Do police keep your fingerprints if you were arrested as a kid?
My nan got burgled a few days ago and the police went around the house looking for fingerprints. I often visit my nan so they probably found mine.
I'm 40 years old and I was arrested for a minor offence when I was 14 and had my prints taken. Is there a chance that they could still have them and come questioning me about the burglary?
They'll probably figure out that it's normal for your fingerprints to be in your nans house, but unless you were a very early starter they'll be different now anyway.
If you weren't convicted (conviction includes accepting a caution) then your fingerprints shouldn't have been kept. If you were convicted of a minor offence, your fingerprints should have been discarded after five years.
You can check what information the police hold on you via the ACRO Criminal Records Office.
I was cautioned for a minor offence so my prints should've been destroyed after 5 years. But can we really trust the police? What if they're weren't destroyed and the police come and question me? Could I sue them?
No. But the upside to that is that we can't really trust them to be competent. Can you really imagine a police force that stored your fingerprints in 1996, and has accidentally preserved them since then, keeping an accurate record of them, through countless filing updates, office moves, department shifts, technological advancements, and would still be able to accurately find and identify them now?
If they did manage to do that, you'd still hope the bloke in the fingerprints department has a sign hanging above his desk saying "found a match on a childs fingerprints we were supposed to delete 20 years ago? Don't use it in a case today!". But if he managed to forget that too, then yeah, I reckon you'd make a few bob off the court case.
>What if they're weren't destroyed and the police come and question me?
"Why did we find your fingerprints at your nan's house?"
"Because it's my nan's house."
"Fair enough."
The presence of your fingerprints doesn't constitute evidence of a crime in any way, because you were supposed to be there. Fingerprints are only evidence when they're found somewhere that they aren't supposed to be. Coppers are thick, but they aren't that thick.
Also, if I wanted to rob my nan, I'd just walk in and take stuff when she wasn't looking*. I'd think it'd be a bit silly to break into a house you frequently visit, but what do I know, I'm not much of a criminal.
*in reality I wouldn't even have to do that, I'm quite sure she'd give me whatever I asked her for, god love her
I'm not worried about being charged for it, i'm just wondering what would happen.
They dust for prints, run them through the computer and find one of them matches me. They won't immediately know I'm her grandson, I'm just another person in their database. So now what happens?
There's a good chance they'll ignore you completely. The overwhelming majority of burglaries are committed by a tiny number of career criminals, mainly people suffering from drug addiction. If you don't have a string of recent convictions, you don't fit the profile. Burglary isn't a high priority for the police, with only 3% of offences leading to a conviction. Career burglars usually figure out that gloves are a good idea, but dusting for prints reassures the public and there's a chance that one of their regulars will get careless.
If your nan's burglary happens to be investigated by a particularly diligent officer, they might ring you up to ask how you know the victim. If you can speak in full sentences without swearing, you'll probably be ruled out of the investigation immediately.
>The overwhelming majority of burglaries are committed by a tiny number of career criminals, mainly people suffering from drug addiction
This. It doesn't seem like it, but burglarly is a somewhat specialised trade in the realm of property offences that small-time criminals don't slip into lightly. It's not just smashing in a window and grabbing whatever you can carry. A lot more can go wrong than when you're just nicking someone's bag at a bus stop. And to maximise your risk reward, you have to have a sense for the kind of places that are worth hitting.
I think I remember reading though that it's not primarily junkies. Burglary and then selling the stolen property can simply be a main source of income for a hardened criminal.
>I think I remember reading though that it's not primarily junkies.
The data isn't great, but burglary is very strongly correlated with prevalence of crack and heroin addiction and barely correlated at all with factors like unemployment.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a strong split in MOs between addicted and non-addicted burglars, with the former mainly being opportunistic and the latter mainly being premeditated. A junkie might put a brick through your window because they saw your Xbox and take it straight to Cash Converters. They don't really care about being caught, they're only thinking about their next fix. For a professional, that isn't worth the risk; they're much more likely to specialise in something like motorbikes or farm machinery, or to target wealthy households in carefully planned operations.
It's more of a reverse correlation I think. 'Ard nuts who have been robbing houses for fifteen years and are still doing it after a stint or two inside are, unsurprisingly, likely to be into hard drugs. Not just doing it because they're a druggie.
A friend had his nearside window smashed in with a rock in a car park just because he had a briefcase in the passenger seat, which contained nothing besides a book from a library and a stack of work related xerox copies. And a pen or two. He was told by police that junkies will nick anything for their next fix. They'll see a briefcase and they'll think that when they pry it open, there'll at least be a scientific calculator inside that they can flip for a gram of heroin.
At another time, another friend with a VW Polo had some mid-range, not cheap, not outlandishly expensive brand name 10'' speakers in his rear deck, and somebody smashed the rear window in over night and ripped out the speakers.
So in essence, don't leave anything on display in your car that could give even the slightest suggestion to a junkie on withdrawal that they could make a few quid off it.
Back when sat navs were still a thing, a mate of mine had his passenger window smashed and his sat nav stolen out of the glove box. When he reported it to the police, the officer said that it was quite common - thieves would look for the mark left by the suction cup on your windscreen.
Not completely related, but I retrofitted a double-DIN Audi Navigation Plus sat nav to my A4 a few years ago. I bought it fair and square legally off eBay, from somebody who had believably removed his from his own car, but there were loads of them "new/never installed" but still for less than 800 quid. Listed retail price at Audi was in the region of £2,000. The thing was that Audi sat navs were stolen in the hundreds by employees from Audi factories especially in Eastern Europe and then either laundered by being brought to Germany, France or the UK and then advertised on their local eBay sites, or you could get them straight from a seller in Hungary, Slovakia or Russia.
The problem with retrofitting an Audi sat nav is that if it isn't installed in the car that it got electronically paired with at the factory, you will need a four-digit PIN code that you have to enter everytime you reconnect the battery. Only Audi has those unit-specific codes, and they are stored in an online database at Audi headquarters in Germany, so I had to go to an Audi UK dealership, give them my sat nav's serial number, and for a fee of £20, they retrieved my four-digit code. They also told me that if somebody came to them with a unit that was reported stolen from the factory as per its serial number, they would call the police on the spot on suspicion of handling stolen property. So you would have been both out your money and your sat nav would have been confiscated, and you would have faced criminal charges.
