Supermarket thieves caught when getaway car has no fuel
Two supermarket thieves were caught when they forgot to put petrol in their getaway car.
Giggle worthy, isn\’t it? But that\’s not quite what happened.
Rose Devlin, 59, and Denise Egan, 52, stole £400 of alcohol from Asda in Chadderton, Greater Manchester, and were all set to drive off with their haul.
The hapless pair ran out of luck, and fuel, when they could not get their blue Citroen to start and had to push the vehicle to the supermarket\’s petrol station.
Their clueless antics were captured on CCTV in June…..
So our Scallys were nicked then, were they? No, actually, they weren\’t.
……and the duo were caught in the act by police four months later when they targeted another Asda store in Hulme in a similar way when one of them distracted a security guard while the other pushed the trolley out of the store.
So the actual story is that even though thieves were sufficiently dim to have a getaway car with no fuel, even though they pushed it around to the petrol station and were on CCTV, they still were not in fact nicked.
Which is rather funny, isn\’t it?
Lots of CCTV (mostly, but not always, the analogue stuff) is really not good enough for the purpose of catching criminals. But I thought most petrol stations used ANPR systems nowadays (or do I just live in a high forecourt-crime zone?)
It says volumes about the incompetence and unwillingness of the police at any rate.
I thought the same…
BTW, the ‘Metro’ reports:
“The court heard both women had been motivated by ‘financial gain’ after their benefits were cut.
Egan was given a conditional discharge for two years and ordered to pay £280 compensation and £85 costs.
Devlin, who has a previous conviction for theft, was committed to Manchester crown court for sentencing on December 13.”
Cue the Left wailing about how the awful ConDem benefit cuts are causing hardship to….
…
…err, to habitual thieves!
“It says volumes about the incompetence and unwillingness of the police at any rate.”
Surely it shows the exact opposite! Police called to a relatively minor theft. Police turn out, get descriptions (and presumably statements), expand their investigation to adjacent petrol station. One assumes that the CCTV was seized at the time (it wouldn’t have been available 4 months later). One assumes that the clip was seized because the “incompetent” cops saw a couple in the clip who matched the description of the offenders. Now if the CCTV clip showed the reg plate of the car in sufficient detail and the cops didn’t check it then, yes, we have incompetence a-plenty. It’s hard to believe that having gone to the trouble of tracking down the CCTV they didn’t raise their lazy fingers to the transmit button on their radio to get the Reg plate checked. So, it appears they recovered the CCTV and were unable to ID the offenders – no surprise if only one of them had a single Pre-Con for a theft, (which could date back years or decades). So, having collected all the available evidence for a MINOR theft and reached a dead end, did they just bin the crime, shred it? Nope, the organisation kept it and still managed flag it up as relevant when the suspects were caught months later. The easy and “incompetent” thing to do would have been to simply process them for the attempt theft that they were eventually caught for. But they actually looked deeper through their systems, found a similar offence, found that there was CCTV for the offence and did the business. Useless numbties!
Or …
Asda reported the original theft and checked their own CCTV footage, and having located the thieves passed it on to the police. Who did nothing.
Why is your scenario more likely than mine?
4oo quid is a minor theft? On a given day, how many larger thefts does the average police station deal with?