BT copper-cable choppers cop 16 months in the cooler
Two men have been jailed for 16 months for nicking large volumes of copper cable from BT's network. The pair posed as workmen to swipe the metal, cutting off telephone and internet connections to hundreds of homes and businesses. Daryl Carslake, 30, and Gavin Marriott, 28, both of Epsom, Surrey, were sentenced at Southwark Crown …
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if its anything like where I live
Then the plod check the registration and notice its registered to a particular address and then suddenly find they have some paperwork to shuffle.
Magically you can live in certain places and be immune to police intervention.
>> police officer had no idea what road he was on <<
Many years ago, the policeman would have a beat and would probably only be responsible for a very small area. These days, they cover an enormous patch; talking to one copper a few years ago on a Sunday, there was just him and two other plods to cover 100 sq miles - population approx. 0.7 million people
They have a shitty job and very little thanks for doing it.
Evidence
> "Just shows the quality of the police force"
Is it a question of quality?
I view the police force as an experiment that has failed. For example, there has been an abject failure to prevent the ownership of unlicensed firearms. Our police patently do not stop most crime and there's no evidence that there would be more crime if there were no police.
Instead of tinkering with 'police reform', our rulers could introduce competing institutions to control crime and further institutions to assess their results.
Re: Evidence
If you read Inspector Gadgets police blog (written by a serving police inspector) you will eventually come to the conculsion that the police are doing their job keep catching the criminals, they keep dragging them in front of the court.
The problem is that the criminals don't receive a punishment that puts them off reoffending.
Gadget blames the CPS (Criminal Protection Service or Couldn't Prosecute Satan!) and the courts. However, looking at the courts they have "sentencing guidelines" imposed from the politicians, who also set "targets" which police officers can be sacked if they don't meet.
Who is ultimately responsible for the current state of affairs? I don't think it's the police or the courts, I think it's the politicians.
It's really down to the quality of the criminals
The competence of the police wasn't really tested in this case due to the fact that these muppets actually went back to the scene of the crime the next day to try and steal more stuff, although you might argue they were just playing the odds, what with it being a one in a million shot that BT engineers would actually be on site the next day.
They quite possibly put the fake plates on when it was a worksite and put real plates on to move it around.
Should be 5 years at least, ideally 10?
Cost per prisoner £41,000. 2 prisoners x 10 years = £820,000
Haven't really thought that through, have you?
A 3 year 7pm - 7am curfew and long term (5 year) community service sentence would be a better option. They can't go out robbing at night and have to organise their lives round a 4 day week for the next 5 years while working to put something back into the community.
Like cleaning dog piss and graffiti off green cabinets, for example.
Re: Should be 5 years at least, ideally 10?
>>Cost per prisoner £41,000. 2 prisoners x 10 years = £820,000<<
Any idea what the cost was to all the people that lost their connections? ( I haven't, but when we lost connections due to a fire in the ground damaging cables, the loss of business over 3 days was about £100,000 for the one company)
>>A 3 year 7pm - 7am curfew and long term (5 year) community service sentence would be a better option.<<
Assuming that they would actually abide by the terms of the service order. Based upon how effective these things normally are, it probably won't stop them for more than the time it takes them to realise that they have no milk / beer / curry / fags etc. Once they see that there is no penalty, they'll be straight back to nicking copper cable.
>>Like cleaning dog piss and graffiti off green cabinets, for example.<<
That I could definitely support; let the buggers out for parts of the day and earn their keep for a change.
Re: Should be 5 years at least, ideally 10?
"Like cleaning dog piss and graffiti off green cabinets, for example."
No, that's low value. Far better to have a Prison Service Labour Corps that does navvy work. Give cons the choice of 23 hours in a cell with a bucket, or "volunteering", and make them dig the trenches and lay the ducts for fibre.
no disincentive
Seriously - these twats caused millions of pounds of disruption and they get a slap on the wrist.
I know it's expensive to keep 'em in jail but there needs to be long sentences to deter wanton destruction of critical infrastructure. The threat of 10-15 years banged up is the kind of thing which puts 'em off.
As for your idealistic views: I live near Epsom and we (neighbours and myself) had to deal with a persistent offender from Epsom who repeatedly breached bail and his curfew. The police end up doing FUCK ALL about it - and when they did finally arrest him (several times), he didn't get any punishment for bail or curfew breaches (merely a warning from the bench which he ignored)
Ditto on his community service which he refused to do - and got away with not doing.
