To catch a thief

What a tragic state of affairs that we have to have CCTV in the gym but low and behold its proven its worth already. 

When I joined the club fifteen years ago we had around 6 people training in each class and the booking in routine consisted of writing your name on a scrutt of paper and putting your money in an old ice cream tub on the floor. We had no standing orders or monthly payments and very little equipment in comparison to nowadays. 

The whole club was run on trust and everyone was expected to play their part, needless to say it NEVER worked, Kru Jon was always having to ask people "if they had paid" and was confronted with the same blank faces I get now when asking a question. The fact is that the club was being robbed lesson after lesson by the very people who should be caring for it.

Rent at the time was £12 per hour, we had to give the owners £24 per class for the air conditioned studio that we used to hire. Subs was still £6 per class (yes no price rise in 15 years) One particular lesson with 8 people training, didn't generate sufficient money to pay the rent and not one of the scumbags owned up to not paying, not only did Jon have to give his time up for free to teach - but also had to finance the rent. 

Completely typical of peoples morals.

Year after year stuff would go missing including training pads (one at a time), tea and coffee, toilet rolls - yes Toilet Rolls!! Club equipment would get damaged and subs wouldn't be paid all by the students of the club - just goes to show you that everyone is in it for themselves and nothing else matters.

With the opening of the new gym earlier this year (Feb 13) we decided to get CCTV installed, this was partially to protect the assets that we'd accumulated over the years, partiality to protect the students whilst in the gym, partially to protect the instructors while teaching and finally because a new wave of thieves had infiltrated the gym taking money from the till, alcohol that was left over from the party and the aforementioned. 

The week before CCTV was installed and before the announcement of CCTV had been made, the first report of theft in the new gym came in. A rather inexpensive pair of gloves (but sentimental to the owner nevertheless) had been accidentally left in the gym after training. When the owner returned the following day they had vanished. (probably accidentally jumped into the thief's bag while he wasn't looking)

A Facebook campaign was started to try and locate them with nobody owning up, ruling out any accident. Several days passed, CCTV was partially installed and the hope of finding the gloves was fading fast. 

We'd actually only installed one camera when the gloves turned up in the communal box, intrigued the senior instructors rewound the hard drive to see the culprit, fortunately the thief had positioned a training bag right within view and we witnessed the criminal take the gloves from a bag, train with them for the duration of the class before putting them back in the communal box.

Needless to say we were all for dishing out our own suitable punishment, however we decided to firstly check Facebook & report it to the police. The dumb thief had seen all the posts on Facebook and even liked one of them, this proved that the person was fully aware of what had happened and it had given the person concerned the opportunity to come forward and confess - not likely.

That person obviously doesn't train at the club anymore and was reported to the police, the lynch mob was not deployed and the CCTV with 6 internal cameras is here to stay!