If, in a few years, you become security manager on a Midlands business park, you may have cause to thank Mark Stokes (or his equivalent in other UK regions) for the site security design.
He’s a West Midlands Police inspector halfway through a one-year secondment to bang the drum for business crime prevention, designing out crime and community safety at a regional development agency. He speaks to Mark Rowe.
In opening gossip before we get to the meat of Mark Stokes’ current job, he raises the recent HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report into police force structure. The inspectors, like many in policing, found that – to quote Home Secretary Charles Clarke – “the implication of the HMIC report, which I accept, is that inevitably we will have fewer forces in the future”. Mark until March is on a one-year secondment to Advantage West Midlands (AWM), the regional development agency which covers the West Midlands and West Mercia, Staffordshire and Warwickshire police force areas. Police seconded to Government regional offices – the places in each region that dish out some crime prevention and other central Government cash to local authorities, so they’re people worth knowing – also work across the 43 police force boundaries.
What did I know about regional development agencies? Mark asked. I dodged the question by suggesting that it’s one of those subjects – like training – that you are either immersed in or you are not. Briefly, AWM is one of nine such agencies in England – Wales has its own, the south east, south west, London, north west, and so on. To quote the AWM website, the Government set up the agencies “to transform England’s regions through sustainable economic development”. The RDAs are non-departmental public bodies, accountable to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). In other words, the agencies provide investment – AWM provides £300m a year – whether for building, regeneration, refurbishment or demolition. Places range from Leek Cattle Market to a ‘University Quarter’ in Stoke-on-Trent. Usually, AWM deals with brownfield sites – such as, say, former coalfields, turning them into, say, business parks. Arguably more famous is the former BBC studios at Pebble Mill in Birmingham. AWM has a 95 year lease on the site – cleared this autumn – from freeholders Calthorpe Estates. In its place will be a science and technology park, “36,000 sq m of world-class research and development facilities for the medical and healthcare industries”, according to the agency. In sum, if there’s a new museum, college, offices or apartments, if it’s on brownfield (already-used, or derelict, rather than green fields) land, a regional development agency may have had a hand in it.
So what has that to do with security and CCTV managers? Well, it could be one day you work in a place built with regional development agency money – from Scarborough, or Cowes’ sea front (developments are at consultation stage) to Leicester’s former Charles Street police station (to become offices and apartments) to the former Chatham naval dockyards in Kent. The building work may come with electronic and physical security equipment. If it does not, and such kit is in fact needed, and added, the retro-fit costs far more than if security were part of the original build. Hence police secondees at these agencies, to be an ambassador, if you like, for security and crime prevention matters – such as North Yorkshire Chief Insp Dave Fortune at Yorkshire Forward; and Derbyshire Insp Jim Bates at East Midlands Development Agency (EMDA).
From the 1980s, the police have become used to bidding for pots of money – whether City Challenge, Safer Cities, Single Regeneration Budget – from the Home Office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). Since 1999, these regional development agencies are more fiscally-based, run by another Government department, the DTI. The result: police found their bids to the development agencies failing. Police asked why, and the development agencies asked what crime prevention had to do with their job, of investing, for example in regenerating cities.
Development-regeneration people is coming to see the worth of crime prevention. The British Urban Regeneration Association (www.bura.org.uk) is running a day on community safety near Warwick on November 9. Police crime prevention specialists make the point: if you’re regenerating a housing or industrial estate, and don’t design out crime for the long term, don’t be surprised if in ten years you have to start again, because crime – graffiti, robbery – is putting off investors. It is early days still for Mark Stokes at AWM; in practical terms, there is the need of any secondee to keep his face known (literally) in both places. Hence he visits Lloyd House, West Midlands Police headquarters in central Birmingham, regularly, and works at the nearby head office of AWM, which has a hot-desk set-up, which suits Mark fine.