In the end he finally killed someone and got put away for that, which ended a couple of years of hell for everyone in the nearby area.
Re: no disincentive
"In the end he finally killed someone and got put away for that, which ended a couple of years of hell for everyone in the nearby area."
Sadly, the pi$$-taking of the criminal classes does only end when they cross a line and finally get sent down properly. It's mainly a problem with the legal system though. Fair trails for all give an advantage to the professional criminals who know how to work the system. It's really not fair to repeatedly blame the police and the CPS and magistrates when the actual problem is the professional criminal underclasses.
As to 'the cost of crime' I think we've all seen enough "hacker causes £20,00000000000 of damages" headlines to know that these are inflated to whatever people want them to be, and are generally a bunch of shit. I don't really think we should be able to take away ten years of someone's life based on a back of fag-packet worst-case bit of maths.
Re: no disincentive
Alas it is often not the fault of the Police despite appearances. In my younger days I was a Special Constable and it was very disheartening to be involved in watching out for specific people known to be 'out and about' despite curfews etc and then watch them taken to court for repeated breaches of bail only for the magistrate to give them bail again!!!
How long would YOU bang your head against that wall before your determination to bang up all the scrotes started to slide?
Re: no disincentive
What makes you think prison is a disincentive?
Taxas killed 10 prisoners in 2011, 474 since 1976, if death doesn't put someone off committing a crime, why would a number of months in a warm and comfortable prison where you're guaranteed two hot meals a day?
Re: no disincentive
How do you know all these details?
It must be hard on the mean streets of Epsom, ha ha ha. What did he do to you - trespass on your lawn?
Re: no disincentive
For some criminals, especially the violent ones, you are right. Some aren't deterred. Their crime doesn't make any economic sense in the first place. But I'm fairly sure that most of those who steal for a living consider their personal risk-reward ratio. Upside: ££££. Downside: self-assessed cost of punishment times chance of being caught. Commit crime if upside > downside. Especially so for those whose crime is planned rather than impulsive.
Crimes against infrastructure cost society a large multiple of the gain to the criminal, and the sentence should therefore be disproportionately heavy. The criminals won't suddenly go straight. But they will go back to the sort of crime where the gain to the criminal approximately equals the loss to the victim or his insurer. In other words they'd stop nicking cable, and go back to nicking cars or breaking into banks, and society at large would be better-off.
Re: no disincentive
How long would YOU bang your head against that wall before your determination to bang up all the scrotes started to slide?
That's something I struggle with every time there's a general election.
Re: no disincentive
Nothing a bat to the kneecaps wouldn't fix.....
Taken into consideration
These chaps had a van and a winch - so it's likely that they have been ripping out a lot more copper than just these couple of incidents ... and they must have been able to get rid of the copper to someone too ...
but of course, tracking those down would take actual leg work from the police who are all busy on twitter at the moment.
Simple solution
BT, give us fibre to the door and you won't need a task force, you can even sell the copper off yourselves :)
Re: Simple solution
Except the thieves are too stupid to tell fibre and copper apart. I've seen several cases of BT fibre infrastructure being ripped out by thieves who thought it was copper.
Re: Simple solution
As James Turner says your average copper thief is not exactly a member of the IEEE, and even if BT did decide to change every line in the country to fibre tomorrow, you'd have lots of copper still in the ground/up on poles for years after.
Re: Simple solution
And selling all that copper (assuming you can remove it economically) might just about pay for all the kit and engineering time required to give the third of the population who don't want broadband or Internet access a simple telephone service that works over fibre - bearing in mind the stuff out there now already works perfectly well for those people.
That just leaves the problem of all the other telcos and ISPs who are selling services to people over that BT copper. If they don't have an equivalent fibre product or the customer doesn't want to upgrade, does BT just tell TalkTalk and Sky and Virgin customers, 'Sorry, we're cutting you off now?"
Maybe the Bill need to set up a dedicated task force to tackle this crime. The officers working in this specialist unit could be called "Copper Coppers" hahaha
Paris because she likes a boy in blue to take down her particulars!
A better
option maybe to encase all the cables with an metal covering that carries 11Kv.
That way we wont have to bother with locking up the gits who steal cable for a living.
Still , we did have some fun with the metal theives by putting a thin layer of brass chips on the barrels of steel scrap chips we kept outside the factory... those barrels went pretty quick .
