“Can you ID this male?” (asks PC Andy Long the Essex Heritage Crime Officer). “Nighthawking is theft! They steal property & our history.”
.

But why bother about that fellow when every detectorist, policeman and PAS official constantly stresses nighthawks are a tiny, tiny minority of detectorists?  Why worry about the damage he causes when it’s easily demonstrable that MOST “legal” detectorists fail to give all their finds to the owner or report them to PAS and therefore “steal property & our history”?
.
Dr Sam Hardy has calculated there are 24K active detectorists. Here are just one percent of them. It’s blatantly clear that mostly they do vastly more stealing of property and history and knowledge than nighthawks. But no-one is tweeting “can you ID these people?” Britain is totally insane!
.

.

__________________________________________

More Heritage Journal views on artefact collecting
__________________________________________