I am Calling this BS

 In the UK, the police are as useless at stopping archaeological looting as everywhere else, except they won't admit it. Seen by a reader in the "Police professional" magazine (" More accurate police recording of heritage crime needed, says research " 13 March 2024) is this little gem:

A reduction in unlawful metal detecting (also known as nighthawking) has been achieved with the support of landowners and the metal detecting community, with offenders being identified and brought to justice;

Last thing I heard, in Britain landowners were advised, by the police no less, to avoid approaching illegal metal detectorists because there was a danger of physical harm. So what does "support of landowners" mean in actual terms? That landownersd phone them up and report any illegal activity spotted? If that is increasing, it only means they are being spotted more frequently. 

More to the point, what does it mean saying illegal artefact hunting has been reduced because of the "support of the metal detecting community"? What is meant by that, that metal detectorists are "shopping" other members of the community? Certainly if you look at the metal detecting forums, you will see that until now, there has been the opposite tendency - of detectoriusts sticking together and refusing to speak out directly about individusals they know are involved. There was only one circumstance when they would - in revenge for something. So what has changed? 

What we do know is that the number of artefact hunters with metal detectors has risen in teh past few years, quite massively. Yet the number of accessible sites has not increased. As for frequency of "permissions", this too is unlikely to have gone up as more and more commercial metal detecting firms offer increasing numbers of landowners cash-for-access to undetected land. What farmer would let some blokes on his land for free when he could et a pocketful of money by saving it for those who pay? So is this not a reason why some will go to secluded parts of such land in the failing light of evening without asking first? Is the number of people that do this the same as it was a decade ago, smaller or bigger? 

It'd be interesting to see the methodology of assessing the number of episodes of illegal artefact hunting in Britain, and how they've established this factoid that there has been a reduction. "It has a familiar smell of the countryside about it" as a correspondent wrote.