The lone ranger
Page 13
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Detective Sergeant Sue Coutts runs the national road freight crime intelligence unit, TruckPol, helping bring organised crime groups to heel
Words: Hayley Pink / Images: Graham Richardson
THE ROAD TRANSPORT sector employs 4% of the UK’s workforce and pumps £1bn into the Treasury each year, yet when a truck-load of goods worth £1m is stolen, it is deemed of no more importance than an individual’s mobile phone being snatched from a car. Why?
Perhaps because historically there has been no mechanism for recording levels of freight crime, let alone separating such data from car crime statistics, which is where TruckPol comes in.
TruckPol is the national road freight crime intelligence unit. It collates, analyses and disseminates data to police forces around the UK. Based in Warwickshire, the organisation is part of the Association of Chief Police Oficers’ Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (AVCIS), which looks at all vehicle crime in the UK.
Now, while you might expect a huge operation, the reality is somewhat different. TruckPol is run by one person, Detective Sergeant Sue Coutts, with support from her trusty assistant, Helen.
Coutts explains: “People think TruckPol is a really big unit, but it’s not at all – it’s just the two of us. It’s me and my assistant Helen, who deals with the admin work. There’s also two guys in the ofice who work on the intelligence side of AVCIS, so I do have some support.
“The thing I’m lacking is an analyst, but I beg, steal and borrow analysts from the other forces,” says Coutts, who has 25 years’ experience in the police force.
Having joined the organisation in 2010 on secondment from Warwickshire police, Coutts is passionate about promoting TruckPol to the road transport sector. “It’s about raising TruckPol’s proile within the industry, because not enough people know about us. And we’re not just there for the police, we’re there for the industry as well,” she says.
Disappointingly, TruckPol receives no funding from the Home Ofice, as this was cut in April as part of the public sector budget cuts. Instead it relies on industry support and sponsor ship. It does receive a little inancial backing from the North Sea Freight Intelligent Transport Solutions project, which is a European-funded initiative that provides a phone app for drivers in the North Sea region highlighting safe parking areas and trafic hotspots.
But Coutts is keen to point out that TruckPol is there for the whole of the industry: “Yes we want sponsorship, but you don’t have to be a sponsor to contact us,” she explains. “Any driver can ring me if they’ve got a suspicious incident that they want to report, or they’ve got a crime that they’ve reported to the local police and they want to make sure we know about it.”
On-the-road information
And it is this on-the-road information from drivers that is crucial to TruckPol’s intelligence gathering when it comes to thwarting organised freight crime.
“One of the main things my police colleagues say is that it would be helpful if drivers did report suspicious incidents. So if they are disturbed at night [by someone outside their cab], then let their local police know.
They can ring and say ‘I’m at Hotwood