A round-up of some of our reporting on car park and parking security of the last few years.
From our November 2001 issue:
Ted Roberts, head of security at the University of Manchester, is also responsible for car parking, as part of the Office of the Director of Residential and Commercial Services. After 28 years in the RAF, he joined the University of Oxford in 1991 and left for Manchester in early 2000; the present head of security at Oxford, Forrest Baker, took his place. Ted reports that car parking in many-spired Oxford is completely different to Manchester. Parking in Oxford is limited, whereas the Manchester campus beside the A34 south of the city centre has one multi-storey and four large open-plan surface car parks, plus smaller parking spaces. Barrier access is by a swipe card (separate from a university identity card). Users must pay for a permit (whether full-time, temporary or daily). Car parking supply and demand is never constant – while there are hopes for a Metro line, new builds on campus eat up parking spaces. Speaking strictly of security, Ted stresses the need for a co-ordinated approach: good management (here he praises his manager in charge of car park operations, ex-Army man Ian Hilton); lighting; CCTV; security patrols and car park attendants. Fortunately, the university is not part of the city’s much-publicised drug-fuelled gang and gun crime, though the campus is quite near to Moss Side.
Security can be a selling point in car parking, a look at Derby suggests. Parksafe car park in Bold Lane, a 440-space multi-storey, owned by Derby City Council and run by Ken Wigley of Belper-based Parksafe was featured in our December 1999 issue. Mr Wigley told Professional Security that a second Parksafe in Lancaster opens on October 15. He actually has a farming background. His inventiveness – plus the theft of his car from an airport car park and a lack of interest when he reported the crime – led to Parksafe opening in 1998. No ‘park at your own risk’ signs at Parksafe; Mr Wigley promises to make good any loss from theft and break-in – and he has not had to yet. It has automatic entry and exit gates, individual bay sensors, secure pedestrian entry points, CCTV and panic buttons every 15 metres on the parking decks and in the stair wells. Before a car can enter the car park the driver must take a barcoded ticket from a ‘spitter’ to open the vehicle entry gates. Once inside, the gates close behind you. Every parking bay has a unique number. Drivers must note their bay number which must then be punched into the key pad of the bay activator, on the nearest landing, to activate the bay sensor. On return to the car park the ticket must be ‘swiped’ through a barcode reader by the pedestrian door whereupon it is momentarily unlocked. When the parking fee is paid, via a Secom International pay-on-foot system, the sensor is de-activated and the vehicle may then be driven away. At the exit the ticket is placed in an exit reader which opens the exit gates for you to leave. Use has risen. Previously, the car park was little used at night, for fear of crime; now, restaurant and pub-goers are prepared to pay a premium for security. Ken Wigley adds: “There have been many benefits that we had not predicted, for example, cleaning costs have fallen dramatically. As well as eradicating crime it has also stopped vandalism.” He withdrew from the Secured Car Parks scheme because it does not place any liability on operators to make good losses. “I think that motorists are being conned because there is no redress if a vehicle is stolen or broken into whilst in a Secured Car Park.” At Christmas, motorists who packed Parksafe had first, thanks to the one-way system, to go past other car parks offering free parking.
Not only does security enter the equation where motorists choose to park in a city – if shoppers suffer car crime (or fear it) in one city, they may shop in the next city, or a securer-feeling edge-of-city complex. Derby’s private and municipal car park operators alike are in competition for business. For instance the Cockpit Island multi-storey, owned by property group MEPC, has SOS help buttons, dome cameras monitored from an office on-site, and fixed cameras in vandal-resistant Conway housings covering the lift doors.
Derby City Council’s 96-camera system includes 48 fixed cameras covering the council’s two multi-storey car parks, at the Assembly Rooms and Chapel Street. Pan and tilt cameras in domes cover the council’s surface car parks. All cameras are monitored 24-7 in a control room installed by Quadrant Video Systems. The SITO-trained CCTV operators are from Broadland Guarding. How does CCTV of car parks fit into the overall city centre surveillance? The council car parks are in a rough circle, inside the ring road. The council encourages people to enter the city by bus or rail; hence a ‘corridor’ of dome cameras protecting roads and walkways from the railway station to the shopping centres. For many years cameras covering the council car parks were monitored on a ‘best endeavour’ basis at the car park supervisor’s office at the bus station. When staff went home, monitoring finished, though recording was constant. Today there are two operators for 16 hours a day and one in the other eight night hours. One operator keeps roughly to the car parks while the other keeps roughly to the streets, though in an incident one will help the other. Police can view tapes in a corner of the control room, which has a telephone link to the police command suite that deals with 999 calls. The council is in the process of putting a video link into the new police station (the old police station was over the road from the Assembly Rooms multi-storey). Sharing of information is indeed important. The effective ShopWatch radio system involves more than 80 stores. City centre police carry a ShopWatch radio too. For the England versus Mexico football friendly at Pride Park Stadium in Derby in May, 25 radios were loaned to publicans and managers. Again, useful intelligence was passed between police, the control room (on the day of the game, police officers were in the council control room) and users on the ground. Police were able to use their resources accordingly, and the event passed without serious trouble. The council is launching this PubWatch scheme shortly with 50 radios.
