Memorandum submitted by Salvo
MANY DATABASES
Salvo's principle message is that databases
are proliferating so no one database will win the race to supremacy.
The Government should concentrate on bringing together the various
interest groups. The Government should also decide what the recommended
national database is aiming to achieve.
WHY HAVE
DATABASES
Databases exist to reduce crime. Interestingly
one of your witnesses was asked about the Kent Bill. Earlier this
year we asked Kent Police if the Kent Bill had reduced theft and
burglary in Kent. The answer they gave was no. People lose sight
of their objectives very easily it seems.
TYPES OF
DATABASE
There are two broad types of database—open
access and restricted or closed access. Closed systems tend to
exclude people from having a role in helping to catch criminals
and recover goods. Open systems seem more effective at recovering
the types of stolen goods we cover. We do not know if closed or
open systems catch more criminals. We do know that the police
need to seek and avail themselves of the public's help if they
are to succeed.
ADVISORY PANEL
The remit of the Illicit Advisory Panel is too
broad. The Panel may know a lot about high value antiques from
Iraq, Rome and London antiquities, but they know much less about
staddle stones from Northampton, cheap fireplaces in Bangor and
stolen garden ornaments. The Panel's solutions will close doors
to certain criminals but open many doors to others. Care is needed
before action is taken.
COMMITTEE'S
QUESTIONS
What do you do?
Salvo is a partnership of three that networks
information about antique and reclaimed materials from buildings
and gardens to dealers, DIY-ers, mainstream construction, police
and heritage organisations. Salvo started in 1992. In 1995 we
started the "Salvo Code" for dealers which now has 110
signees, mainly UK, but also European and North American. SalvoNEWS
is a printed and e-mailed newsletter, each edition of which circulates
to between 500 and 2,500 people. In tandem with our aim of helping
to reduce the 33,000 tonnes of reclaimable materials landfilled
very day in the UK by stimulating the market, we started the "Salvo
theft alerts" database to warn the trade about illicit materials
entering the market in the hope that the trade would:
1. Avoid buying stolen items.
2. Help seize and recover stolen items.
3. Help in the arrest and identification
of criminals.
Benefit for the trade
Salvo Theft Alerts helps the legitimate trade
avoid stolen items. Salvo Theft Alerts may also help the dodgy
trade work out whether something they know to be stolen may be
difficult to sell because it is "hot". Each theft alert
contains the crime reference number and a police contact telephone
number. Since interceptions of stolen goods are often hundreds
of miles from, or even in a different country to, the original
theft, it is crucial that police crime reference numbers and telephone
numbers appear alongside each theft alert to help police local
to the intercept tie up the theft with the originating police,
in order to make instant arrests and seizures. Without police
details goods could be avoided by dealers but no items would ever
be intercepted.
Case in point
Several years ago on a Friday night a wrought
iron balustrade was smashed off with a sledgehammer extensively
damaging the stone staircase of a listed Georgian customs house
that had been empty for years. A local dealer told us that night.
The local police were also told. We sent out an e-mail to the
trade that night. The next afternoon, in a dealer's yard about
60 miles from the crime, a van turned up in the back of which
was a load of wrought iron stair balustrade. The written description
matched. The dealer arranged for one member of staff to engage
the van-driver in conversation while he called the police. Twenty
minutes later three squad cars turned up, lights flashing and
tyres screeching into a yardful of bemused Saturday shoppers.
The police took a look inside the van and called the police in
the town of the theft to confirm that a crime had taken place.
It was Saturday afternoon and no-one was available to help. They
tried to contact the owner of the building from where the balustrade
had come, but they could not find out who owned it. They tried
for an hour, holding the van in the dealers yard and generally
disrupting that dealer's prime Saturday selling time. It was obvious
that the material was stolen, but the police refused to act. Without
a crime reference number they felt powerless to arrest (they could
be accused of making a false arrest) and they knew the CPS would
not proceed. So they let the van-driver and the goods go, and
that was the last that was ever seen of him or the balustrade.
