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Who pays for policing?
Page 7
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WEST MIDLANDS Police say a highly successful anti-truck crime initiative may close unless hauliers contribute towards its £200.000-ayear running costs.
The suggestion has provoked outrage with one prominent critic of the force saying it heralds a new era in which the potential victims of truck crime have to pay to ensure it is properly investigated.
Operation Indicate waslaunched in June after regional truck crime levels soared following the end of a similar initiative called Operation Coppergold in 2003.
Superintendent Andy Bebbington, head of Indicate's sevenstrong team of officers, says it has resulted in a 46% drop in truck crime with 50 arrests and the recovery of more than £500,000 worth of stolen property.
-There is no projected end date," he says. "If I get my way it will run for at least another 12 months and I will try to keep it going ad infinitum. But Chris Kelly, chairman of Scania dealership Keltruck, says that at a meeting of regional haulage and business leaders last month, Bebbington painted a much bleaker outlook that heralded a new era of policing.
"He specifically stated that Operation Indicate would end soon unless the industry was prepared to pay £200,000 a year for its continuance.," Kelly reports.
"My comment was that this was outrageous and that if the police, as a professional body, had to resort to this sort of tactic then as honourable men they should resign."
Bebbington confirms that the annual management and staffing costs of Indicate are around £200,000 and he agrees that new forms of funding may eventually have lobe explored.
But he adds: "I would not just come to the industry — there are other funding streams I would try to tap into. The last thing I want to do is come to an industry that is suffering through HGV crime."
Mike Farmer, regional director of the Road Haulage Association who attended last month's meeting, says fighting truck crime is a core police responsibility and hauliers already pay for it through business rates and other taxation.
"We would be extremely disappointed if Indicate did not continue," he says." When Coppergold was disbanded, crime rates went through the roof and that resulted in Indicate being created.
"We don't want to see this cycle being repeated."