Yes I used to live on a farm and there were many thefts around the area. They are still going on now. It's been going on for decades. The thieves steal quad bikes, motorbikes, ride-on lawnmowers, power tools, fuel etc.
Apparently it's usually quite professional teams who operate over large areas. They drive long distances with big vans or lorries at night stealing lots of stuff. They are often not deterred by locks, dogs, alarms, tracker chips, serial numbers, UV marks etc. There are also less smooth criminals who do this though, over shorter distances. The great majority of the time no one is caught and the property is never returned. I wonder if they are selling the more expensive items abroad. Occasionally though the Police will catch someone, they usually seem to catch them while they are driving back to base. I think it's almost always the small time copycats they catch. Anyway it makes no difference, in a few months it will happen again.
Once in a while all the Police Forces from Police Scotland as it now is, from the Borders, down to Humberside, South Yorkshire, Manchester and Merseyside, will declare a joint operation and crackdown on Farm Theft but it seems to achieve nothing.
There are also sheep thefts from time to time, from the moors at night. It seems to be gentlemen from places such as Bradford and Kirklees, people who don't eat a lot of sausage rolls doing it.
The response time isn't that important practically most of the time, as the thieves are usually long gone by the time the thefts are noticed. I suppose it would be good for morale if they turned up quickly though. However several times I've spotted poachers, day and night, and the response time would vary from 1:15 to 3 hours, which obviously is usually too late to catch them. They also used to drive up in the police van with headlights and blue lights on at night, which could be seen a long way away and would cause the poachers to turn off their torches and hide, until I told them to stop doing that. Even without the blue lights just driving slower than usual, they can see the headlights moving suspiciously slowly, and the sound of a van engine is distinct from that of a car.
Most criminals aren't very clever, and the poachers would sometimes come and openly walk around during the day on view for hundreds of yards. At night you can also see their torches from a long way, and hear them talking on a still night from a long way. But the enforcement is also so slow (and inept) that they could get away with it, so maybe they're not that stupid. You could at least get their car number plates. They leave signs to each other in the hedges of baling twine tied between branches.
The coppers aren't usually very bright either, not only did they used to drive up with headlights and blue lights, they would misquote me, forget what I'd said a few minutes ago, miss obvious things like lines of flattened grass where the lawnmower had been pushed away etc. They're not usually from the countryside, don't know the area very well, don't seem to have much training or experience in rural policing, and realistically it's a low priority and they would prefer to move their careers on to investigating big drug gangs or murders in the big city ASAP. The rural criminals definitely have the upper hand (they do crime in the countryside but live in the urban areas). If they ever catch the pros it's probably because they got lucky.
Out of every crime I or anyone I know has been the victim of (that I am aware of), the Police only solved one. There was one case of people poaching geese which they stopped. I once had my bag, with a laptop and some other stuff in, stolen from Paddington Library, which had CCTV (I checked with the librarian that they had it, it was working, and they would save the footage). I went and reported it very quickly, then got a letter after a few weeks saying that the CCTV had been deleted and as that was their only lead they were dropping it.
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