| On Topic
Agricultural Crime- On Track for recovery
The cost of rural crime in the UK has been estimated at a staggering £ 39m and many farmers who feel under siege from thieves are now turning their farmyards into fortresses just to protect their homes, families, properties and livelihoods.
T he impact of crime on rural communities has been devastating to the extent that some farmers are now giving up the profession all together because of continuous thievery. Most stolen items appear to be tools followed by Quad vehicles. Livestock theft including sheep rustling cost the country £ 2.2m and Agricultural vehicle theft at £ 5.4m whilst down on 2015 was boosted by the huge theft of Land Rover Defenders which had risen by almost 17 % from £ 1.8m to £ 2.1m between 2015 and 2016.
Cost of UK rural crime in 2016 was recorded as England £ 33.8m, Northern Ireland £ 2.5m, Scotland £ 1.6m and Wales £ 1.3m with Lincolnshire being the worst-hit English county with a loss of £ 2.5m.
In the last 5 years the total loss to the UK for Agricultural crime has been calculated at over £ 203 million pounds with the blame set mainly on blatant European thieves who now exploit our transport links and can move stolen items into mainland Europe in a matter of hours.
The news that theft and fraud figures from the private, commercial and leisure sectors of motorcycling appear to be all heading north at a great rate of knots was undeniably a shock to the government officials and senior police officers attending the UK ' s National Vehicle Crime Conference held in Loughborough recently.
Much concern was shown regarding the
12 | Farming Monthly | September 2017
dramatic changes in the current crime epidemic not helped of course by the continued depletion of police resources. Indeed the prediction of at least a 10 % to 20 % increase in the theft of machinery on last year and that more motorcycles trikes and quads are now stolen than sold created an agreement for a complete rethink on how the police deal with this type of theft altogether.
It was good to hear however that some battles against the thief are being won particularly in technology where the invisible DNA marking systems for instance have shown they are a positive aid to the recovery of machines and their parts.
The success of stolen property being recovered using these systems has not only been hailed by the police as a welcome aid in the recovery of property but they now appear to act as a deterrent to theft in their own right.
Suggested successful marking kits Datatag & Selectamark
It is the tracking device however that appears to have broken through as today’ s‘ most wanted’ piece of technology desired by paranoid owners who simply wants their tractor or quad returned quickly after theft. With tracking companies offering a 90 % recovery rate and promising that speedy return these clearly appear to be the crime prevention devices to have.
The tracking device has been around for some time and whilst there are quite a few‘ cheap’ self-monitored systems available from the internet that may help you trace your property if it’ s been dumped somewhere locally, it’ s still likely that actually recovering it could be rather difficult.
Most of the today’ s subscription-based 24 / 7 tracking companies immediately notifies their base the moment a piece of machinery is moved without the keys in the ignition. It’ s then they will contact the owner, check that it’ s not still in their possession( for instance, if they forgot to deactivate it), then immediately begin tracking it.
The companies support staff, many of who are former police officers are then deployed to assist local police in seizing the machine or gaining access to where the tracker indicates it to be. That appears to be the requirement nowadays as there are no rights to enter private property without police help and dependent on the circumstances a warrant may be necessary.
The technology behind these devices often referred to as‘ GPS trackers’ is varied and today there are several types each offering their own advantage.
The majority of subscription-based tracking systems currently on the market today use cellular communication to talk to a server when the craft goes into an alert state( for instance, if shaken). Others check in only at various programmable times of the day, at which point the device then updates its location.
Many suspicious thieves already shake an item to see if it has an alarm fitted and it’ s becoming more common for them to do the
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