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FORGET GUILT EDGED STATISTICS
Page 3
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The road transport industry is many things efficient, dynamic, incredibly safe but it is also uniquely vulnerable. A company would no more think of leaving hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock out on the street than it would leaving its premises unlocked late at night. Yet every day trucks carrying high-value cargoes are out there on the roads or parked up in lay-bys or barely lit industrial estates.
CM has shouted long and loudly in the past trying to make the authorities take notice of this industry's plight, but it seems that unless the problem reaches crisis levels then ifs relegated to the 'to do' pile in the police headquarters. A case in point is the witless cancellation of the hugely successful Operation Coppergold, only for the West Midlands police to find crime levels shooting back up in its absence.
Its replacement, Operation Indicate, now finds itself accused of massaging figures to place the blame on operators for a recent spate of attacks. It claims that 24% of thefts are "exacerbated" by drivers leaving the keys in the vehicle; others say that drivers forced to abandon their trucks are included in those statistics.
Whoever is correct, one thing is sure. Statistics will never give us the context of an incident, a sense of the decisions made and the reasons underpinning them. These stats only tell us that the crime rate is too high and the solution rate too low. Whatever incidents of carelessness occur, it isn't drivers or operators who are guilty of truck theft.
We sympathise with the staff of Operation Indicate but we share the aims of its detractors. Indicate has a unique opportunity to prove to senior police officers and politicians that positive policing with the co-operation of a major industry can have dramatic results. And to waste this chance would be a crime in its own right.