There are some scumbags in the world.  Last night one or more of them broke into my dad’s garage, stole all of his tools and his 1952 Velo Solex, a kind of bicycle with an engine, his latest pride and joy.  He has an eye for the unusual, my dad, his “boat”, an Escapade, is in fact a kind of pedalo, only a bit cooler and without the swan neck at the top.  And no child sick.  I think it has a go faster stripe and everything and it’s surprisingly nippy.  He ALWAYS gets an audience when he takes it out which is, I suspect, why he has it.  His car is an MG Midget the colour of, well, diarrhoea.  MG say “bracken” but no, diarrhoea.

Anyway, the engine of the Solex wasn’t attached at the time and the thieves left that behind, as clearly they didn’t know what it was they were stealing.  Which begs the question, why bother?  It’s obviously a very old bike and you’re hardly going to get much for that, especially without the engine if by some miracle you actually knew what it was you had.  I can’t imagine a Burberry cap wearing chav larking about on it, not even in Portsmouth.  I’m worried that the bastards will just dump it somewhere meaning that the whole exercise, apart from getting a lifetime’s worth of tools, was mostly pointless and only served to upset.  And, of course, the police were no use, sending a “scene of crime officer” no doubt with “SOCO” emblazoned on the back of their jacket in CSI stylee.  Nice.  Apparently they faffed about looking for fingerprints and couldn’t find a single one.  You could argue they’d also struggle to find their arse with both hands.  Just saying.

I too had a fairly recent brush with some scumbags.  These ones were particularly blatant and less than bright.  The weather was pants, it had been raining and very windy and I noticed one day that my shed door had blown open.  I didn’t think much of it as I had things to do but later in the day I noticed some stuff had also somehow got outside the shed.  Namely an old headboard, some wood and a bike.  Now, I couldn’t be sure they hadn’t always been outside the shed, at least until I saw two hoodies walk out of my shed carrying another bike.  In broad daylight!  I couldn’t believe my eyes!  I didn’t really know what to do.  I paced a bit and went looking for the phone.  Was this enough of an emergency to call 999?  I wasn’t sure.  But I didn’t want them to get away with any of my stuff so I went to the patio door and banged loudly on it.  Shitbags 1 and 2 turned round, clocked me and legged it over the back wall from whence they came.

I dialled 999 gave the description, checked the shed to see if they’d actually got anything but wasn’t sure.  One of the quick release wheels was missing from one of our bikes but apart from that I couldn’t tell.  But about 5 minutes later I had a call, a police officer had responded and caught one of the little buggers.  How unusual!  He had a bike and they wanted to know if it was ours, but sadly I couldn’t be sure one way or the other.  And despite the fact my description matched exactly what the little bastard was wearing the CPS decided not to proceed.  Even though the policeman had caught him red-handed and he’d resisted arrest too.  I’m not a fan of the CPS.  (If you’ve not caught my earlier posts, why not?  And why I don’t rate the criminal justice system starts at Hope Springs?)

The thing is, I am very vocal about rehabilitation of offenders and passionate about re-educating the wider public to see them differently.  Most of them.  But it’s people like this that give ex-offenders a bad name.  These are the scumbags that most people imagine when they hear the word offender.  These are the scumbags that Daily Mail readers want to lock up and conveniently mislay the key.  Up to a point, even I agree.  Can they be rehabilitated?  Maybe not, they want something for nothing and don’t care who they hurt to get it.  I’m generalising but they’re not usually clever enough to avoid capture yet only get short custodial or community sentences for relatively petty crimes.  There is neither the time nor the resource available to rehabilitate offenders on shorter sentences, try as they might, and so for people like this prison becomes a revolving door.  So many things need to change, I’m working on finding some way of making a difference but I think I’ve got my work cut out.