Gangsters, rustlers and the disastrous impact of rural crime

THERE was a time when the number one topic of conversation among farmers was the weather. Nowadays, whenever you talk to a farmer, the first thing they’ll want to discuss is rural crime.

A generation ago rural crime was local and tended to be low-level and opportunistic. A bloke might break into a shed, steal a few tools and sell them in the pub car park, but that was about the extent of it. Yet about seven or eight years ago there was a huge sea-change in rural crime in the UK, and much of the farming community was blind-sided.

Gangs of criminals realised that while it might be difficult to steal Ferraris from city streets, there were vehicles out in the countryside which were of a similar value, in demand all over the world and protected by very little security.

Organised crime syndicates started stealing tractors, 4x4s and quad bikes from farms, often smashing through poorly locked gates and then loading the vehicles on to the back of articulated lorries. Sometimes the lorry drivers are involved, sometimes not.

Then they’ll take the tractors down to the channel ports and within hours they can be travelling across Europe.

Farmers suddenly found themselves dealing with a new breed of brazen criminals who were targeting the countryside, and easily overcoming farm security measures to steal expensive vehicles and equipment.

In many parts of Scotland there has been a fall in the number of farmers, the number of people working on farms and a general change in rural society.

Alerted

Even a generation ago everybody in a village would have known everybody else. They’d have known what vehicle they drove, what tractors they had; and if somebody else was seen driving a tractor or moving one, it would have been noticed, and people would have alerted the farmers.

Nowadays, in many places that social cohesion no longer exists. A lot of people in rural areas have moved in typically to work somewhere else and don’t have close links to the countryside. The days when everybody was born there and stayed there have gone.

The latest rural crime figures bear that out. The countryside insurer NFU Mutual recently published figures showing that rural crime cost the Scottish economy £1.5million last year.

Farmers are increasingly digging defensive ditches, creating ‘strong rooms’ to protect expensive equipment and reinforcing gates to protect farmyards from ram raids. Some farmers have resorted to medieval-style fortifications such as earthworks in an effort to protect themselves.

Across the UK, rural crime rose last year by 13.4 per cent. While Scotland has bucked that trend, with figures falling by 3.8 per cent (more of which later), there is no question that the nature of rural crime has changed completely.

Farmers, and those who provide their equipment, have struggled to adapt. The spate of vehicle thefts resulted in many manufacturers getting their act together to put decent security on tractors, and many now have tracking devices attached to them.

Of course the thieves know that, so they’ll typically move a tractor a mile or so and leave it somewhere they think it won’t be noticed then come back in three to four days.

If the tracker has activated, somebody will have probably turned up to take it back to its owner, but if not, the thieves will pick the tractor up and take it to its destination, either in the UK or abroad.

Some farmers have been hit two or three times by the same thieves. They’ll know which farmer has had his quad bikes stolen, and then they’ll come back a few weeks later when they’ve replaced them, and steal those too. Unless they have put in some really robust security, the thieves will keep returning.

Improving security in one area can negatively impact neighbouring places. Quite often when crime figures drop in one region, they will rise in another.

The thieves aren’t saying ‘we’ll stop stealing, we’ll stay at home and watch TV’. They simply go somewhere else.

Aside from vehicle and equipment theft, we have also seen a huge change in the amount of livestock being stolen. A decade ago you might see small groups of sheep being stolen, and it might well have been somebody local who was then going to slaughter them and sell the meat on locally.

Today we are seeing greater numbers of sheep taken in single incidents. Often it’s 20 upwards, and sometimes up to 100 sheep are being stolen at once. It shows a high level of organisation. They are very rarely recovered, which leads to the theory that they are being slaughtered very soon after being stolen.

Then there are the crimes where nothing is taken, such as hare coursing and flytipping. These can also be devastating for farmers, injuring livestock and contaminating the environment.

Anguish

It has all taken a huge toll on the farmers themselves. It is one of the issues in their lives which gives them the most anguish. Farmers nowadays know that thieves are out and about, driving around, scoping out farms as targets, trying to find out what they’ve got and how they can get it.

This leads to high levels of anxiety and sleepless nights. It is a worry that weighs on their minds constantly.

In among all this, a glimmer of hope may be found by looking at Scotland. In 2015, the Scotland Partnership Against Rural Crime was formed by Police Scotland, NFU Mutual and others.

This enabled police to train officers in the investigation and prevention of a wide range of rural crimes – from basic training that will mean a police officer will now consider searching a lorry carrying a tractor at 2am (and know what to look for if it’s stolen), to providing support for livestock theft detection operations.

This has resulted in a greater awareness of rural crime among the police, and tractor and quad theft costs in Scotland have fallen by almost half in the three years. But there is still a long way to go.

There is no simple and straightforward solution to securing a farm because each one is different.

We recommend that farmers go to the nearest road and take a look from there to see what impression the farm would give to a thief. Can they see tough gates and good security? Or can they see shiny 4x4s and a tractor?

We also recommend social networking. It’s important to be talking to your neighbours and the police – setting up WhatsApp groups to report suspicious sightings, keeping abreast of things on Twitter and Facebook. Farmers need to do everything they can.

Rural crime is something that causes heartache and anguish, and it could destroy the traditional nature of the countryside, which is open and trusting. Farmers want to go about the job of farming.

What we don’t want to end up with is a world where farms are surrounded by huge security fences, as though they were urban factories. Nobody wants our countryside to be turned into a fortress.