Whats the point of car insurance and the police?

Yesterday I had one of those days where you lose all faith in the system around you.

I was woken up at about 5am by mum who was leaving for work, half asleep and semi naked I rush outside to find someone had broken into my car - my passenger window smashed in, my car stereo missing along with my sat nav. My car stereo isn’t worth £40 brand new, my sat nav was worth £80.
My next door neighbour’s car had also been broken into - he's a self employed plumber and near enough £2k worth of tools were stolen from his van - he starts wondering around the street and discovers 8 more cars that have been broken into.

I call the Police to report all of this and they kindly state that someone will give me a call back a within an hour - 4 hours later I receive a call - they say not much can be done about it, apart from me driving my car to the police station the next day for finger print checks, that would mean taking another day off work and having a car without a window for another day, I ask him if there’s any chance of getting my stuff back or catching these low life scum - he says "honestly, no".

So I call my insurance company with the crime reference number, hoping they could replace my window, car stereo and my sat nav – how wrong could I be?
The chap on the phone tells me as my policy is only third party fire and theft that I would have to pay the full excess of £200 and it would increase my premium for next year as I am making a claim. I kindly tell him there is no point as I could probably find a second hand window for £30 and buy a new stereo for £50.

So I end up finding a local chap who replaced my broken passenger window for £60, and buy a new Kenwood stereo for £55 from Amazon.

I paid just over £500 for a year’s insurance on a car which isn’t worth £1k, and the police weren’t in the slightest bit interested that 10 cars on one road had been broken into. When insurance companies can legally mug you and the police do not care about crime, its no wonder some people out there drive without insurance and crime figures continue to rise.

I know the old saying "crime is only rising when it affects you", but its clearly visible in Lambeth.

Summary:
Car broken into, £40 stereo nicked along with £80 sat nav. Police don’t care, Insurance company wants to charge excess greater than the value of items. End up paying for everything myself. No justice.

Yeah it sucks, but when you're listening to tunes on your new stereo, looking out your new window, and you rear end a Bugatti, then you're going to REALLY appreciate that 3rd party insurance.

Don't vote for the incumbant labour council who have presided over the re-organisation of policing.

File a complaint about the police not taking the incident remotely seriously.

Get together with the other owners draft a letter to your MP, the PM and a tabloid like the current bun detailing what happened.

Or just drink some alcohol

8+ cars broken into in your street and none of them had alarms or the alarms were not heard? Hmmm.

As for the insurance, that's par for the course I'm afraid.....I've been in the same situation (and worse!) and when you think about it calmly in a months time, you will probably realise that if they paid out on these small claims with no consequence, your premium would be a lot higher then it currently is.

Bottom line is that while insurance companies do take a piss a bit, it is thieving scum, the uninsured and ambulance chasers that cause the premiums to rise :(

TBH that is the risk you pay having a less comprehensive policy, usually cheaper to fix yourself unless someone else hits you and you get their details and it rules in your favour

I agree the police could do more though, especially given the numbers concerned

Been there done that, car was broken into a few years ago, lost my stereo & sat nav (glove box). Spoke to the insurance company about if they'd cover it or not and was told by a very cheerful man that they would....but there was a £350 excess. :surrender:

Only way to make use of it is if you crash, crash hard, fast and into something expensive. Anything short of that and its a scam! :(

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Originally Posted by shaithis

8+ cars broken into in your street and none of them had alarms or the alarms were not heard? Hmmm.

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Yeah, they targeted all the cars without alarms.

Touch wood I havent crashed into anyone, nor do I intend to, in fact I cycle more than I use the car.

I may just take your advice Animus and ask some of the other victims if they wouldnt mind being mentioned in a letter.

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Originally Posted by DeludedGuy

Yeah, they targeted all the cars without alarms.

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Well, as much as it might seems silly spending £100 on a alarm for a £1000 car, it is a deterrent!!

I would never have a car these days without Thatcam approved alarm and immobiliser.

Police are usless these days. My Dad was attacked a few months ago (he is a taxi driver), they took the car for a few days for fingerprinting. What did they find - nothing! Why? Cause they only fingerprinter where the driver sits.

Some thugs smashed all the car windows on my street, again police did nothing.

House opposite us got robbed not 2 days ago, and the police turned up. Looked around and drove off.

I could go on.

Oh, and don't even get me started on insurance.

