Mar 27

High Street shops call for more protection

It’s tough enough for Britain’s High Streets in the current economic climate and now, with cuts to the budgets of local Councils, shopkeepers are also feeling vulnerable from the threat of thieves and vandals with a lack of CCTV and their local police stations being closed.

For example, an opticians in Ongar was broken into recently – the alarm was triggered and the thieves escaped with nothing, however, there wasn’t sufficient CCTV coverage of the shop to capture the raiders. “The recent spate of break-ins in Ongar does concern me,” said Mr Boatmans, the proprietor of the Opticians. “I’m not sure if it’s because they have shut the police station and the CCTV isn’t any good. Ongar is a target. We absolutely need another camera in the High Street.”

Going forward, police, shopkeepers and councils could really benefit by working closely together and installing cost-effective IP camera networks like Jabbakam. A fraction of the cost of traditional CCTV and able to alert the customer instantly when movement is detected, each shop could have their own cameras rather than rely on those in the High Street and the shopkeepers and police could work in unison when it came to managing their network of cameras.

The results of successful partnerships between the police, councils and residents can be seen in the village of Pilsley, Derbyshire where 6 months ago there were persistent reports of drunken and nuisance behavior. However, since the partnership was set up and new CCTV installed related calls to the police have dropped from 20 a week to zero.