The Hatton Garden safety deposit burglary over the Easter weekend of 2015 is almost too fantastical to be true. For businesses with valuable physical assets and the security specialists charged with protecting them, it was a chilling reminder of the very real risks, writes Sonia Blizzard, managing director at broadband provider Beaming.
The particulars of the case have been widely reported. Following 18-months of planning a gang of notorious career criminals – aided, abetted and (some say) master-minded by a mysterious inside man known only as ‘Basil’ – broke into a seemingly impenetrable vault in the heart of London’s jewellery district and executed a crime caper worthy of the big screen.
The gang gained access to offices above the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company twice over the long weekend, abseiled down a lift shaft into the basement, disconnected the security systems and used heavy cutting equipment to drill through a thick, reinforced concrete wall to gain access to an underground vault containing almost 1000 safety deposit boxes. They emptied more than 70 of them and made off with £14m in diamonds, gold, jewellery and cash.
The heist captured international attention, in part because crimes of this type are becoming less frequent as organised crime moves online. While most of the perpetrators are now behind bars, Basil and around £10m of the gang’s takings are still at large and will perhaps never be found. Advances in security monitoring and internet technologies made over recent years mean that the gang could have been stopped in the act and not a single penny should have been lost.
The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company shares 88-90 Hatton Garden with other tenants, so anyone with the right key and four-digit entry pin could have gained access to the building. It is reported that Basil had these, accessed the building and opened a fire exit to let the rest of the gang and its heavy cutting equipment inside.
Despite the gang’s attempt to take out the security systems, an SMS alert was automatically sent by the alarm system to a monitoring company when this door was opened. The security firm called the police and sent a guard to the scene. The police didn’t deem the alert to be sufficiently important to dispatch officers and the security guard, who examined the exterior of the building and found the doors were secure, recorded the incident as a false alarm. Both responses proved more than unfortunate.
There were CCTV cameras inside and outside of the building, which – alongside number plate recognition and mobile phone evidence – ultimately helped to trace and convict most of the gang. Security contractors I’ve spoken to wonder why the available technology was not being used to its fullest potential.
While few small businesses can justify the cost of a permanent team of security guards on their premises, modern internet and networking technologies mean that live CCTV footage can be transmitted securely to a remote monitoring company using a standard office broadband connection.
Even if a remote CCTV feed is not under constant observation, its existence enables security specialists to instantly view video footage when an alarm, such as the SMS door alert at Hatton Garden, is triggered.
Many of today’s career criminals are smart enough to know that CCTV footage can be beamed to a remote monitoring location, and some will seek to cut phone lines crucial to the broadband connection prior to an attempted burglary. As a result, an increasing number of security providers are working with their clients to ensure a backup connection – such as the 4G mobile phone network – is available to kick in the moment the primary internet connection fails.
The evidence from live-feed CCTV would have shown immediately that suspicious activities were happening at to the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company and provided further evidence compelling the police to take action. Even if the CCTV cameras had all been disabled, the lack of visuals from the scene could have been confirmed instantly using the secure internet connection and a more a proportionate response could then have been directed.
While high-profile blags like the Hatton Garden heist happen less frequently these days, Government statistics show that 40 per cent of businesses experienced criminal acts against their premises in the last year. With police under increasing pressure to do more with less, the more businesses can do to protect themselves the better.
CCTV is a valuable tool in the fight against crime and the ability to connect it to remote security specialists through a fast, secure and resilient internet connection helps to turn it from being a simple deterrent or evidence source after the fact, to a real-time crime fighting tool capable of stopping the perpetrators in their tracks.
The best protected small businesses tend to be those whose intruder alarm, CCTV, access control, fire detection and alarm monitoring services are securely connected to an active alarm receiving centre where trained professionals can monitor all of the evidence they produce. This kind of integrated approach may well have helped at Hatton Garden.
While there is little comfort to those that lost substantial sums at Hatton Garden from knowing that a more modern security set-up could have stopped what was dubbed ‘the crime of the decade’, it should still serve as a £14m wake-up call to the businesses community and security industry, which have a huge amount to lose if they fail to use the technology that is available to them to ensure their premises are as secure as possible.
