Inside the World of Large-Scale Food Heists
June 27th, 2016We just had all of the meat from our most recent home killed steer stolen from our butcher shop’s freezer. The thieves sawed a hole through the freezer and made off with our meat, another customer’s meat and some of the shop’s meat. (I assume it was multiple thieves because several hundred kilos of meat was stolen.)
The police didn’t even show up. They gave our butcher a reference number over the phone and asked him to, in effect, do his own police report. Yep. It’s true. This article mentions that police are no longer responding to shoplifting and burglaries around here.
Via: Eater:
A large draw to boosting food is that the stakes, compared to other stolen goods, are extremely low. Unlike money or electronics that have serial codes, it’s difficult to trace food that has been stolen. And to make matters worse, the penalties, even if a perp is caught with thousands of dollars worth of stolen goods, can be almost non-existent. “It’s a slap on the wrist,” said Rocky Pipkin, a private detective based in Visalia, California and president of the Pipkin Detective Agency. “Even if [thieves] get caught — and very few have gotten caught — unless the Feds get involved and rope up all the people facilitating the transport and such of the large quantities, then it’s grand theft.” According to Pipkin, that translates to “no time in jail in California, or at least very little.”
What do you reckon, Kevin…
Stolen for resale? Or locals having a big BBQ?
That would be a hell of a BBQ!
True 🙂
I was imagining a bikie gang with a clubhouse. Any of those operating in your area?
There are gangs here, but my guess is that the perps live within a couple of hundred metres of the shop as it appears they used the shop’s large wheelie/rubbish bins to haul the meat away.
do you reckon the butcher will get a couple of noisy / aggressive dogs to discourage the thieves?
btw, large-scale meat thievery is not new in NZ.was happening in the 80s. rustling too.
I don’t see how he could keep dogs there. The butcher shop is in something like a strip mall. Some cheap security cameras would have come in very handy. Even cheap ones can be set to send out alerts when they detect people (passive infrared, PIR). Place a couple of those around the freezer area… Anyway, if policing wasn’t in state of collapse here, maybe cops could have approached other businesses to look at their camera footage. The cops are always out writing traffic violations because that generates revenue. If they catch thieves, that costs the state money. I’ve never seen a stretch of road more heavily policed for traffic violations in my life than the road that goes past that butcher shop. Several thousand dollars worth of meat stolen and several thousand additional dollars worth of damage done to a commercial freezer and the cops can’t be bothered to show up at all.
So police are no longer investigating burglaries and other thefts? Well what exactly are those lazy human donut furnaces getting paid to do these days, besides extort free sex from hookers, tazer skateboarders and rough up homeless people?
Having traffic police with presence has a disproportionate psychological effect. People fall in line, and stop speeding or violating small rules. I have lived in cities where police told me there are zero or one traffic officers on duty per shift, but in Seattle, they regularly make a practice of ticketing pedestrians entering the crosswalk when the signal has started blinking downtown, because they think it is the cause of traffic jams. Here in Koeln or Cologne, these bike officers are first enforcing the rules for bikes, pedestrians riding in the correct lane. They carry credit card scanners and can issue tickets on the spot. Later they take away someone’s car without the correct license plate, and they stand by a dismount zone and give out tickets (the circle with a bicycle in it is not internationally clear that it is a forbidden sign). They also discuss how the people scooting along on a bicycle pedal are technically within the law because they’re not riding. (this is sort of a series with multiple episodes http://www.spiegel.de/sptv/spiegeltv/spiegel-tv-reportage-ueber-fahrradpolizei-koeln-a-1097554.html
http://www.spiegel.tv/filme/koelner-fahrrad-cops/
That sucks Kevin. Curious, have you done a background on the butcher shop owner? His employees?
I have to admit I’ve never done it for the butchers I’ve used here (CONUS), but they weren’t always my choice, more that of the rancher raising the cow I owned.