Tool thieves - Victorian justice.

[t8hants]

The Victorians knew how to deal with tool thieves!

 

[Trevanion]

These days the police don’t even want to bother chasing up thefts even if you’ve got pretty much all the details of the thieves. He got 10 years of hard labour for pinching one plane whilst most van raids of thousands of pounds of kit never result in an arrest.

 

[Boringgeoff]

Those days a lot of thieves got transported to Australia and many went on to have a better life than if they'd remained imprisoned in England.
My wifes great great grandfather was convicted of sheep stealing at the Wells Assizes in 1857, transported to Fremantle WA in 1859, granted ticket of leave 1861 and conditional pardon in 1863. Of course nicking a sheep is not as serious as making off with a plane.
Cheers,
Geoff.

 

[Inspector]

Hard to blame the cops for not wanting to arrest a thief when the know the courts will let them go before the ink is dry on the arrest reports. Naturally they would be more enthusiastic to arrest if they knew the thief would be tried and sent away for good. :wink:

Pete

 

[D_W]

These days the police don’t even want to bother chasing up thefts even if you’ve got pretty much all the details of the thieves. He got 10 years of hard labour for pinching one plane whilst most van raids of thousands of pounds of kit never result in an arrest.

Not sure how things are in the UK, but in the US, local police pretty much don't care about giving you an official piece of paper so that you can recover insurance money. Until some political reason comes up, they have zero interest in recovering property unless a detective takes a shine on it.

I'd speculate the reason here is that there's no slice in it for police to find anything. They're returning you property whereas other things give them the potential of asset seizure or fines. The laws should be changed so that the police recover a fine from the thief in addition to returning the property to its rightful owner.