Conservation Bulletin 70 | PDF - English Heritage

HERITAGE CRIME
It is against the same backdrop of policing
partnership that Richard Crompton, the former
Chief Constable of Lincolnshire and ACPO lead
for Rural and Wildlife Crime, established an ACPO
Heritage Crime portfolio in March 2010. Working
with English Heritage he helped to establish the
two-year secondment of Mark Harrison, then a
Chief Inspector with Kent Police, to better inform
those tackling crimes against historic buildings and
archaeological sites.
Mark and his colleagues also worked tirelessly
to develop a Memorandum of Understanding
between ACPO, the Crown Prosecution Service
(CPS) and English Heritage. As well as fostering
cooperation between the respective parties its aim
was to ensure that police, prosecutors and the
courts were aware of the impact that the theft
and damage had on the historic environment.
Recognising the variety of criminal offences
involved, heritage crime was defined quite widely
as ‘any offence which harms the value of England’s
heritage assets and their settings to this and future
generations’.
To help achieve this aim, English Heritage
established the Alliance for Reduction of Crime
Against Heritage (ARCH), a stakeholder group
comprising numerous organisations, enforcement
agencies and local authorities committed to protecting
England’s heritage assets.
Since the retirement of Richard Crompton in
the summer of 2012, I have been working with
police and other colleagues specialising in acquisitive
crime. In the light of changing crime trends
nationally and internationally – as evidenced
by two recent and significant thefts from the
Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and Durham
University’s Oriental Museum – it is timely to
reconsider how we are jointly to conserve heritage
assets and cultural property for future generations.
Nationally, despite falling police budgets, crime
is falling but it is still vital to ensure that the
potentially rich pickings from heritage crime are
subject to the same trend.
Detective Superintendent Adrian Green from
Durham Constabulary now leads Operation
Shrewd, a national enquiry reviewing the Cambridge
and Durham offences alongside other thefts
of rhino horn, jade and Chinese artefacts, predominantly
from the early Ming and Qing Dynasties,
from provincial museums and private collections
in the UK and Europe.
Gone are the days when organised criminal
gangs focused solely on robbing banks and safety
deposit boxes, or importing controlled drugs; they
Most heritage crimes are not carefully planned. The
ill-informed thieves who stole Henry Moore’s Sundial were
paid just £46.50 for its value as scrap metal.
© Henry Moore Foundation
have now accessed a rich new vein that offers
significantly higher returns for much lower associated
risk. Why would these gangs risk extended
custodial sentences for trafficking heroin or
cocaine, when rhino horn will net them upwards
of £45,000 per kilo and individual pieces of stolen
jade or porcelain could deliver instant profits of
up to £1 million in the South-East Asian market?
Recognising the growing of organised crime
upon the heritage sector nationally and internationally,
the Department for Culture, Media and
Sport and the Home Office have recently agreed
that I will establish an ACPO Heritage Crime
Working Group (HCWG), a team of experts
brought together to build on existing partnerships
to provide even better conservation and protection
of fixed heritage assets, historic artefacts and
cultural property for future generations.
I envisage that in coming years the HCWG will
not only provide vital strategic coordination
but also ensure that police forces and other law
An 18th-century jade bowl stolen from the Oriental Museum
in Durham on 5 April 2012. Both items were recovered and
the offenders sentenced to 8 years.
© University of Durham
4 | Conservation bulletin | Issue 70: Summer 2013