The city has gained £1.1m in a Home Office CCTV Initiative round two bid, for another 62 cameras, covering around the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary (DRI), the Arboretum Park, and housing areas. Images will be transmitted by fibre-optic cable to the control room, which has space ready to take the extension. A link will go to the DRI, so that the hospital and council CCTV operators can pass images to each other and the police. In February, the council is introducing on-street parking charges, which will mean more parking staff – and more eyes and ears on the street. CCTV already watches car parking attendants who may be vulnerable when handing out tickets and cash-collecting.
From March 2002:
The number of car parks gaining Secured Car Park Award status has topped 1,000. Of the 1,026 UK car parks with the status, 395 are in London and the South East. The British Parking Association has taken over the running of the scheme from ACPO.
From May 2003:
What works best when it comes to securing car parks? Is an official ‘secure car park’ award scheme doing the business? Subtle threats to car park owners appear to do the job, a study suggests.
A ‘naming and shaming’ threat is hanging over owners of high-crime car parks who refuse to upgrade security, Home Office research suggests. The report gives an anonymous case study of high-crime car parking at a retail park, which had access control problems (“escape options for offenders”), poor maintenance of shrubbery and trees (where criminals can hide), lack of CCTV and poor lighting. The site landlord said paying for security measures was not “economically feasible”, while tenants argued the landlord was responsible. Police gave the retail park a deadline to pay for extra security, or else. The ‘or else’ was that the police – claiming a ‘duty of care’ to the public – would warn the local media of the car park’s crime problems, and put warnings on street lighting columns on the approach to the site. Police threatened also to withdraw their attendance from the site, with exceptions (such as injury-incidents). Such withdrawal of response would have business and insurance implications to the retail park, the police pointed out. The retail park gave in. CCTV and lighting were installed, with matched funding from the police. The research – titled Between the lines: an evaluation of the Secured Car Park Award Scheme looked at Manchester, Nottingham, Cheltenham, Northampton, Canterbury and Daventry.
The authors reported: “Formal surveillance (including patrols), lighting, access control and a good physical appearance of the car park can lead to reductions in car crime (or maintain low crime levels in newly built car parks). These features are also those shown by our survey to be important in helping to reduce the fear of crime. The survey showed that cleaner, lighter and better laid-out parking sites are seen as safer by the public, in terms of both security and personal safety.” In other words, crime prevention was a matter of CCTV, staff present on site, and good upkeep, such as lighting and marked pedestrian walkways and well defined perimeters.
The SCP scheme was set up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 1992. Support for it is mixed, the authors report. How you generally manage your car park seems to count. The authors praise Fosse Park, a retail park on the outskirts of Leicester, which has SCP status. Leicester’s Car Park Watch Scheme includes Fosse Park Retail Park and two nearby supermarkets, a leisure park, business park and local hospitals. Members meet quarterly and alert each other via pagers. At Fosse Park: “Security is primarily provided by 22 CCTV cameras and physical patrols. Every shift has a four-man team, with two people monitoring the CCTV screens and two physically patrolling the car parks, roles are regularly switched to avoid boredom and fatigue. All patrol staff have high visibility jackets and caps (which the operators suggest makes customers feel more secure and is good for staff morale), all carry radios with panic alarms. Crime levels in the car park are low, particularly when compared with the car parks attached to two different supermarket chains and a much smaller car park serving a hotel. The hotel, which largely serves businesspeople, has particularly high crime levels compared to other local car parks [maybe partly because of laptops and the like left in the back of cars]. The low crime levels of the Fosse Park car park are attributed locally to the good surveillance provided both by the patrols and the CCTV system.” That is, the CCTV operators can direct the regularly patrolling officers to suspicious incidents. Also featured in the study is the Bold Lane, Derby, multi-storey, run by Parksafe – which has pulled out of SCP. Their customer guarantee (of car and contents) won an innovation award at the 2002 British Parking Awards.