Deluded, while I sympathise with you as a victim (having been there, and done that), I think you need to get some things in perspective.

Firstly, paying £500 insurance on a car worth <£1000. The premium there (or indeed in most cases) isn't primarily based on the value of the car insured. It's a factor, but a fairly small one, especially for a policy that isn't fully comp. It's based on the repair values of the car you might hit (as someone pointed out, like the Bugatti) but probably even more, it's based on the potential for whopping great personal injury claims. Suppose you lose control and cause an accident, and someone else loses arms or legs, and quite possibly, their career? Suppose they're permanently disabled at a result of other less obvious injuries? Your insurance is looking at a compensation claim that will run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions. That is what you're paying for. You're paying for the small possiblity of a very large payout like that, plus the larger possibility of replacing that written-off Bugatti, plus the very much larger probability that repairing the Jag/BMW/Merc, or even the Ford or VW, is going to cost £1000 or more for a relatively small accident. Just putting a scratch in most new cars is going to cost a few hundred, even if no parts or panels are needed.

As for the police, frustrating though them not being really interested is, you got the truth. In all probability, you won't get your gear back. And, had they torn out there all lights and sirens blazing, they'd still have merely found that the toerags that did you over had long gone. Their attitude reflects, in part at least, that they face exactly this situation again and again and again, with minimal chance of proving who did it if they're not caught in the act, and with limited resources to deal with all the other things they have to handle, like burglaries, assaults and, of course, the absolute scourge of modern society .... speeding motorists.

As I said, I feel your pain. Having had my car broken into several times, and nicked on one occasion, it has cost me a LOT of money over the years. Several grand at least. And they get you one way or the other. If you claim, you get clobbered by premiums. If you don't, you get to pay for the little <bleeps> activities yourself. And you will get anff all support from either police or insurance companies, but if you were to find who did it and decide to teach them a lesson, God help you if the authorities can prove it was you that did the teaching.

In oh so many ways, the authorities can't or won't protect you and enforce the law, but will nail your hide to the wall if you do it yourself. And police and politicians wonder why we don't have much confidence in them? :rolleyes:

Welcome to the modern world.

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

... incumbant labour council ...

... draft a letter to ... a tabloid ...

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Torygraph or Wail then - they'll be all over it like flies on a steaming dung-heap... ;)

The reality with most theft is that, unless the item is particularly distinctive or extensively (expensively?) tagged, there's little chance of getting it back. Someone walked off with my *locked* bike from outside Manchester Aquatic Centre one tea-time about a year ago. They *must* have used some kind of cutters to get through the lock, and there *must* have been people about who saw it happening, but the police basically just took my details and said "bad luck, sorry mate". I can kind of see their point too - unless a thief was really careless, and left some easily identifiable forensic evidence on the scene, the chances of tracing someone are miniscule. To hit 8 cars in one street suggests a certain level of professionalism - those kinds of people are *not* going to leave obvious clues...

As far as insurance goes, your car insurance is, as others have pointed out, charging you for the risk you pose by driving a ton of metal at up to 70mph. I've long since decided that, for the most part, possessions insurance is a complete rip off (after I got caught by my household policy offering all risks insurance, but only for incidents occuring *outside* the home, not in it!), and nowadays I put a small amount of money away into a savings account each month as a less rip-off version of insurance. Yes, I do run the risk that, should I lose all my earthly possessions in a fire, I won't be able to replace everything. But I only need to win my gamble for about 4 months before I have enough saved to cover the essentials ;)

At the end of the day insurance is a bet - and my step-dad always used to tell me that a bet is a contract between a fool and a swindler. Insurance companies make pretty healthy profits most of the time, so that should give you a reasonable indication of which side of the contract they're on...

The guy with the van had a few £K's worth of tools and no alarm? Thats just silly IMO. Easy targets cars without alarms, thats not to say those with won't get targeted.

I sympathise with you having also had one of my cars broken into, decent Kenwood stereo knicked, door knackered. If the window was smashed I would have done what you did, new one from breakers and replaced stereo, but the cost to replace stuff was a lot more than excess so I claimed.

The problem with premiums is the amount of people driving around without insurance, those 'non natives' shall we say are to blame mostly in my thoughts for that, higher premiums means people can't and dont want to pay, thus risk it.

