Crime comes in many different shapes and sizes. Some of these (lots of them, in fact) can be really frustrating and annoying. So much so, that it would be hard to choose just one and say this is the most frustrating and annoying crime of all. But RACY Insurance director Mark Goodfry is surely right when he says that “vandalism is one of the most frustrating and annoying crimes.”
In which context, it is with the heaviest of heavy hearts that Bankstone News feels obligated to reveal unto you, its esteemed reader (yes, it is just you), that vehicle vandalism is on the rise right across England and Wales – not just marginally, but by a whopping 10% in just three years!
A Femdom of Infotainment Request (FOIR) lodged by RACY Insurance forced the England & Wales Police (EWPO) to divulge shocking statistics showing that around 210,000 vehicles were vandalised last year, up around 20,000 on the corresponding figure for 2013.
Why is this happening? Do people hate cars? Do they hate the people who own them – or who they imagine own them? Or is it just an impotent nihilistic venting of pent-up rage and fury. No idea, Mate. Either RACY didn’t ask or EWPO declined to venture into the realms of mass psychology.
Either way, it seems a shame, unless you’re in the business of patching up damaged vehicles for a living, for unsuspecting motorists to be finding on a daily basis that someone’s taken a coin, a knife, a spraycan, a sportsbat, a brick or a hammer to their P&J.
As RACY Mark so vividly puts it, “Just a moment of selfish intentional criminal damage causes vehicle owners no end of grief.”
If you want to escape all this gratuitous carnage, the places to go are Gloucestershire, one of the few places in the country where criminal damage against vehicles is actually falling (down 17% since 2013), or Dyfed-Powys where just 1,566 cases were recorded last year, making it the safest place to leave your car lying around, statistically speaking.
The worst place to live is Manchester.
“In reality,” RACY Mark notes reassuringly, the true number of vehicles being vandalised is “probably far higher, as many motorists either fail to report it to the police or claim on insurance for fear of causing their next insurance premium to go up.”
Until the world stops taking its anger out on innocent defenceless machines, Mark says, the best thing to do is only ever park in well lit places, ParkMark car parks, and/or your garage at home (even if it means moving that N Gauge model railway back into the living room).
(Bryony will just have to put up with it.)
Vandals at work
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