Mark notes a difference in the development agency’s and police cultures. It’s for the best that his previous job was in crime reduction, dealing say with local authorities, rather than in front-line policing. Police culture is to do everything the proverbial yesterday, like fire-fighters, even more so in recent years thanks to central Government key performance indicators. Whereas AWM and its equivalents around the regions are thinking long-term. They buy land, maybe decontaminate it, bring development partners together: decisions may not bear fruit in five or even ten years. Mark sums up: “You couldn’t have two organisations more different.” So besides Mark having to become familiar with implementation zones and technology clusters, he appreciates that Rome (or a Bilston Urban Village) wasn’t built in a day.
Mark mentions the Safer Places document published last year by the ODPM (full title: Safer Places: The Planning System and Crime Prevention). Mark Stokes, as reported in our November 2004 issue, was among those consulted as a ‘sounding board’ by the report authors. Previously, Mark says, regeneration people did not consider crime as something that affected the sustainability of a regeneration project; whereas he would argue that the threat of crime is something that needs to be designed out, or at least minimised.
Mark sees his role as three-fold: designing out crime (his real specialism; he is vice-chairman of the Designing Out Crime Association, DOCA: www.doca.org.uk); specific issues to do with business crime; and community safety.
Right away he plunges into the problem of definition of crime against business. Let us digress a minute: retailers, hauliers and other businesses complain that they pay taxes and do not get much of (or any) police service. Going back to police KPIs, if any sort of crime is not defined, it isn’t recorded, and if it cannot be measured, it cannot have a KPI and inevitably crimes with KPIs will get priority. To return to Mark Stokes: do you include under business crime, he says, hospitals, schools and places of worship? Some police forces regard crimes done against a private hospital as business crime – but not crime against NHS hospitals; and ditto for private and state schools. Hence, there is no national agreement on what business crime is; and thus no way to measure it meaningfully, or to know what wants tackling. West Midlands Police’s view, Mark adds, is not to get hung up on definitions, but to do something. As for business complaints about the police, he replies that he can show a host of initiatives where police resources have been concentrated. There remains the perception, Mark admits, that crime against business (such as fraud) is not taken seriously by the police. (To which police can and do reply: some businesses do not take the security of their premises and assets seriously enough.)
He gives the example of the Bayton Road industrial estate in Exhall, Coventry, where Mark is trying to gain funding for extra security measures, such as CCTV. A past bid by the inudstrial estate for AWM funds was turned down. There are pros and cons to installing an automatic number plate recognition system (ANPR) running over an public space CCTV, controlling access to the estate. Yes, the ANPR would bring up suspects – but in many cases the system’s ‘hits’ would mean other people’s crime solved. No brownie points there. In other words, how useful to the industrial estate, how sustainable, is ANPR, compared with say perimeter fencing and lighting? Technology such as ANPR, or manned guarding, come with a cost, to keep managing them. And technology can be easily switched off – the guarding contract and control room operator contract ends, the CCTV cameras are not maintained. At least a perimeter fence once installed is there, doing its job, regardless of new owners or managers, and cannot be switched off, for whatever reason. This is not to suggest Mark Stokes is anti-technology. Quite the opposite. He spoke in praise of UK CCTV at the annual conference of the International Crime Prevention through Environmental Design Association (CPTED – sep-ted), in Calgary in 2003. He points to CCTV’s use in investigations – such as David Copeland, the Brick Lane nail-bomber in 1999; and most recently the July 21 attempted London bombers. He contrasts such UK success with the lack of US public space CCTV, and the Washington DC snipers of 2002.
As for designing out crime: “What I am trying to do is reach a stage where Secured by Design [the scheme run by ACPO, www.securedbydesign.com] would be an automatic inclusion in all the development work AWM undertakes.”
Community safety, Mark adds, is an all-encompassing term, meaning a two-way flow of information (ambassadorial again), perhaps to immigrant groups, to make sure the region is safe in the widest sense; to tackle the risk of sectarianism, ethnic minorities falling out, which again could be a threat to the sustainability of a development agency’s investment.
