Sir – I much enjoyed reading the March edition of Security Management Today. Your editorial coverage continues to be concise, detailed, interesting, informative and refreshing.

I was particularly interested in Raising The Standard (‘Burglar beware!’, p43), in which the National Security Inspectorate’s (NSI) chief executive Tom Mullarkey explained the reasons why intruder alarms remain the best defence mechanism for any commercial company.

As a long-time practitioner in the security industry, I have to say that I’m most saddened at many of today’s developments. For the most part, the blame for those developments can be laid squarely at the feet of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

To my mind, DD243 is a document that has been constantly altered to suit the manpower needs of ACPO. In short, it panders to ACPO’s apparent desire to ‘remove the police from policing’, at least when it comes to burglary (be it public or business related).

The rules laid down by ACPO are such that the intruder has benefited greatly in that there is little chance of the police arriving at a crime scene, let alone finding a suspect in the general vicinity.

The latest – and daftest – move is the Unique Reference Number requirement stipulated by ACPO in relation to CCTV. ACPO now requires an audible warning to be delivered to the intruder, advising them that the central station monitoring team knows they are there and will be alerting the police (or on-site security team members) to attend. That does little more than afford the criminal(s) time to leave (often with their ill-gotten gains), and duly proceed to commit further crimes at other locations.

The police might well argue that they can gain genetic evidence – in truth this is not very likely – and so catch the intruder(s) at a later stage when they’re arrested for another offence. The latter might even be true, but would it not be better to arrest the criminal(s) there and then, thereby preventing other offences from taking place elsewhere?

Given that ACPO appears to be doing very little for this industry or members of the general public, perhaps we should stop giving the police free support – ie providing vehicles (ADT), sponsoring events (the BSIA, the NSI and the SSAIB) and providing CCTV support (through NCP, for example) to name but a few.

James Torrance, Proprietor The Alarm Engineer

Source

SMT