Phil Cleary, the founder of the property marking company SmartWater Technology Ltd wants his firm to be known for doing more than making ‘pots of forensic paint’. He can point to spreading corporate use of his products. He spoke to Mark Rowe.
You pull up to the barrier at the gatehouse, sign in and drive to the parking spaces. Press the door intercom to be let into the reception, sign in and take your visitor badge. How a visitor is met by any company says a lot, and above all at a security product manufacturer, SmartWater could not be faulted. Nor do they miss a trick with their neat marketing. While a visitor sits on a sofa waiting, recorded television news items play on a flat screen. Around the UK TV regions, the news presenters may look different but the message is the same; SmartWater is in use by utilities, schools, you name it, to mark property. In the last few years, some in security and criminal justice have grumbled of the CSI effect; in other words, thanks to the United States TV series CSI, showing cases of crime dazzlingly solved within an hour, clients and juries expect the same in real life. With SmartWater, we are talking CSI! Microscopes in laboratories, and law enforcers able to plant their hands on a criminal with certainty – something the bad guys understand, as much as the good guys. <br><br>Briefly put, the SmartWater forensic marking product is a solution – using the chemical meaning of that word, a liquid; besides the current use of ‘solution’ as another word for ‘system’ or ‘product’. You apply the fluid to whatever property you want marked, whether lead on church roofs, metal stairways at waterworks, cable alongside railway lines, or portable property such as laptops, or cash in transit boxes. As John Jones, head of client support operations – ex-Northamptonshire Police – told me while he was showing me around the building, you’re only limited by your imagination. To mention just one of the marking product’s uses as played on the screen in the foyer, apart from the domestic kits, in little transparent bottles that look like cosmetics. For corporate use there’s a spray, in a 500ml red bottle. Take the install in an Eastbourne school. You fit it in a ceiling in, let’s say, a computer or IT room. You can link the product to an alarm or a sensor; the intruder opens the door to the IT room, looking for things to take away, and the marking product sprays him. He’ll know about that, whereas the marking product on a computer is invisible to the human eye and only shows under ultra-violet light (UV). The spray lingers on hands for weeks – and in that regional news report about the Eastbourne school report, you saw the TV reporter marked with the product soaping his hands vigorously under a tap; the product still showed under a UV torch. It stays on clothes and you could say, why don’t criminals get rid of their clobber? Remember that SmartWater is invisible – how can the criminal know when or how often he ought to get rid of his clothes? And it seems that criminals are not keen to throw away their training shoes. What’s more, many police officers and police custody suites are equipped with UV lighting. The thinking is that if someone is stopped for going equipped, or driving a car without insurance, it may be that they are marked with SmartWater, potentially linking them with a crime they committed many days or weeks previous. Already, you see, the marking product can sow seeds of doubt in the criminal’s mind. <br><br>And this is Phil Cleary’s point about his company selling more than ‘pots of paint’; he stresses that the company offers risk management; strategy. There’s an interesting relation to other security measures. To continue with the case of the school: the marking product is installed alongside electronic security, and schools will still have locks on doors, passive infra-red detectors, and so on; and SmartWater evidence can back up CCTV, for instance, or property recovered from the suspect’s home. But the marking product does what CCTV and intruder alarms cannot; it links the criminal to the scene of the crime. The criminal carries the marking product away with him; whereas other traces left at the scene, such as fingerprints, are disputable in court. You can recover the marking product even after the thing it’s on is burned; Phil Cleary showed some footage of tests. And if you are thinking, what if someone has the marking product on their hand, and they claim they’ve shaken hands with their mate – whose name they can never remember and who they reckon did the crime?! SmartWater have thought of that one, too, by doing research into how the product lands and spreads on skin. Can you explain how it’s landed on the back of your hand, or your ears, or gloves?! <br><br>What was striking from the visit to the company’s clean and new – opened in July 2005, a plaque said – offices and Phil Cleary, the chief executive, was that the marking product isn’t touted as the wonder-bullet. Rather, Phil Cleary stresses how the marking product is used with other measures, in a process. For instance one aim is to put the message across to the ‘criminal fraternity’, with signs and advertising, and the 100 per cent conviction rate with the product in court; another example of the CSI effect in action. It’s also interesting that where police have use the marking product – whether offering it to householders, or places of worship, or students, or against car crime – police are quick to point to the statistical drops in crime, before and after property is marked. The product is used in a discriminating way, as Phil Cleary describes. He says of the company’s work with Network Rail, to protect track cable against copper thieves: “The fundamental thing we do is, we attack the ‘food chain’ between the thief and the guy who converts it [the stolen metal] into cash. This is what we do, across the piece, whether it’s burglary, car crime …” He stresses how it is important to catch the individual thieves; they go into prison, and when asked, why they are there, they say, in a word, ‘SmartWater’. There is the deterrent. And to return to the topic of publicity, recently the company has brought out adverts