NaVCIS puts cargo crime in the conference spotlight

The organised nature of cargo theft from trucks was highlighted by Mike Dawber, the field intelligence officer at the freight desk of the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (NaVCIS) to the Logistics UK Transport Manager conference in Somerset.

But the response to cargo theft from the authorities was not so well-organised, he admitted.

There was no single Home Office code for recording freight crime, so not even the total number or value of such incidents could be calculated. Rachel Taylor, the Labour MP for the logistics heartland of North Warwickshire and Bedworth, was sponsoring a Private Member’s Bill to grant a code to freight crime and set sentencing guidelines, and this was at the Second Reading stage in the House of Commons.

Mr Dawber, a transport industry-funded serving police officer said that there were at least 5000 incidents a year of theft from trucks, but it was acknowledged that these thefts were “very much under-recorded”.

He had supported 48 investigations last year, all cargo thefts from vehicles of over 7.5-tonnes GVW.

The gangs specialising in cargo theft were centred in Leeds, Liverpool, Essex and Birmingham, but the people involved were prepared to travel for up to four hours to reach their targets.

Sometimes ‘insider knowledge’ was used, but it appeared that in most cases the criminals just had a very good idea of what would be in which vehicles based on location and direction of travel.

‘Curtain-slashing’ was often dismissed as an opportunistic or minor theft, but this was not the reality in 95 per cent of cases. Mr Dawber showed video of a classic ‘side-by side’ theft where a truck with loose curtains pulled up beside a targeted curtainsider. A crew inside the body of the loose-curtained truck pulled their curtains back, entered the target vehicle by slashing its curtains, and transferred the cargo to their truck, which then had its curtains swiftly fastened and went on its way. It was virtually impossible for CCTV to identify the miscreants as most of them were concealed in the vehicles throughout.

More spectacular were the ‘rollover’ thefts, which looked like scenes from the ‘Fast & Furious’ movies. A pursuit vehicle would chase a truck know to be carrying mobile phones or laptops.

It would tailgate the target, someone would climb from its sunroof onto the bonnet, then cut the locks off the rear doors of the target truck. The pursuit vehicle would fall back while the truck’s doors opened, then close in again to enable items to be grabbed out of the back of the truck.

While these thefts may sound like fiction, Mr Dawber maintained there had been 16 of them in the UK last year.

Stolen goods were fed back into the economy by various routes. Market stalls, car-boot sales, and independent wholesalers accounted for many consumer goods, while prescription drugs were marketed through the dark web.

Incredibly, a large consignment of barbeque equipment stolen from a truck in Stafford had found its way onto the shelves of a national supermarket!

Mr Dawber slammed the lack of safe truck paring in the UK.

“Last year there were 1,500 incidents of cargo thefts at MSAs, which are supposed to provide safe parking. Truck parks need to be secure. This means fencing, segregation from other road users, lighting, security patrols and barrier entry/exit,” he said.