It's a bit like my house insurance. The insurance guy advised me to get a big dog (I have) and the insurance will cover the lawsuit if the dog hurts a burglar.

So all I need insurance for is for the burglars' benefit (and accidental damage, of course).

Still, my dog is a 3 year-old, 40Kg/88lb male Airedale Terrier with carnassial teeth capable of biting through a man's wrist, so I would probably be delighted to see the Insurer pay up. Bang for buck I think it would be better than television.

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

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At the end of the day insurance is a bet - and my step-dad always used to tell me that a bet is a contract between a fool and a swindler. Insurance companies make pretty healthy profits most of the time, so that should give you a reasonable indication of which side of the contract they're on...

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That's a bit over the top. A friend of my parents, many years ago, viewed it like that. He declined to pay for household contents insurance. One of his family (son I think) put the chip pan on and then got a phone call. He forgot all about the pan .... until the fire. It gutted the house, and completely destroyed the contents, from clothes to electronics, to .... well, virtually everything.

Most forms of insurance are indeed gambles. but it's a gamble between a relatively small risk and a relatively large loss. The chap I mentioned above found himself and his family possessing pretty much what they stood up in, and it cost him an absolute fortune. You don't realise the value of the things most of us acquire over the years until you have to replace it all in one go. It took him a couple of years to get out of the debt he ended up in just replacing what needed replacing. And he was lucky the house itself didn't burn down. And for what? Saving a couple of hundred q1uid on the contents premium?

To my mind, there are some insurances that for many of us, and assuming you can afford it, you're a fool if you don't take them out. Okay, sometimes money is so tight you simply can't afford it and have to take the chance, and it may be a fairly small chance, but it can be a very big hit if you come up unlucky. For me, assuming I can afford it, the peace of mind alone makes it worth while.

That suchs big tme mate, seems like a letter to your local MP is best solution.

Althought most seem to say police suck, around my area they have been quite good to be honest! MY sisters car windo was smashed and a passing patrol car came and helped us out (was like 3 in the morning after phoning police), searched around the area for anyone and did there best. We know who it was but the evidence wasnt there (family issues, sisters daughter farther is a prick) but yeh they can be helpful.

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Originally Posted by Saracen

... The chap I mentioned above found himself and his family possessing pretty much what they stood up in ...

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I definitely have an advantage in renting - if the house did burn down then we could always look to rent a furnished house next time. Also, the wife and I are content to live with virtually nothing, if we need to - we don't watch TV, we don't have many "gadgets" etc. so we probably *could* get by just in what we stand up in. I appreciate that a lot of people wouldn't find it that easy, though.

Also, I'm not sure where you've been looking for insurance quotes recently, but if you're looking to take out a policy now you're talking considerably more than £200 a year. And as I said, the last time I had insurance I was paying over £200 a year having deliberately taken additional cover, and it still didn't cover me when I tried to make a claim!

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

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Also, I'm not sure where you've been looking for insurance quotes recently, but if you're looking to take out a policy now you're talking considerably more than £200 a year. And as I said, the last time I had insurance I was paying over £200 a year having deliberately taken additional cover, and it still didn't cover me when I tried to make a claim!

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I renewed the buildings and contents insurance about three weeks ago, and it was well under £300 for both. I mean in total, not each. And that includes a fair bit of accidental damage cover, and all risk cover for things like my laptop and a lot of camera gear, including away from home.

You may be paying well over "considerably more" than £200 for content, but I'm not. Maybe you live in the wrong place, scary? :D

Note: the "wrong place" crack is facetious. Insurance is hard to compare because it depends on so many factors, and while location (and stats for that location) is one of them, so are things like age, house type, construction methods, security measures, cover taken, occupation and so on.

that sucks man, had my car broken into just before christmas, they got my stereo, ipod, and some tools and ash tray ?!?!.
still haven't gotten around to fitting an alarm, but I don't leave anything in the car anymore. the alarm will be the next step, that an a baseball bat by the front door!

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Originally Posted by circuitmonkey

the alarm will be the next step, that an a baseball bat by the front door!

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check with your insurers, many will give discounts if you have certified alarms.....might be worth weighing up the costs and savings when choosing your alarm/immobiliser.

all I want the alarm to do is alert me to get hold of the baseball bat. I'm not intending to keep the car past my next insurance policy renewal. just don't want my stereo stolen again.