Bicycles removed by property manager without my knowledge

davidmcn

pbartlett said:

so my defense against nicking someone's property left, say, in their front garden is this officer - i put a label on it and wrote them a note saying if it wasnt moved in a month i would deem it abandoned and collect it.

Yes, if you think you can persuade a court that you had an honest belief that you were entitled to do that...

pbartlett

now  even i know that having an honest belief that you weren't beaking the law is no defense ... )

lincroft1710

pbartlett said:

so my defense against nicking someone's property left, say, in their front garden is this officer - i put a label on it and wrote them a note saying if it wasnt moved in a month i would deem it abandoned and collect it.

There is a slight difference between your scenario and that of the OP. In your case you are removing something from someone else's land. In the OP's case the representative of the landowner removed something from the landowner's land.

burlingtonfl6

pbartlett said:

so my defense against nicking someone's property left, say, in their front garden is this officer - i put a label on it and wrote them a note saying if it wasnt moved in a month i would deem it abandoned and collect it.

Happens with boats where I live. The council puts a notice on them and removes them after x amount of time

Ectophile

pbartlett said:

now  even i know that having an honest belief that you weren't beaking the law is no defense ... )

In the case of theft, intent is everything.  The legislation was linked to by an earlier poster.  It's peppered with words like "dishonestly" and "with intent".

Manxman_in_exile

pbartlett said:

now  even i know that having an honest belief that you weren't beaking the law is no defense ... )

Then you know less than you think you do.  Having an honest belief that what you are doing is legal is a defence to many (not necessarily all) criminal offences. 

If I recall correctly this was re-confirmed by the then House of Lords in the 1970s in a rape case (where many people mistakenly thought the defendants must have got off - they didn't) and also in the 1980s when armed police shot the (unarmed?) driver of a mini car because they wrongly (but honestly) believed he was about to open fire on them.

As others have pointed out, dishonest intent is part of the mens rea of the crime of theft.  If you aren't dishonest, you aren't stealing.  (I suspect that like many people you are wrongly confusing this with the old maxim - "ignorance of the law is no defence".  This means if you dishonestly deprive someone of their property you are committing an offence even if you do not know it's a crime.  But if you do the same honestly believing for instance that it is your property, it's not theft.

The OP needs to sue the property management company in the tort of conversion.  (Which is a civil wrong consisting basically of depriving an owner of their property).

David713

Manxman_in_exile said:

pbartlett said:

now  even i know that having an honest belief that you weren't beaking the law is no defense ... )

Then you know less than you think you do.  Having an honest belief that what you are doing is legal is a defence to many (not necessarily all) criminal offences. 

Not to mention such things as unknowingly handling or selling stolen goods and passing counterfeit currency, all of which you have a valid defence for if you were not aware of the fact that the goods were stolen or the currency was fake.

davidmcn

Besides, even if it had been a crime, how would reporting it to the police help the OP? The cops don't offer some sort of free debt recovery service.

pbartlett

but a different example - i am passing a skip in the street and help.myself to something from it - a passing observant policeman arrests me for theft - my arguing that i honestly didnt know it was stealing if i took abandoned stuff from a skip will get me precisely nowhere.

pbartlett

davidmcn said:

Besides, even if it had been a crime, how would reporting it to the police help the OP? The cops don't offer some sort of free debt recovery service.

so if your car window was smashed and your laptop was taken you wouldn't report it to the police on the grounds they don't offer a free debt recovery service?

the managing agent has taken someone else"s property and sold it on - you simply just can't do that, even if you do attach a label first.