Ps we keep all the scrap inside now
Police don't prevent crime any more, just a half arsed attempt to clean up after
"Police computer checks against the van linked it to the theft three weeks earlier in Teddington, allowing cops in London to file a second set of charges."
So, couldn't be bothered to trace the reg number of the van and prevent future crime by arresting the pair that were reported at the previous crime scene, but they only filed charges when they had the perps already so they could garner a good set of crime detection stats. As for the crims using a real plate on their van used in mulipple heists, it doesn't show much for either parties intelligence.
Re: Police don't prevent crime any more, just a half arsed attempt to clean up after
>> trace the reg number of the van <<
Assuming that the address is actually valid
A while ago, the DVLA admitted that they don't have the correct details for about 1 vehicle in 10 - that's over 3 million of them out there.
Re: Police don't prevent crime any more, just a half arsed attempt to clean up after
"A while ago, the DVLA admitted that they don't have the correct details for about 1 vehicle in 10 - that's over 3 million of them out there."
DVLA are useless. I unintentionally ran a car all of last year with no MOT. Used daily, drove repeatedly past the various ACPO cameras, past many, many ANPR equipped police cars. Even went to meetings with the police driving it. Do you think we had one call, letter, reminder, or anything, from DVLA, police or anybody? It only came to light because the tax was becoming due, which happens to be a couple of days after the MOT (so taxed last year on an MOT with three days to go).
If they can't even enforce the basic mechanical safety check then what's the chance of them doing any other piece of motoring administration correctly?
Re: Police don't prevent crime any more, just a half arsed attempt to clean up after
[Pedant] DVLA don't deal with MOTs, that's VOSA's job (just as bad). DVLA would only flag up a car with no tax[/pedant]
What's it worth?
Having never tried to fence 450m of copper cable I have no idea what it's worth. I'm genuinely curious. How much would they have made from that hoist? Is it really worth the crim's time to do it? How do you fence it? Do they have to remelt it first?
Re: What's it worth?
Usually you have to burn off the insulation or they won't take it AFAIK
Re: What's it worth?
Burning the insulation off is the easiest way of getting caught.
If you want clean copper (best price) you need to use a machine to remove the insulation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE28j2MQCRg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdT_LvtovMc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P21PBvcLmQQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xScaU15tA1M
Commercial cable strippers are also available.
Re: What's it worth?
I've long wondered why the media always insists on reporting the value of drugs seized - "What? A million quid for a few kilos? What proportion gets through? Hmm, so long as I don't traffic somewhere that has the death penalty..."
This is exactly the opposite - even at vastly inflated metal prices, the amount of effort involved hardly seems commensurate to get a few grand at scrap and the risk of a year or so banged up.
The media generally keep banging on about how copper is hitting record prices per tonne. Instead, they should be pointing out that just 1 tonne is a hell of a lot of copper wire, even at whatever wire gauge BT use.
Re: What's it worth?
"1 tonne is a hell of a lot of copper wire"
You would be surprised / You have no idea.
Re: What's it worth? @El Presidente
I wouldn't be surprised / I have some idea / I overdid a rhetorical flourish.
I'll admit to ignorance of the thickness of copper in the wires involved - @2cm diameter a tonne will be around 400m of wire, which I'd imagine would take up about 1/2 m^3 in volume allowing for insulation and imperfect packing (were it a pure copper ingot it would be approx 0.1 m^3), and a few reels like that is going to start buggering the suspension in the vehicle you use.
It's not as though you can repeat this too often in a given area, and you're sometimes going to yield fibre rather than your planned copper haul, so the risk/effort/reward ratios look way out to me. [Unless you come up with a way of being paid to replace the cable you've just nicked.., ideally with the same cable]
Re: What's it worth? @ Richard IV
"I'll admit to ignorance of the thickness of copper in the wires involved"
Yet claim superior knowledge of the cost/benefit analysis of nicking copper cable which is rife, globally, and very very profitable?
Riiiiiight.
Even common criminals know more about the subject than you do yet here you are, posting miscalculated bollocks about it on a web forum, along with with your 'workings out' ... LOL .. some people have no shame and less of a clue.
Cupid Stunts! (OK almost Feb. 14)
Should've just nicked the manhole covers. Quicker, and still worth the effort!
Re: Cupid Stunts! (OK almost Feb. 14)
BT ones are usually concrete on a light metal frame, unless in a heavy roadway,
Scrap metal
This stuff wouldn't be worth stealing without dishonest scrap metal dealers to sell it to. Why isn't there a regulation and licensing scheme? Or, if there is one, why doesn't it work?