The dealer who made the intercept was very unhappy, and we vowed
never to run a Salvo theft alert without a crime reference number
again. We do, however, now run theft alerts called H2i (hard to
identify) which alerts the trade to possibilities of stolen items.
Benefit for the police and/or Customs and Excise
Salvo theft alerts have helped the police by:
1. Helping to circulate information quickly
by e-mail on the same day to the trade, some auction houses and
12 UK police FIB's.
2. Helping to recover stolen goods.
3. Helping to arrest and convict criminals.
4. Helping to check seized goods against
our database especially when the seizure is by police who may
have little expertise in antique-identification from photographs.
We have not heard of Customs using Salvo Theft Alerts. They may
do but we would not necessarily know.
Coordination or cooperation with the police/Customs
and Excise
Salvo does not co-ordinate the police in any
way. We have never been involved operationally. We merely pass
on information given to us by the police and public. We do cooperate
with the police and will do whatever is asked. We would like to
be more involved with police policy but have never been invited.
Compatibility between the various databases (and
between the databases and the ACIS database available online)
These days all databases are compatible in a
computing sense. Salvo has started to join data from different
databases together in real time. Data from one of our databases
now appears on a GIS map based recycling database run by the Building
Research Establishment. In future there will be thousands of theft
databases. We are devising a system for them all to be searchable
with one click of the mouse.
The contribution of your database to "due
diligence" by the trade
Salvo Theft Alerts is an open database. We have
thought long and hard about "closing" our database but
have not yet seen any compelling reason for so doing. It has been
suggested that we should do this by Trace and ALR. However, Salvo
Theft Alerts statistically is the best performer of the three
with an average 14% recovery rate between 1995 and 2000. One reason
given for restricting access is that it somehow proves due diligence.
However, it is easy for us to know if a dealer has checked our
database.
Proving due diligence using an open database
If in court a dealer said, "I checked Salvo's
database on 23 March and the fireplace was not on it", we
could absolutely and easily verify whether or not the fireplace
was on the database on 23 March. We could not check whether the
dealer checked the database, but that is academic if the item
was not on it. If the dealer claimed to have checked the database
and not found the fireplace but the fireplace was on it on 23
March, then a claim of due diligence by the dealer will not have
been proved. If the dealer claimed that the database was "down",
whether or not it was is irrelevant, unless he rang us up he would
not have proved due diligence.
The problem is that due diligence checking is
not realistic if a dealer has to check a dozen databases. This
is why we are looking on single click pan-database searching.
Such systems cut across commercial and operational interests.
If they are in the public interest perhaps they should be publicly
regulated and funded by a levy on insurers.
The ALR have a closed system although a criminal
could pay to search their system. Trace have a closed system although
they print theft alerts in their paper and anyone can subscribe.
So neither have strictly closed systems at all.
At present we do keep log files of requests
made to the database and these could be used by police computer
forensics to find out who made the request. I guess this could
be of limited use to the legal system. Our database is not sufficient
in the sense that it does not have every theft of architectural
and garden antiques logged on it. We reckon to receive information
on between 5 and 10% of reported thefts, and we receive between
100 and 200 theft alerts per year. So we guess that there are
around 1,000-2,000 architectural and garden thefts a year in total
in the UK. Due diligence with respect to unlawfully removed objects,
as opposed to stolen ones, has not been considered by the Government,
but there are perhaps so few cases as to make it not worthwhile.
Salvo Theft Alerts would easily cope with these too. We believe
our system is as powerful as the major search engines, so we should
not have a problem with bandwidth, capacity and usage.
The balance to be struck between "recovery
of goods" and "apprehension of criminals"
This is a good question. Why do we have theft
databases? Is it to alert the trade to allow them to avoid items,
or is it to catch criminals or recover stolen goods? Simple guidance
is needed. At present, if a dealer acts to help catch criminals,
he or she usually exposes their staff and business to danger.