with the investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre, who describes SmartWater as ‘bad for business’ – the criminals’ business, that is. <br><br>SmartWater ask not to talk about a number of things: their covert operations, and work that has resulted in as yet unfinished court cases. They will not say where their marking product is on Network Rail’s track. To purely apply the product to mile after mile would be an astronomical cost, quite apart from taking time. Instead, and as speakers on metal theft described at the IFSEC conference in May, those tasked with securing metal have gone for the ‘hot-spot’ approach, plotting where (and, as best they can, when) cable or metal is stolen. Find your hot-spots, where many of the crimes congregate, and concentrate your work there. You target-harden. So, there is a place for other physical and electronic security, whether perimeter fencing, thermal imaging cameras, and remote monitoring, and patrolling where you know the thieves operate. <br><br>As Phil Cleary points out, the strategy is to go for the ‘food chain’, deny the cable thieves the market for their stolen goods. Hence, as he showed me, visits (overt and under-cover) to scrap metal dealers, explaining the marking product, offering the signage. British Transport Police and other forces have been making similar visits. As Phil Cleary says, it may be that some scrap dealers nod during the visit and use the signs as mats afterwards and take no notice and carry on buying cable, no questions asked, no names taken, which is against the law relating to scrap metal dealing. Now those dealers may be merely sloppy, or crooked. In a most interesting pair of covert video recordings, Phil Cleary showed ex-police posing as men with cable to sell, bringing it from the back of a van, and getting it weighed without the scrap dealer employee asking a thing. Months later, on a return visit, an employee apologetically declined to take some cable offered similarly out the back of a van. The message had got through; the metal thieves’ market had been disrupted. Again, this is in line with police methods. To repeat, the crucial point is that the marking product brings traceability; if a man in a van drives to a scrap metal yard with a man hole cover, or cable with ‘BT’ printed, who is to say it’s stolen? The van man can say he found it, or give any number of excuses. But as reported in the July 2011 issue of Professional Security, reels of cable can now be forensically marked with SmartWater’s liquid, during production of the cable; so the forensically coded liquid does not have to be applied manually. With cable marked, the cable manufacturers can prove the place and time of production of each reel. They can do quality control and for example reject with confidence warranty claims based on counterfeits of their products. And as for theft and buying of stolen property, traceability equals accountability. Phil Cleary suggests that the problem of theft of cable is so great for some utility companies that they would be willing to pay a premium for forensically traceable cable. And as for the cost of combating the theft, cable stolen from Network Rail in the night means delayed trains in the morning, and angry passengers. Delayed trains means loss of money. <br><br>So while much of SmartWater’s work has been through the public sector to mark domestic property, the rise lately in metal prices that has prompted theft of metal – from waterworks, under roads, you name it – has created a corporate demand for the risk management strategy behind its success; and not only in the UK. The rising metal prices and the appeal to criminals are worldwide. SmartWater has opened a London office and is seeking to show it to heads of security from railways, utilities and other sectors. That London office has a control room for logging and co-ordinating operations, as does Telford. The Telford head office is home besides to the white-coat world of manufacture of the forensic marking product; and the analysis of samples, done with lasers and mass-spectrometry (and more people in white coats). <br><br>To sum up, Phil Cleary does not want his company to be pigeon-holed as a property marking company. “We are a risk management company,” he stresses. Whether it’s acquisitive crime, or metal theft from heritage buildings, yes, you could mark property with the liquid, and pin up the stickers to say you have done so, and leave it at that. But Phil Cleary – a former policeman, like many at his company – recommends use of other things, whether covert operations, video, audio, ‘honey-traps’, and co-operation with police. The aim is to make the offender accountable for their crime and the thought of a police cell door locking behind them seem all the more likely. If you can achieve that then you can create a genuine deterrent – something which property marking alone could never accomplish.<br><br>MacIntyre view<br><br>Donal MacIntyre has featured in commercials for SmartWater without accepting a fee, having become aware of the product while filming Macintyre’s Big Sting for TV. He said: "I have seen first-hand the huge deterrent effect of SmartWater. Criminals know what it is and the potential risk of capture and conviction that it represents. I have spoken to serious criminals who all say that SmartWater is bad for business and acts as their number one deterrent.” You can view the Crimewatch-style commercials on the SmartWater YouTube channel. <br><br>Memorial project<br><br>As reported last issue, the SmartWater Foundation is partnering with War Memorials Trust on the In Memoriam 2014 project. The aim: locate, log and protect thousands of memorials, mostly honouring the dead of the 1914-18 war. As the former chief constable Sir Keith Povey, chairman of the foundation, has said: “As the centenary of the First World War approaches, In Memoriam 2014 encourages communities to reconnect with their local war memorials and remember the sacrifice that so many people made for their country.“ Where a war memorial has had its metal stolen, the scrap value may be fairly small, but the moral outrage at the disrespect shown to the memorial is great.
