1. There’s been a fire at Brand Depot. Lets hope a starving retailer wasn’t trying to get some insurance back before departing on a midnight clear.
- One store sustained fire damage with as many as a dozen more shops affected by smoke and subsequent water damage.
ACT Policing and ACT Fire Brigade investigators are yet to determine the cause of the fire.
ACT Policing has posted a static guard at the scene until AFP Forensic Services expected arrival tomorrow (August 27).
It is expected some areas of the Brand Depot complex will be closed to members of the public for a period of time tomorrow morning to allow investigators to complete their analysis of the scene.
2. There’s going to be a petrol forum addressing people driving away without paying for fuel.
Sometime in late October they’ll have a chat about letting petrol stations email in their theft reports (fax is currently required).
Interestingly strategic closing of pumps is a strategy referred to. Perhaps not a conspiracy against tight-arse Tuesday after all?
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I love the stocks!
Not quite as amusing as a good old fashioned witch dunking or hanging, but still special in their way.
: )
I’m going to go with DMD on this one. Petrol drivoffs are a preventable crime. It’s not only the petrol drive off you are stopping – stolen plates would decrease as there would be no point. Stolen cars would not be able to be refueled. Add some pop up road spikes at the exits to the station for anyone not paying for fuel – or a bloke at the exit with a shotgun.
Kind of like credit card fraud – legislate to have a divers licence sized photo on the card or simply acceptable photo ID must be produced at the same time as the card. I can count on one hand the number of times a sales person has checked my signature on my card in the past year – I know this as it says CHECK PHOTO ID on it. Not being able to use the card means it is not a target for theives in the first place.
On the other hand I’m all for the stocks idea. With rotten veges to throw at them.
There used to be a complete psycho working at the Weston servo late at night. I went in once to get milk and he was slamming in to someone who didn’t understand how pre-paid worked. Terrifying. Haven’t seen him lately though.
d’oh, that’s ‘at BD’, not ‘and…’
was the fire and BD lit with stolen petrol?
Whoops silly italics went too far….doh
Thumper Quote:
And I’m still talking about society being disadvantaged by having to cater for a small amount of miscreants.
Perhaps we’re lucky that it’s still just a small amount. Punishing existing miscreants only goes so far, and can’t be the whole solution – what society needs to fix is the way it creates situations where being a miscreant is fun/profitable. Miscreants disobey the law because they have no respect for it, or their “victims”. Bikie gangs sell drugs because it’s highly profitable.
Actually, here’s a novel idea.
Why don’t the servos put on service station attendants like they used to have? It would not only provide employment for kids but the attendants could hold a person’s licence, or car keys while they fill the car.
Then, when the car is full and the driver is paying, the attendant washes the windscreen and checks the tires. When the drive has paid for the fuel, the attendant gives them back the keys and/ or licence.
Yes, we’d have to pay a bit more, but people have already indicated that they don’t mind costs being passed on to the consumer, and we’d be providing employment and receiving a service.
Seems win/ win to me
S4anta said :
I think a commitee ought moderate your moderation.
Suck my noodly masters’ noodly appendage
Here’s a plan:
you steal petrol. The community hunts you down and uses said stolen fuel to set you alight.
+ives:
dickhead half arsed crim, no longer operational.
community gets a bonfire (and not the one featured here on RA)
-ives:
increase in greenhouse gases, and a direct correlation in hippies and other greenie types filling the void with hyperbole and bongo accompanied rhetoric.
I never advocated zero tolerance. I simply mentioned it as a argument against DMDs ‘let everyone go, it is all too hard’ mentality..
Zero tolerance has too much scope for mistakes, a bit like the death penalty really.
And I’m still talking about society being disadvantaged by having to cater for a small amount of miscreants.
What happens when our homes all have bars on the windows, savage dogs in the yard, armed guards in the street all because crime cannot be controlled? Just like Port Morseby where you are very safe, you just can’t do anything because you are confined to the compound for your own safety. This is the logical conclusion of this argument.
Thumper, if you look more deeply you’ll find that ‘zero-tolerance’ only works in cases where there’s a massive (and very expensive) increase in police resources.
It also comes at a huge human cost of a number of petty offenders being criminalised and institutionalised.
In places where they’ve increased the policing resources without recourse to ‘zero-tolerance’ crime figures also improve by similar margins.
Which would appear to indicate that zero tolerance isn’t much of a solution to anything.
Me I’d rather pay for my petrol in advance than pay for an extra 1,000 police in Canberra with nothing better to do with their time than hassle kids.
We had our car stolen once. It was a Sunday night. When we went to catch a bus home we soon found out why. One exorbitant taxi fare later, I had to wonder: “Why don’t they fix the buses?”
I have personally contributed to the GetUp Fuelwatch ad because I think it makes sense to implement real solutions to the problem of petrol prices, let alone the benefits to our planet.
Often addressing root causes will be the best means of prevention.
re #1,
where did it start, i wonder?
My argument, if anyone really cared to look, was more about the loss of liberties by law abiding citizens rather than the incarceration of drive off crooks.
Something about society being disadvantaged by having to cater for a small amount of miscreants?
Thumper said :
Thumper: You sort of almost just made it to the point I was going to make.
Anything the petrol stations do will be passed onto us. However locking someone up for 5 years is not just a ridiculously unproportionate sentence, who pays for gaols? WE DO! Your original plan will pass the costs onto us as well. That also completely sucks.
So we get to your revised plan. I am a big believer in a greater emphasis in restitution over retribution (retribution of course has a big role to play). I’d suggest to you that a fine of merely what they stole would not be sufficient. If you steal $50 and the potential cost is paying $50, there’s no incentive not to do it.
So I would suggest they must pay restitution to the victim, pay the court/arrest/prosecution costs, and then if that does not provide enough of a sentence, an additional ‘naughty naughty’ fine.
or alternatively take simple steps to stop the crime happening in the first place
Afterall, it’s only a car.
Sure – compare a $30K asset to $50 worth of petrol. They’re, like, totally the same thing.
The logical extent of the other side of the arguement is to let petty crimals get away with everything.
No, it’s to have a sense of perspective (and really, you lost all claims to the logical extent of anything with the petrol = car thing). Put reasonable preventative measures in place, catch those stupid enough to be caught, and for the rest – suck it up. Every other business builds theft into their margins – I’m sure servos do as well.
I have a special entry in The Guide.
Earth: mostly harmless. See Granny