The police say "do nothing, take details. let the criminals
go and phone them afterwards". The insurers say, "do
nothing, we don't want the stuff back, we will write off the loss
on an actuarial basis". The heritagists say, "don't
deal in architectural and garden antiques in the first place,
then there would be no problem (apart from bigger landfill sites)".
Many dealers ignore the dangers and have a go, often resulting
in the recovery of goods and, less often, arrests and convictions.
Salvo does not take rewards, and the best dealers are not influenced
by them. We have not seen evidence that rewards work, and I believe
they may encourage higher value crime, and corruption. The simplest
way of reducing crime would be if licensed dealers were allowed
to buy known stolen goods cheap to repatriate to the losers, for
which insurers would then foot the bill. For uninsured goods the
dealer would foot the bill. The dealer would take details, registration
numbers, photos etc of the seller (who most of the time is not
the thief), and pass that information to the police. The police
could then decide to act or not, but at least the goods would
be recovered. At present when known stolen goods turn up in a
van in a reputable dealer's yard, the police generally do not
act, the criminal gets away, and the goods disappear. It should
be stated that some theft is likely to be insurance fraud anyway.
Insurance fraud example
This happened a few years ago. A dealer buys
a nice pair of urns from a county gent who turns up in his yard.
The dealer pays £1,500 by cheque. The vendor lives 100 miles
away. A few days later a Salvo theft alert is raised and, sure
enough, it is for the theft of the same urns. The dealer contacts
the police who visit the loser and ask him to go and identify
the urns. The owner turns up and says they are not his urns. The
dealer can plainly see they are, but if the owner denies it, what
can you do? It turns out that the insurers have paid £5,000
for the loss of the urns. So the owner has made a cool £6,500
out of the deal, enough for a family skiing holiday if other finances
are a bit low.
The UK's effort in relation to systems in other
countries
The UK has the most honest dealers and the best
theft databases. My guess would be that incidence of crime is
lowest, and recovery highest, in the UK. However, there is a problem
and the situation is not rosy. Currently the UK's appetite for
interceptions is going down, our theft database is getting less
information, crime has shifted from high to lower value, harder
to identify, items and is increasing; and recovery has plummeted.
What progress has been made towards a comprehensive
national database since the Committee's, and ITAP's, recommendations
in 2000 (not to mention ITAP's firm demarche in 2002)
Salvo held meetings with the Art Loss Register
in 2001 and with Trace in 2002, both of whom are able to input
thefts on to Salvo's system directly. Of the 12 subscribing police
forces, one uses the system directly, two others are considering
it. The rest forward information about theft to Salvo by post.
Most police forces seem to find theft databases operationally
problematic. The ones that have joined Salvo Theft Alerts seem
to believe that making theft alerts public encourages intercepts
and recoveries, and reduces crime. The idea of a home office database
would not be very good in our field. The police do not generally
have the degree of expertise needed to keep databases accurate
enough to be useful.
Police expertise example
During a periodic cull of Salvo Theft Alerts
to see how many thefts in a police area had been recovered, we
asked about the theft of a large statue of a "heron"
(which was in fact a crane). "Well," the officer said,
"it's not surprising we haven't found it yet, we were looking
for a 4ft herring".
Models for public-sector developments in this
area
None.
Do the police themselves have the necessary expertise
and resources to implement a specialist database of this sort
They do not have the expertise, and throwing
money at them is not the answer. The trade need one place to search
for stolen objects, yet more theft databases are being set up
around the world every day.
Due diligence
In the USA due diligence is a legal requirement
upon the owner in the event of a theft to be diligent about looking
to recover the stolen goods. If they are not they cannot claim
on their insurance for the loss. We should adopt this in Britain.
No-one can help reduce theft if theft is not reported and if insurers
do not care about recovery. In the UK insurers have claimed that
garden theft has reached epidemic proportions in order to frighten
people into paying unnecessary premiums. Then when thefts occur
the insurers do nothing and just pay up. Insurers must be diligent
too.
10 November 2003
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