This is the second most populated category on our National Picture page with over 193,000 Other crimes for May 2011.
You may be staggered to find out though that under Other falls a voluminous 1,293 different types of offences. I really couldn’t list them all here, in a blog post – but we will be posting them and all the others up on a spreadsheet shortly. But the Other range of offences is pretty massive. For example;
“Bigamy” – enough said
“Abstracting electricity” – actually I thought that in a modern country such as this, it is hard to do unlike say in some developing countries that take time to build a paying retail base for the utilities. It must be pretty small scale in Britain though, possibly mainly confined to squatters, but I may be wrong. This may change however with many of us energy watchers anticipating rising bills for some time to come.
Metal theft on the other hand – particularly copper – is today increasing electricity and internet/telephone stoppages because electricity needs to run through it. So you may be interested to know that Melting down or breaking up metal coin without license is another Other crime.
“Keeping disorderly houses” – in relation to the 1751 Disorderly Houses Act. Can’t imagine this gets invoked too often.
“Theft or unuthorised taking of a pedal cycle” – an interesting turn of phrase that one. Perhaps somewhere in the distant past, a bike thief said “I wasn’t stealing it, just taking it in an unauthorised way“, so the offence description had to be changed?
Nonetheless, I’m pleased to see it there. I had thought that bicycle theft – a serious problem with over 500,000 stolen a year according to research by Halfords did not have a separate category.
I’ve always understood the need to protect anonymity and ongoing legal proceedings but keeping 1,293 types of offences – some of them obviously serious and others seemingly trivial – under wraps strikes me as a bit excessive. After all, if you had your bicycle stolen outside your place of work/high street/station etc. why would you not want other people to know about it?