For details please see Notice of annual parish meeting May25

Alcester South Safer Neighbourhood Team –

The 10 Principles of Crime Prevention

1. Target Hardening – Making your property harder for an offender to access. Upgrading the locks on your doors, windows, sheds and outbuildings. Fitting sash jammers to vulnerable doors and windows. Using secure passwords to prevent criminals hacking your online accounts
2. Target Removal – Ensuring that a potential target is out of view. Not leaving items on view through your windows – i.e. laptops, phones, keys, bags. Putting your vehicle in the garage if you have one and not leaving valuables on display. Being cautious about what you post online as it may be used to identify or locate you offline.
3. Reducing the Means – Removing items that may help commit an offence. Not leaving tools and ladders in the garden and clearing up any rubble/bricks. Keeping wheelie bins out of reach, as they may be a climbing aid or help transport items. Making sure that bricks and rubble are cleared.
4. Reducing the Payoff – Reducing the profit the criminal can make from the offence. Security marking your property. Marking your property in such a way that others will not want to buy from the thief. Not buying property you believe or suspect to be stolen.
5. Access Control – Looking at measures that will control access to a location, a person or object. Locking your doors and windows to both your house and your vehicle. Ensuring that fencing, hedges, walls and other boundary treatments are in a good state of repair. Putting a security system in place at a commercial site (entry barriers, security guards, ID cards)
6. Surveillance – Improving surveillance around homes, businesses or public places to deter criminals. Removing high hedges / fences at the front of your home that allows an offender to work unseen. Consider adding CCTV to a commercial site or public place. Establishing a Neighbourhood Watch Scheme in your street
7. Environmental Change – Ensuring your property and wider community looks cared for. Ensuring that graffiti and domestic/commercial waste is cleared up. Reporting issues with fly-tipping or broken streetlights to the relevant authority. Working with the police and local authority to close a footpath.
8. Rule Setting – Changing our habits by setting rules and positioning signage in appropriate locations. Introducing a rule that the last person entering / leaving should lock the door and remove the keys. Informing visitors to commercial sites that they must report to reception on arrival. Informing users that a particular site is closed between certain times and should not be accessed.
9. Increase the Chances of Being Caught – Increasing the likelihood that an offender will be caught to prevent crime occurring. Making use of dusk to dawn security lighting is in place and in working order. Using good quality CCTV and/or alarm systems, especially on commercial sites and public places. Upgrading security to delay an offender, meaning they have to spend more time to gain access.
10. Deflecting Offenders – Deterring an offender or deflecting their intention. Using timer switches to make our homes look occupied if vacant after the hours of darkness. Running youth diversionary schemes with partner agencies. Referring offenders to drug rehabilitation programmes