On the 1st of July 2024, I was out and about in the West Midlands, conducting some work when my car was stolen. Unfortunately, this was partly due to my own mistake of leaving the car engine running. The reason for leaving it running was a recurring engine problem that day, which required jump-starting the car if turned off.
I immediately called 999, and to my relief, a police unit responded quickly, arriving within minutes. I explained the situation to them and mentioned that I had tracked one of my phones, which was inside the car, to a nearby estate which i found on the side of the road. The police conducted a search in the vicinity but didn’t find it. Unfortunately, I had no other tracking devices in the car apart from some Air Tags on the keys. Without my iPhone, I couldn’t track them as my Android phone couldn’t bypass the two-factor authentication required.
The police examined nearby CCTV footage from a house but found nothing useful. They informed me that the car would be flagged in their system, so it would be identified if it passed a camera. I was given a crime number for reference.
Upon returning home, I managed to track the Air Tags on my motorbike keys, which were also in the car. The keys were pinging at two different locations. I first tracked the motorbike keys but couldn’t locate them. I then tracked the car keys, and fortunately, this led me to my car. I called 999 again, and a unit was dispatched. They instructed me not to touch the car to allow for forensic examination.
I informed the officers about my dash cam, which recorded front and back. They assured me forensics would check it. Later that evening, I was notified that my car was towed to a garage. The next morning, I discovered that no forensic examination had been conducted.
I contacted the police to inquire about the forensics, and their response was disheartening. They only forensically examine vehicles if they are part of a series or stolen in a burglary dwelling. My car did not meet these criteria, so no forensics were performed. This response was frustrating, especially since there had been several car thefts in the area, which I would classify as a series.
My insurance company recovered the vehicle, and I went to inspect it for damage. I retrieved the memory card from the dash cam, which revealed the vehicle used by the thief and its number plate. There were at least three people involved, and the road was busy at the time, suggesting potential witnesses and additional dash cam footage from other vehicles. However, the delay in forensics meant this evidence was likely lost.
I handed the memory card to the police, who bagged it as evidence. They promised to notify the officer in charge, but it could still take days or weeks before the footage is reviewed.
After supplying them with the dash cam footage, I got a response back from them saying the following:
“Thanks for the footage, I’ve viewed it. The correct reg is DA65PUV which is a cloned vehicle, very likely stolen on false plates.”
Now, I received the last message from the police stating they are closing the report. My final thoughts are that this clearly goes to show the state of the police force. In the last message, they don’t even know I got the car back, so putting a marker on it is a waste of time. Plus, what other lines of inquiry would they pursue if they had the car? I’ve already been told that they wouldn’t do forensics on it. Have the police tracked down the owners of the other cars on the road at the time, which you can see in my dash camera footage, to see if they have footage of the thieves? The answer to that would be no.
There has been a whole number of car thefts in the area, and to say I managed to find my car with the potential of DNA or fingerprints on it that could help identify and capture these people, and yet they won’t do the forensics on it, is absolutely shocking. As always, police will go out of their way to stop people from exercising their lawful legal rights. Yet, when it comes to actual police work, they don’t seem to want to know as much. This just goes to show the two-tier policing system in this country.
This is exactly why there is so little confidence in the police force from the members of the public. If they want to try and start building bridges, they need to start doing proper investigations.
