Morecambe Rock

Over recent years, church roofs and war memorials have been stripped of their metal by opportunistic amoral thieves (one may think thieves inherently amoral but some only steal items which can be claimed back on insurance rather than family heirlooms) but now a heinous act has been committed which people do care about, deviancy that may have sprung from the pages of Brighton Rock - Eric Morecambe has been nobbled!
To be precise, his statue in the sleepy (cliche alert) seaside town of Morecambe (where he was born, as John Eric Bartholomew) has been savagely attacked.  The bronze figure of the beloved comedian had been a principal attraction of this coastal outpost in north-west England since 1999.  Obviously not all the locals were enamoured by it, as a 32-year old from Morecambe has been arrested on suspicion of attempted theft - the miscreant sawed through the standing leg of the statue (the other leg was cocked in traditional pose of ol' Eric), letting the whole body fall to the ground where it was found lying on Saturday morning.
It was a pretty stupid commission as even the most unscrupulous of metal dealers would balk at accepting such a haul to melt down into unrecognisable ingots.  If it was just vandalism, one would be shocked at the petty thoughtlessness of the criminality but one might justify as it drunken high larks.  The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens has been the subject of many assaults. On April 24, 1964, the statue's head was sawn off and stolen by politically oriented artists of the Situationist movement. The head was never recovered and a new head was produced and placed on the statue. On July 22, 1984, the right arm was sawn off and returned two days later by two young men. In 1990, an attempt to sever the statue's head left a 18 centimeters (7 in) deep cut in the neck.
On January 6, 1998, the statue was decapitated again; the culprits were never found, but the head was returned anonymously to a nearby TV station, and reattached on February 4. On the night of September 10, 2003, the statue was knocked off its base with explosives and later found in the harbour's waters. Holes had been blasted in the mermaid's wrist and knee.
This shows that even a supposedly tolerant, cultured civilisation as Denmark suffers from rude actions but its citizens are too intelligent to try and steal it for melting down.  Even Eric Morecambe would struggle to find sunshine in this.