance but the conditions in the T&Cs were so ridiculous it made it a farce. For example, I worked away a lot, staying in hotels. One condition of the insurance was that I had to take all the tools out of my van and store them in my room…a van full of tools for fucks sake! Imagine repeating that twice a day for a week. Imagine the reaction of the hotel staff!

25. Police don’t have enough resources.

    Stolen tools are basically untraceable. Unlike cars, they don’t have number plates*, there’s no V5C, and they aren’t tracked by cameras etc.

    *Yes power tools may have serial numbers but there’s no national database of those serial numbers or who they belong to.

26. The worst part is, if you took justice into your own hands, the police would then take action.

    Didn’t that electrician who hooked his van up to an electrical charge to shock would be thieves get done?

    Imagine you have a wife and kids and some scum comes to take your means of feeding, clothing, and heating them… I’d go werewolf on them.

27. I think people underestimate just how dreadful the state of the UK is, and how badly behaved the UK public are compared to nations you might see as obvious comparators.

    Constant fighting whether alcohol fuelled or not. Domestic violence rampant. Mental health services dreadful and useless so police take on that work as well. Children in private care homes going missing and having to be found whilst private companies are paid for accommodating them and do nothing to find them.

    The public are terribly behaved compared to other European countries which means Police are always going to be up against it to do anything besides fight in vain against the tide. Public services have collapsed and Police are the service of last resort.

    Whilst managing that situation they had 20k police officers cut and about 40k staff support roles. Only now is the police officer cut being reversed, but you now have a workforce of brand new officers rather than experience and skill being passed forward between individuals.

    So why do tool thefts not get investigated? Because the sheer amount of harm, and risk being served up for the Police to deal with makes properly dealing with crime (which is why most of them will tell you they joined) a laughable idea.

    It is to their credit that on the stuff that really does matter- murder, terrorism, emergency calls, sexual offences – that they have managed to continue broadly at the same level of performance that they did prior to 2010 (which was never superb in some areas but has not significantly declined in the way you might have expected). To do this has meant even more brutal impact on crimes like tool thefts.

    They wouldn’t be in a position to perform well given the environment but just to complete the story, they have always experienced real-terms pay cuts since 2010 far beyond those experienced by health workers, teachers, or any other public sector who are on strike, but cannot themselves take industrial action. It is not a recipe for a high performing police force to have excessive demand, insufficient resources, and morale at rock-bottom due to having no industrial rights and having their pay held down as a consequence.

    I have co-authored a few books about policing which is the reason for my interest.

28. Can I just state the obvious, if you gut Policing budgets for 12 years, and cut the number of police staff severely, the quality of the service is going to go down massively. The majority of the UK voted for this. If you don’t want this level of Police service and a NHS on its knees, then you all need to vote for someone else.

29. Do the police do any better on any other kind of theft?

    That copper probably gave you that advice knowing full well how understaffed their force is, and let’s be honest what kind of evidence would you even expect to find? Unless you had a video of the thief and they’re thick enough to not hide their face you’ve got no chance.

30. you should be allowed to defend your property, with lethal force. The kind of person who decides to break into a van to steal tools has forfeited their right to safety anyway.