Via Iain Dale, is the story that in some areas victims of car crime must pay the police £100 for the privilage of having the case investigated. Oh and if the car is found, the police now charge storage.
Victims of car crime are being told their cases will not be investigated - unless they pay more than £100 for the privilege.
Police say they will not conduct fingerprint or DNA tests to discover who might have stolen a car or motorbike unless a fee is first paid to a private company - in Norfolk it is Recovery Management Services - which is responsible for recovering and storing stolen vehicles.
Owners will be given a straight choice when their vehicle is found - if they want the case taken further, they will have to pay; otherwise it will be left for them to sort themselves.
The new charges, which start at £105, have been introduced by the Home Office but have immediately been attacked as an extra layer of tax, a penalty on those already traumatised by falling victim to crime and also a first step towards the privatisation of policing.
**And there I was thinking that we paid for policing as part of our community charge? But it gets even better, we will not be able to report bank frauds to the police either.
People will no longer be able to report cheque or card fraud or theft to the police under new rules being introduced by the Government.
From 1 April 2007, anyone who is a victim of this type of crime will be told to report it to their bank or building society and not police.
It will now be up to financial institutions to report such crimes to the police, which has lead to fears official figures will not truly reflect the seriousness of the problem.
Andrew Goodwill, managing director of Early Warning, an online card fraud specialist company, said the move is downgrading card fraud from a crime to an industry problem.
**Right so lets take a closer look at that one, often fraud takes place due to errors at a bank level - being lax with customer details, breaches of the Data Protection Act, staff fraud etc etc, but even if it doesn't occur there it is still theft at the end of the day.
Now we have a whole area of crime being in effect taken out of police hands, handed back to the very people who may have caused the problem to occur in the first place. The phrase poacher turned gamekeeper springs to mind here.
Should your bank decide that some stonewalling is called for, and believe me that happens a lot with UK banks, they can keep you hanging on until they decide that they are going to look into this, or maybe even decide that you were to free and easy with your bank details - its easy for them to argue that you should have kept a better eye on your credit card - and decide to do nothing.
Victims of car crime are being told their cases will not be investigated - unless they pay more than £100 for the privilege.
Police say they will not conduct fingerprint or DNA tests to discover who might have stolen a car or motorbike unless a fee is first paid to a private company - in Norfolk it is Recovery Management Services - which is responsible for recovering and storing stolen vehicles.
Owners will be given a straight choice when their vehicle is found - if they want the case taken further, they will have to pay; otherwise it will be left for them to sort themselves.
The new charges, which start at £105, have been introduced by the Home Office but have immediately been attacked as an extra layer of tax, a penalty on those already traumatised by falling victim to crime and also a first step towards the privatisation of policing.
**And there I was thinking that we paid for policing as part of our community charge? But it gets even better, we will not be able to report bank frauds to the police either.
People will no longer be able to report cheque or card fraud or theft to the police under new rules being introduced by the Government.
From 1 April 2007, anyone who is a victim of this type of crime will be told to report it to their bank or building society and not police.
It will now be up to financial institutions to report such crimes to the police, which has lead to fears official figures will not truly reflect the seriousness of the problem.
Andrew Goodwill, managing director of Early Warning, an online card fraud specialist company, said the move is downgrading card fraud from a crime to an industry problem.
**Right so lets take a closer look at that one, often fraud takes place due to errors at a bank level - being lax with customer details, breaches of the Data Protection Act, staff fraud etc etc, but even if it doesn't occur there it is still theft at the end of the day.
Now we have a whole area of crime being in effect taken out of police hands, handed back to the very people who may have caused the problem to occur in the first place. The phrase poacher turned gamekeeper springs to mind here.
Should your bank decide that some stonewalling is called for, and believe me that happens a lot with UK banks, they can keep you hanging on until they decide that they are going to look into this, or maybe even decide that you were to free and easy with your bank details - its easy for them to argue that you should have kept a better eye on your credit card - and decide to do nothing.
There have been quite a few cases where people have had their cards cloned and money taken and the banks have argued this line, the fact that people will not be able to make a police case out of this is going to create more problems for the consumers, more complaints to the FSA and make people more wary us trading online for example.
I know of cases where banks have refused to look into card fraud unless they get a crime number from the police, so what happens in those cases now?
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2 people have spoken:
This IS the UK you're talking about? You have to PAY THE POLICE to get a crime investigated? You know, your government is shutting down about 40% of your post offices too. It looks very much like your government is running out of funds. Maybe they need to import more cheap labor from Pakistan to improve the economy, hmmm?
Or maybe sending all those Pakis and "asylum seekers" back where they came from would help, by getting them off the public dole. Now, there's a thought.
Rastaman
www.islamanazi.com
I'll bet if someone found an unfired .22 cartridge, they would pull out all stops and have Scotland Yard running it through the labs. A simple robbery, which affects tax paying citizens, however, seems to be a different matter.
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