Greg Lawrence, Group Loss Risk Manager for retailers Tesco, speaks on secure parking. From our October 2001 print edition.
You can tell that Greg Lawrence, Group Loss Risk Manager for retailers Tesco, is fascinated about designing out crime. He was a speaker on the subject at IFSEC (and reported on in our July issue). What’s more, he takes pains to talk meaningfully about the subject without technicalities – which is not the same as saying he is talking common-sense (more of that later). Some Tesco supermarkets are served by municipal car parks (such as Ludlow) and the Metro brand of stores (at Convent Garden, Oxford Street and Goodge Street in central London) do not have car parking. In the main Tesco does own its site parking. Greg makes the point that if a municipal operator gets it wrong and a car park becomes unfriendly for users, a town centre’s customers can use other car parks. If a retailer gets its car park wrong, the customers will go to a rival. There are standard principles that Greg brings to bear in securing a car park. A clear boundary, for example. Greg is careful to define what he means – not a 15-feet fence, ‘but the boundary where the public domain ends and the car park begins has to be made very clear’. This could mean a waist-high fence with wooden railings, and attractive but prickly shrubs on the private side of the boundary – something psychologically strong and not attractive to someone thinking of cocking their leg over the fence and taking a short cut. ‘So what I would be looking for is a strong boundary with as few entrances as possible, and where there are entrances, it’s ideal for pedestrians to be beside the motorists.’ Ideally, Greg does not want to separate the pedestrians from the traffic – the former on pavements, the latter on roads, of course. ‘If we can have one road in and out, that is the ideal. The trouble is, that is not really practical for a supermarket because customers can’t get in. What we are seeking is that by putting the entrances in the right places what you don’t have is a through route across the car park.’ The technical term for such a short-cut is a through route movement generator. Once you have a TRMG, and it is normal for people to use the car park who are not customers, legitimate customers start to expect strangers in the car park, there is the question of territoriality – that is, the influence that people exert over space. It’s a subtle process, and not all parts of a car park will be equally vulnerable, but it’s something that car thieves are looking for – ‘the thief’s biggest weapon is anonymity’. A car parked by one of these through routes is most vulnerable. Greg points out that a car thief takes on average 30 seconds to steal a car, depending on its make and age. To steal from a car takes even less time. Where there are pedestrian entrances, they may be narrow, and in a chiccane, to put off skateboarders, and people trying to wheel trollies away. That said, the entrance must be suitable for wheelchairs and pushchairs. ‘Whatever we do, we try to keep it low key. There is a relationship between aggressive design – barbed wire, pallisade fencing – and additional crime – and what we try to do is make everything as customer-friendly as possible.’ Greg wraps up this thinking in a slogan: ‘If it is good for customers, then on the balance of probabilities it is probably bad for crime.’ In terms of security precautions, that means keeping the car park clean and tidy, and not allowing hiding places, and making the parking bays facing the same way, he suggests. What does the customer arriving in his car want’ Greg asks. Answer: a parking place he is happy with, and an unthreatening route to the store entrance. For an example of a threatening walkway Greg mentions the Marble Arch underpasses. (To be fair, we reported in September 2000 how Westminster Council is installing vandal-resistant Silent Witness CCTV cameras in Marble Arch and other walkways.) Why are they so threatening for pedestrians, and harbours for beggars and buskers’ Because, Greg replies, thanks to the right-angled corners, you walk halfway along an underpass to find yourself not able to see what is ahead, and yet if you want to retreat you are not able to see what is behind the corner you have just turned. In the car park, this is where lighting comes in. ‘The research tends to suggest that lighting doesn’t prevent crime, only indirectly. It removes the cover of darkness and allows you to see it’s secure and safe. It reassures you. A soft white light is always preferable in car parking situations to a harsh yellow light. You can see natural colours and by the same token very bright light like a football stadium light is hostile, because it is unnatural. Again, we are looking for low-key lighting.’ Greg wants car parks lit well enough so that shopper can feel confident about pushing his trolley there (and without tripping over!), without encouraging local youths to use the car park as a part-time football pitch. Above all no pools of light, which let thief of mugger hide. This brings Greg to what he believes is a mistaken perception – that solutions to crime generally are common-sense. Alas, everybody has a different idea of what common-sense is. For instance, you could say that the common-sense answer to secure pedestrian entry to a supermarket site is to make plenty of entrances. Maybe, Greg replies, but the more entrances you create, the more anonymity you are creating for thieves and yobboes. ‘you will find even in a large car park you can immediately see, and instinctively you will know, which are the plcaes you really want to avoid. The problem is, it’s different in daylight and night. You park your car when it’s light and when it gets dark things have changed. We try and design for that as well. But it’s like everything else in crime prevention, it’s a compromise.’
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As for petrol stations at a supermarket, drive-offs without paying are becoming more of a problem as the cost of fuel goes up. Greg has looked at how to make drive-offs at a Tesco petrol station more difficult. At an extreme, any retailer can reduce crime to a minimum on their sites … but how would customers get in’ Tesco like other retailers has 24-hour opening, or to be exact all-week opening bar Sunday 4pm to Monday morning. Greg agrees that such long opening hours bring a tension, the classic security tension, between letting in legitimate site users and keeping out the undesirables. By and large – and it’s more complicated where the firm do not own the site – Tesco’s aim is to have an open site with controls. What’s to be avoided are extremes of security – whether complete control, or no control. Here Greg refers to a theme of his IFSEC talk on designing out crime; recorded crime has rocketed since World War One. If the government is correct that the rise in crime is bottoming out (and Greg won’t vouch for it), what Greg described at IFSEC as the ‘cycle of competitive struggle’ will set in. We will see fewer criminals, but the ones left will be better at crime, and more determined. Given that drugs are such a social problem, retailers can expect to be hit by more, displaced, crime and disorder. So Greg anticipates. ‘And from a car park view the disorder is much more significant than the crime, because it is threatening if you park the car and if you have to go through a group of kids hanging around.’ Fear of crime is greater than the reality, Greg says, and those threatened shoppers will choose to go elsewhere. Physical security measures such as CCTV and help-points not only encourage customers, but discourage those groups hanging around, and thus separate the one or two really nasty ring-leaders from the many hangers-on who will be deterred. If the real nasties linger, going along the legal route of serving injunctions against a couple of people to keep them off your site is far easier (and cheaper) than acting against 30. As for anti-social behaviour orders, that as we reported last month have found few takers, Greg feels they are rather maligned, while adding that it’s his personal opinion rather than a company one. If an excuse given for not using ASBOs is that they are too much trouble, that suggests to Greg that the problem being addressed has not reached the stage where an ASBO is necessary. Greg closes with a plea from the heart – planners, architects and the construction industry, to his knowledge, do not have designing out crime in either their training or their continuing professional development curriculum. Hence architects and planners pedestrianise a town centre, say, and are surprised if they cause anti-social behaviour and crime. Many design problems are forced upon us by the planning authorities, Greg argues – and the planning authorities claim their decisions are forced on them by central government. Whatever, because crime prevention only in the last few years became an accepted planning consideration, senior planners are not used to the concept, and their decisions are causing car parks and town centres creating, for instance, anonymity where criminals and anti-social gangs can thrive.When contentious plans go to appeal, Greg points out that there are specialist planning inspectors for highways and mineral extraction plans – but not crime prevention. Hence some subtle designs for preventing crime are being judged by inexperienced inspectors. Retail security staffs, facing youths hanging around, thieves taking advantage of dark corners, and shoppers fleeing for somewhere safer, have to live with those planning judgements for years.
