YOUR article Crush Hour (The Crow, August 17) details the crushing of untaxed and uninsured vehicles. It features a smiling police officer there to see the death ram reduce a Ford Escort to scrap. We cannot condone uninsured vehicles on the road (no compe

YOUR article Crush Hour (The Crow, August 17) details the crushing of untaxed and uninsured vehicles. It features a smiling police officer there to see the death ram reduce a Ford Escort to scrap.

We cannot condone uninsured vehicles on the road (no compensation if you're hit by one) or untaxed ones.

Neither can I condone the destruction of someone's property to delight the police and onlookers. That car and others like it were assembled with someone's care and skill. Now all wasted. I saw a recent newsreel clip of a mini-motorbike being smashed to bits while police and council officials had a good laugh.

Let's get this clear.

Psychologists assert vandalism is fun and the witnesses to your photo shoot and the newsreel clip were all enjoying it. But we are giving quite the wrong message to vandals committing criminal damage - it's all right if you can find a reason to do it, however fundamentally dodgy.

There is no difference between the police destroying someone's property and vandals doing it instead - the final effect is to wreck one person's work and another's belongings. As John Aubrey said in his Brief Lives: "There is no greater lechery than getting pleasure out of another's misery."

The French can teach the police a lesson: a car is confiscated and sold, never confiscated and crushed. I doubt they'd destroy a £25,000 stack of money if it were that or the BMW.

I don't want to see any more pictures of smug police officers crushing cars. They put themselves no higher than the criminals they're supposed to protect us from. Let's stop this nonsense straightaway.

LISTER J WILSON

Litlington