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A police officer highlighting the difficulty of tracing the rightful owners of stolen frames has triggered a European Sunglass Association debate into how the industry can better assist the police in catching thieves who steal frames.

DC Sean Olson of the Metropolitan Police, who has been investigating a series of sunglass thefts from opticians and warehouses, told Optician this week: 'We regularly recover sunglasses and need to trace them back to where they came from. We need to evidentially prove in court where they have come from as the first thing a defence solicitor asks us is how do we know they came from the burglary we're trying to link them to.'

When contacted by Optician, Rod Lane, president of the European Sunglass Association (ESA) commented: 'The ESA will discuss what it can do to help the traceability of product at its next meeting.' Contemplating the practicality of creating a system to individually identify frames, Lane pointed out: 'The optician is handling a much lower volume than the manufacturers and distributors, so the retailer should also take some responsibility for labelling the frames so that they can be traced back to them.'

Asked what could be done to assist the police in tracing stolen frames back to their owners, Olson replied: 'The easiest thing to do would be to mark it with some sort of identifier, a unique number that links it back to opticians. A simple database would let us find where they came from.'

Of a number of major eyewear manufacturers contacted by Optician, only Luxottica individually numbers its frames, but only high-end product such as the Bulgari, Chanel and Tiffany brands. A Luxottica spokesman explained how these frames featured a special code that traced them back to their first purchaser. Safilo said that it did not have the means to trace any of its frames back to the purchaser.

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