It’s clearly the case that fewer careless habits could cut car crime, although it’s arguable that greater care on the part of drivers is more likely to reduce thefts from vehicles than it is to safeguard the 1000 or so cars that are physically removed every day in the UK. It may well be that recent calls for the mandatory fitting of engine immobilisers stands a more realistic chance of success in this respect.
Such a technology-biased solution at least employs contemporary science for its intended purpose – namely that of addressing contemporary problems. Unfortunately, the practical difficulty of retrofitting millions of vehicles appears to obviate any substantial progress, except in the longer term.
So, can current technology achieve meaningful results in some other way? A brief analysis of the problem may help to answer the question. Car theft has one almost universally common factor, and another that’s substantially common. First, most stolen cars are driven away under their own power and, as such, are amenable to detection on the roads. Second, more than one fifth of all car crimes occur in car parks – and are agreeable to preventative measures that may be accurately targeted.
Another important factor is money. Last October, Home Secretary Jack Straw said that car crime costs the nation GB pound 3.5 billion every year. There is a huge potential, then, for a sustainable solution. Even a partial one. A solution that would make for rapid savings in excess of its initial cost.
An answer may well lie with technology that’s already in use throughout many parts of the country. That is the vast numbers of CCTV cameras that are now a common feature of our town centres, main roads and motorways.
Were it possible for the cameras to be networked, and programmed with an automatic number plate recognition capability, it would probably be difficult – even now – for a significant proportion of stolen vehicles to escape early detection.
For this to happen, though, the current generation of analogue cameras would have to be replaced with digital systems, or at the very least converted to digital operation.
Given that the entire visual surveillance market will probably convert to digital during the next two to five years, the cost of replacing systems in this way will fall rapidly.
The conversion of existing systems is already a practical and economically viable exercise, not least in its potential for replacing an unlimited number of local monitoring centres with a single facility.
Cutting the cost of car crime
It’s quite easy to imagine generating a first year profit on the cost of conversion in revenue savings alone, quite apart from the ability of hundreds of converted systems to begin impacting on car crime.
Although about 80% of all car parks are inevitably owned by cash-strapped local councils, there’s compelling evidence that investment in CCTV has a powerful effect in driving down the estimated 22% of all car crime which occurs there.
Those 700-plus car parks employing CCTV as part of the Association of Chief Police Officers/AA Secured Car Parks scheme report average reductions in car crime of around 70%. Extrapolating this figure across the country suggests that CCTV in every car park would cut the annual cost of vehicle crime by more than half a billion pounds.
Exactly how much such an installation programme would cost is unknown but, given that the projected saving is equal to 20% of the value of the entire world video market, it would appear safe to assume that end users could make an early return on the initial investment.
The national campaign to remind drivers to be more careful about ownership of their vehicles is costing an estimated GB pound 8 million in its first year alone. Even such a relatively modest sum would make substantial inroads into the more than one-in-five offences that could be directly influenced by extensive CCTV coverage in our car parks.
Since all the available evidence suggests that the digital CCTV technology employed will effectively pay for itself, the concept of investing in crime prevention as a profitable exercise may well prove to be a valuable legacy of the digital age.
