Police team to blitz truck thefts
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• Police and insurers in East Anglia are to meet next week for the first time in an attempt to check the unprecedented rise in truck thefts in the region.
Figures just released from Norfolk show truck thefts totalling more than Elm in the county last year. Police in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex will pool their information at a meeting in Cambridge on 9 April.They are looking for common threads to explain the crimes.
Police hope to exchange information between nominated officers in the county forces and to produce anti-theft publicity, says Sergeant Terry Pearce of Norfolk police. "We're looking to get the eastern area working together rather than counties working alone," he says.
The meeting, which is believed to be the first of its kind in Britain, has been called by insurance loss adjuster Thomas Ho well following a worrying rise i thefts in East Anglia.
Ben Riley from Thomas H( well says: "Household thefts th value of a tractive unit would ge a lot more public attention an investigation than lost trucks do
He believes a more co-ord nated approach is needed in th face of rising crime and promise to study the systems whic police and port authorities 1.49 for dealing with thefts.
Hauliers are invited to a meeting and will be able to hel formulate a policy for truc theft prevention. The RHA has also been invited.
The extent of the problem faced by operators was highlighted last week when Norfolk police said 100 commercial vehicles had been stolen in the county last year. Another 14 have been stolen in January and February of this year, and since mid-March CM's Crimeline has counted 10 trucks lost in East Anglia and north of London (see Crimeline, page 23).
Although police cannot yet pin-point the cause, some operators in the region believe the vehicles are being stolen by one or two professional gangs and sent to the Continent, where they are stripped down.
Others suggest the vehicles — many of them Volvo FlOs and F12s — are being shipped out for use in Cyprus.
Mike Brown, of RBT Transport, which had an FLIO stolen last week from Diss, sums up hauliers' fury at the thefts: "I feel so bitter about the people who have taken the vehicle, It's taken years to work up to that vehicle and they've just taken it."