South West Business Against Crime launches Safer Premises Initiative

The Safer Premises Initiative launched exclusively by South West Business Against Crime (SWBAC) aims to help businesses as diverse as farms, factories, warehouses and schools, protect their property and share intelligence securely.

Safer Premises Initiative (SPI) has two levels of membership, standard and premium. Standard members receive access to the SPI intranet, crime prevention advice, discounted training and an account with Immobilise, a free national property register. Premium members also get the SmartWater property marking product.

SWBAC Scheme Co-ordinator, Andy Sharman says: “This is the first initiative of its kind to look outside of our town centres and offer other business sectors the support they need in preventing crimes against them. Through our innovative partnership approach of working with statutory agencies and commercial partners, we have created the strongest available deterrent to help protect all businesses within the Somerset West district. It is through the co-operation of the partnership and business members, that we can send a strong message that criminals targeting the area will find it a lot tougher to get away without detection “ SWBAC helped in the development and are the first crime reduction partnership to take delivery of Littoralis’ latest information sharing system, Safer Premises Intranet. Littoralis’ secure intranets for information sharing are now used by business crime reduction partnerships around the UK.

Charlie Newman, managing director of Brighton-based Littoralis, said: “We’re the leading provider of specialist intranet systems for town and city centre crime reduction partnerships. Mainly they’re being used to support the work of business groups targeting shoplifting in the ‘day time economy’ and antisocial behaviour in the ‘night-time economy’ around pubs and clubs. But areas further out from the centre of towns and cities have different problems, and that’s why we developed SPI.”

Scheme organisers point out that in less populous areas, where policing is less visible, risks include criminal damage, theft of plant and machinery, metal theft and joyriding. The victims are less likely to be shops and pubs.

According to Charlie Newman, while places like these may have CCTV and security personnel, what’s missing is the means of communicating intelligence, to the police, and enabling police to easily and quickly communicate back to the businesses, schools, farms and others. “That’s what SPI does. It’s a low cost, secure and highly efficient way of improving the two-way exchange between police and local businesses and other organisations, allowing SPI members to report incidents online, browse images of ‘most active’ individuals, access listings of lost or stolen plant and machinery and much else besides. For the police it’s an invaluable generator of excellent intelligence and provides a really effective communications platform with a community that isn’t always so easy to communicate with because of its wide geographical spread.”

SmartWater Chief Executive, Phil Cleary, said: “The most important part of securing a conviction for theft is establishing an irrefutable link between the stolen material, the criminals and the scene of the crime. SmartWater does just that, providing robust forensic evidence that allows Police to make criminals more accountable for their actions. To date SmartWater has secured over 1,000 criminal convictions and maintains a 100% conviction rate in court.”

For more about SWBAC visit www.swbac.org.uk

For more on Littoralis new Safer Premises Intranet visit www.littoralis.com/spi.htm

For more on Smartwater visit www.smartwater.com

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