Police don’t bother investigating £229 MILLION of Car Thefts every year

A new report claims that police forces in the UK don’t bother investigate a quarter of all car thefts every year – that’s 30,000 cars worth £229 million.

We all feel that police forces in the UK don’t take car crime seriously enough – although they take revenue-generating minor traffic offences very seriously – and a new report from APU uncovers just how extensively UK police forces ignore high-value car crime.

It seems that of the 117,000 cars stolen every year in the UK, half disappear completely, and half of those thefts aren’t considered by the police to be worthy of investigation.

That’s an astonishing 30,000 thefts a year the police don’t think qualify as a crime, despite the value of those cars estimated to be worth a massive £229 million.

In fact, it seems that if a stolen car is owned by a company, the police are likely to treat it as a civil crime.

Neil Thomas, Director of Investigative Services at APU, which commissioned the report, said:

If a vehicle owned by a business rather than an individual – such as a fleet vehicle or garage courtesy car – goes missing, frequently the police tend to consider it a civil crime because the business has effectively allowed someone the use of that car.

Increasing pressure on police forces in the form of budget cuts and overstretched resources means not enough time can be dedicated to the investigation and retrieval of stolen vehicles.

But it isn’t just companies that are affected by the findings of our study – a proportion of those thefts not looked into will be private car owners too.

We can’t think of any other area of crime where the police could dismiss £229 million of losses every year as not worth investigating, and however stretched the police may be with budget cuts, it’s hard to justify their (in)action.

It would appear that losing a valuable car is no big deal, and police officers can’t be spared to investigate, but God help you if you let loose an unguarded comment on social media, or if you happen to be a well-know face from the 1970s who once flirted with a fan, because there seem to be endless officers available to investigate that.

And how exactly does this policy fit with the Association of Chief Police Officers guidelines which state the police have an obligation for “investigating crime and bringing offenders to justice”?

It would seem the most basic principles of policing have been lost in recent years.