Using official police recorded crime statistics and data from the British Crime Survey (BCS), Donald Roy - an economist working for the Home Office - was able to calculate that in Britain in 1995, thieves selling stolen property cleared between £900 million and £1680 million (net) and that fences cleared between £450 million and £870 million (net) through selling stolen property[1].
In order to seek know more about how many people are involved in buying stolen goods, and what types of people buy them, I wrote my first series of questions on the subject for the nationally representative 1994 British Crime Survey (BCS).
For a useful government overview of my work and a range of publications available online please click here scrolling down to the bottom of the page at http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/burglary/burglaryminisite07.htm and view the MRA publications.
The results were analysed and published and they reveal that the involvement of the general public in buying stolen goods is quite extensive; a lot more extensive than many people realised. The study found that 11 percent of people in England and Wales admitted buying stolen goods in the past five years; 70 percent thought that some of their neighbours had stolen goods such as VCRs and TVs in their homes; and that almost half of males aged 16-24 had been offered or else bought stolen goods. Comparing males with females, more than twice as many males buy. In the poorest neighbourhoods, 40 percent of males bought stolen goods compared to 17 percent of females. Even in the most affluent neighbourhoods seven percent of people bought stolen goods. Incredible as they are, these figures could be an underestimate if some respondents were reluctant to admit buying stolen goods and others forgot that they did so.
When questions about stolen goods were first asked in the BCS, the company responsible for administering it thought they would have to be dropped. During the initial piloting of these questions interviewers reported that they met with an unprecedented level of reluctance to continue with the survey or else a refusal to answer the questions. This was found to be due to the subject matter itself and nothing to do with the way the questions were worded. And it is important to remember that all respondents were guaranteed anonymity.
This reluctance by the general public to admit buying stolen goods nearly led to the questions being scrapped. When the, renowned Home Office Criminologist Patricia Mayhew and two Directors of the survey company British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) met to discuss the first pilot of the 1994 BCS, we were told that people did not like to be asked about buying stolen goods – although they were prepared to answer questions about other self-reported offending including theft, assault or taking illegal drugs.
We discussed options and agreed that BMRB should persist with the stolen goods questions, despite the reluctance of their seasoned interviewers to incur the wrath and reluctance of respondents, and that they should put the questions onto a computer so that respondents could answer without needing to communicate their responses to the interviewers.
This Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing technique (CAPI) was used for the first time in the BCS (Sutton 1998 http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/r69.pdf ). CAPI involves interviewers using a laptop to display the BCS the BCS questionnaire and directly type in respondent’s answers. At certain times the laptop was turned around so that respondents keyed their own answers to a series of questions – including those about buying stolen goods. This self-keying CAPI system successfully recorded responses to the same questions about purchasing stolen goods that had previously been dogged by an unacceptably high refusal rate. One reason for this is that possibly many respondents were using the stolen property in their own homes and felt either embarrassed or, despite assurances of confidentiality, feared subsequent prosecution.
The findings form the 1994 BCS formed part of the first ever systematic national study of stolen goods. That study included 45 in-depth interviews with thieves and others who had at some point been prolifically involved somewhere in the theft system that includes stealing, or selling and buying stolen goods http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hors178.pdf.
My research revealed that thieves and dealers were operating what I described as the ‘two and three way split’ whereby experienced thieves selling to fences ask for between half the wholesale price and a third of the fences selling price. This tends to vary though depending upon whether or not items are in high demand as fast moving consumer goods. Thieves selling stolen cigarettes, for example, were paid between 30 and 40 percent of the retail price. Shoplifters selling stolen clothes, meat and bottles of alcohol such as vodka, whisky and brandy directly to consumers received half the retail price. Other stolen but used items, like electrical goods stolen from house burglaries, were usually sold by the thief for a third of the retail value. If the fence sells directly to someone who knows the goods are stolen then they sell for half the retail price. If the fence is a businessperson selling stolen goods to innocent customers through a shop then the goods are usually sold to the public for two-thirds of the retail value. Gold jewellery is different in that that it is sold by thieves to jewellery shops for the going rate for scrap gold. This two and three way split on prices appears to be cast in stone, not least because several writers have documented these pricing practices existing in the UK and USA for well over 100 years. The uniformity in profit making from crime should not be such a surprise really, because there are only so many ways of doing things efficiently and effectively and the two and three way split is simple to understand and operate by those seeking to make quick but regular profits in illicit markets.
Apart from these relatively recent revelations, stolen goods markets are a neglected area of criminology, policing, crime reduction and social policy making. Compared with other areas of offending, such as burglary and robbery, there has been little research into who buys stolen goods, the factors that influence demand for them, what impact this has on property thieves and wider society and what might be best done to tackle the problem.
One thing is known though, and that is that most stolen goods are sold. They are not stolen by a hidden army of thieving and hoarding property fetishists and kleptomaniacs. The hard reality is that most goods stolen from houses and cars, or from businesses such as shops, are sold within half an hour of the theft. They are then openly enjoyed by other people in their houses and in their cars or else on the streets. Therefore, stolen goods markets clearly motivate and facilitate theft, and because of this crucial role that they play in the property theft system, they warrant much closer attention from criminologists, policy makers, police and the courts.
Footnotes:
[1] UK National Accounts. Unpublished Office of National Statistics document.