While the study said that security-related improvements to car parks led to better use by customers (and more profits for owners and shopping centres), the authors also spoke of “difficulties in trying to persuade owners of well-used car parks to upgrade their levels of security”. The study could do no more than estimate how many car parks England and Wales has: it suggested 8,500 local authority-owned car parks and 20,000 in total (including for example hospitals and pubs). The SCP has fallen well short of an official target of 2,000 in the scheme by the year 2000 (critical mass for the scheme, the study reports, may be 3,000). A reason for lack of take-up might be the cost of inspection for the award – £150 each year. NCP, to name one national car park operator, have a policy of not putting their car parks forward for SCP. Yet the study describes how NCP take security seriously: for instance, NCP’s digitally-recording CCTV control room in Manchester monitors 312 cameras covering 50 car parks. Similar control rooms, though based on analogue systems, have been developed in Leicester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Bristol. Also praised in the study was the NCP’s BROMAT [Break-ins to vehicles, Robberies against NCP, Offences against customers, Miscellaneous, Assaults on staff, Theft of vehicles] system of recording incidents. It allows the company to monitor trends. In other words, car park operators can work with the local authority and police, without going down the SCP route.
Award status does not necessarily mean lower crime. “The standard of security in SCPs varies considerably across the country,” the authors say. In Nottingham, Fletcher Gate was upgraded before its award (including more CCTV and lighting) but crime remains ‘relatively high’. The authors say: “The reasons for this are not clear but appear to be related to staffing problems, and being targeted by a prolific offender …” A similar-size NCP car park nearby without the award has lower crime. The word ‘secured’ is questioned, some park operators asking if they would be open to claims of liability if someone was a victim of crime on a ‘secured’ site. Funding is in doubt too, the ABI and AA having pulled out and the Home Office stepping in. The scheme’s self-assessment guidance manual came in for praise. Even if car park operators did not seek the ‘secure’ award, the manual was a reference tool. Car park security has improved in places, though, without the award scheme. New car parks may be built to higher design specifications; “it is easier to build-in security from the outset rather than modify car parks at a later stage”, the authors point out.
Car washers, who move about the car park, may add to natural surveillance and deter criminals, the study suggests. As for costs, the study quotes one out-of-town retail site that estimated annual staff costs (17 dedicated car park staff including security, maintenance, and secretarial personnel and six management staff) of about £350,000 and CCTV rental costs of £35,000 (including maintenance). The author list costs for several surface and multi-storey car parks they studied.
Between the lines: an evaluation of the Secured Car Park Award Scheme. Home Office Research Study 266, by David G Smith, Mick Gregson and James Morgan, March 2003. Report downloadable at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/index.html
On April 22, 2004 the Secured Car Parks Scheme was re-launched as the ‘Safer Parking Scheme’. The scheme has been running since 1992, aimed at reducing vehicle crime in parking areas. Parking operators receive the ‘Safer Parking Award’ once their parking facility has been assessed by the police.
From our June 2004 issue:
Industry, Government and the police launched the new Safer Parking Scheme. Running for 12 years as the Secured Car Parks Scheme, this Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) initiative is aimed at reducing crime and fear of crime in car parks. At the launch in London, Hazel Blears Minister of State at the Home Office, said that if more widely adopted by parking operators it will have a great impact on reducing crime and creating a safer community environment. The British Parking Association, took over the management of the scheme from the AA in 2001. The number of Safer Parking award holders has increased from 930 to 1430 during the last two years. The BPA welcome the changes made to the scheme and Keith Banbury, Chief Executive, has said: “The Safer Parking Scheme is an essential and positive development in the parking industry. By belonging to the scheme, Parking operators show a commitment to reducing both the fear of crime and criminal activity in their facilities. This serves to benefit society as a whole, by improving the environment in which we live and therefore our quality of life.”
Deputy Chief Constable Bob Quick, of ACPO who chaired the launch event said: “The Secured Car Park Scheme in its original format was effective in reducing crime, but being fundamentally design-led prevented some operators from joining. Acknowledging this the scheme has been revised in consultation with the industry, with the criteria being risk rather than design based. I am confident that the new Safer Parking Scheme will allow all operators the opportunity to fulfil the criteria that will be recognised with the highly valued Safer Parking Award status."
