Vehicle Related Thefts: Practice Messages from the British Crime Survey. Briefing Note 6/01. Home Office

This briefing note sets out to provide a national overview of vehicle related theft, gleaned from the British Crime Survey (BCS). It seeks to provide a national benchmark against which local police forces and crime reduction partnerships can compare local data, to provide a basis on which to respond to the particularities of a local picture. Much of the statistical information in this note was contained in the main report on the 2000 British Crime Survey (BCS- see Kershaw et al. (2000)), but here more explicit links are made between BCS results and implications for local crime reduction practice. Analogous notes on burglary (Budd, 2001) and violence (Mattinson, 2001) have also been published. Result in this note present a picture of reducing thefts and opportunities for further reduction.Vehicle-related thefts have consistently accounted for over a fifth of crimes measured by the BCS throughout the 1990s. The levels have fallen by around 30 % since their peak in 1993, BCS estimates indicate that there were just under 3 million vehicle related thefts in 1999.They cover three categories of theft: Thefts of vehicles Thefts from vehicles (including thefts of property left inside vehicles and vehicle components) Attempted thefts of or from a vehicle. Attempted thefts of and from vehicles are considered together as it is often unclear whether the offender was targeting the vehicle, or property/vehicle components. This briefing note examines the following: Who is at most risk of suffering vehicle theft? Levels of vehicle security. How did offenders get into or try to get into vehicles? What was stolen? Which cars are most likely to be stolen? (based on information from the Car Theft Index) Recovery rates for stolen vehicles. Were incidents reported to the police and insurers? Implications for crime reductive practice are spelled out. These include focusing effort on groups with high risk, including those with prior offences suffered. Also advocated is extra attention on the safety of vehicles parked at or near the victim’s home, where most vehicle crime occurs. The note does not discuss incidents involving commercial vehicles, as these are outside the scope of the BCS1. A more extensive analysis of vehicle-related thefts is contained in Section 5 of the main report on th