Q: The police recovered my IPAD the apple id of the thief is needed to access and set it up after erasing it how might i set up my iPad and erase the thiefs apple id

Can the police act as your intermediary?  Are they able to contact the thief on your behalf?  I would ask them unless you already know the answer.  Let the police try to unlock the iPad for you.

Anecdotally, the only option left to you is to take the iPad with your original proof of purchase to an Apple store and ee if they will unlock it for you (basically they will wipe it)

Apple will never comment or confirm that they can do this, but there are rumors, so may be a long shot.

Basically that's the activation lock and it's meant to prevent the theft of devices by rendering them useless without the Apple ID and password of the person that activated it. There is no user hack or way around it (be a pretty useless tool if there was)

There have been persistent rumors that Apple has some way to get past it, but they are just rumours, so what I'm suggesting may not work.

If the thief was able to wipe your device and set it up with their Apple ID, then you never activated the Find My app or linked it to your iCloud account, or the thief would not have been able to set the device up.

If Apple cannot or will not help you wipe the device then, well the police may as well never have recovered it because it's useless to you.

Skydiver119 wrote:

 

If the thief was able to wipe your device and set it up with their Apple ID, then you never activated the Find My app or linked it to your iCloud account, or the thief would not have been able to set the device up.

Another possibility is that @ltchaos' Apple ID and password had been compromised, and the thief knew these items.