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to spot scrap that's probably stolen: copper cable, sheet lead and copper off roofs, manhole covers.
Re: Scrap metal
"This stuff wouldn't be worth stealing without dishonest scrap metal dealers to sell it to. Why isn't there a regulation and licensing scheme? Or, if there is one, why doesn't it work?"
They're trying to regulate, but unsurprisingly the industry is resisting. And when I say 'industry' I mean of course 'scrap metal merchants who have always dealt in used banknotes and the grey economy'. It's like trying to get Crack Converters to check stuff isn't nicked: It essentially destroys their business, because much of their business is with crims.
Re: Scrap metal
Try the Al Capone solution, they couldn't get him for the crimes, but they did get him for the tax frauds associated with them. Any scrappie who can't produce documentation for all the copper on the premises gets a tax bill assuming he paid nothing for it, i.e. his whole sale price is treated as profit. Let's see them keep a buisness going that way.
Re: Scrap metal
There must also be quite a bit of material that looks exactly the same, such as from legitimate building or renovation works. You have basically just described all material that a scrap merchant would see on a daily basis.
Re: Scrap metal
"such as from legitimate building or renovation works. "
That's typically grey market as well! It's a well-know little scam in the building trade to take all to good bits to the scrappy for a few used fivers. The whole business is utterly dodgy. I've never known an honest scrappy. Or indeed one who could be described in any way more flattering than 'pikey'.
Re: Scrap metal
I took a couple of old dead car batteries to my local scrappy the other week, rather than giving them to the local council, and they insisted on taking my name, address and car registration number. They then took my bank details as they could only pay by BACS.
The money was in my account before I got home.
An unscrupulous dealer would have difficulty (I presume), shifting any quantity of untraceable metals.
Assuming, of course, that any official checks are ever carried out without a complaint being made...
As an aside, a pre-1990 domestic copper hot water cylinder is now worth more as scrap than it cost new...
It's not that profitable. Unstripped, they'd be lucky to touch £1.00 a kilo with no questions asked. Maybe £3:50-4.25 if it's properly stripped. Putting a mug between themselves and the buyer would cut their share down to about 75p a kilo unstripped, or £3 stripped.
Once you add in the transport and logistics, these two guys were not exactly getting rich quick.. If they weren't stripping the cable, they'd be working for peanuts. If they were stripping it, they'd each be touching around 700 a week tax free for about 50 hours work. (allegedly). Barely worth the risk, unless you're on the bottom rung of the modern economy. I'll bet the old bill also confiscated the van, winch, and any other kit they could link to the thefts.
*sigh*
There is one - the regs were recently tightened up - and all it has really achieved is creating more administration for the metal business and an inconvenience of having to faff around with cheques as cash payments are no longer permitted.
The bent dealers will still operate the black market as none of this stuff ever went through the books anyhow. Just another example of legislation from a bunch of muppets who have no grasp on real life for ordinary people.
The van was most likely running under faked registration details either a non existent owner or cloned with another vehicle or on stolen number plates. Do people really not know about this stuff despite the exposure in the media of the different ways thieves operate?
Re: *sigh*
The government's claim that preventing scrap dealers from using cash will deter this kind of crime is clearly rubbish. It is clear to all that these measures are actually a crackdown of tax avoidance. The government just don't have the balls or integrity to admit it.
Morons
>The same motor was used in a similar blag in Fernheath
They really deserve to be nicked, don't they?
Shame they didn't rip out the crap copper that has been flapping my line for the 11 years I have been on broadband. That way I might get a decent pair that will allow my "always on" service to be *always on* instead of having a sync that resembles a bouncing ball..... and no it isn't an issue in the flat - every elecrical gizmo and gadget in the premises has changed in that time... most of my neighbours have changed due to short-hold tenancies (this development is popular amongst the buy to let boys) so no issues with something that her next door has - and now one else around here has this issue.. IT IS THE <&@£ LINE!!!!!!!!!!!
As for masquerading as BT engineers, the same charge could be levelled against the muppets that keep closing jobs on my unstable 3 km line as no fault when the ISPs radius and my router logs clearly show the line dropping far more often than it should, Including the guy who improved the below FTL fault raised by my last ISP then authorized an SFI charge on a fault that wast in my premises or equipment.
blimey!
> cutting off telephone and internet connections to hundreds of homes and businesses
They got all BT's customers in one swoop!!
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