British Transport Police crime mapping technology fails to curb cable theft

The British Transport Police has revealed that it has seen a 70 per cent increase in cable theft despite adopting Pitney Bowes' Business Insight package in a bid to improve crime mapping and analysis.

Cable theft costs the rail industry over £770m a year and the British Transport Police said that tackling this has become its number one priority, but unfortunately the solution it deployed about six months ago has not delivered the anticipated results.

Incidents such as the recent South West Trains meltdown, which was the result of cable theft, have led to hundreds of hours of delays and left thousands of angry passengers stranded.

A British Transport Police spokesman told Computing that the Pitney Bowes deployment was just one of the measures it had taken to tackle the problem.

"We're doing a whole load of things to tackle cable theft; some of them are overt, some are covert," he said.

"We do scrap metal dealer visits looking for illegal goods and we use automatic number plate recognition technology."

He also said that the Pitney Bowes solution had led to several arrests and convictions and so had provided some benefit to the force.

A lot of the information that the Business Insight solution gathers allows the force to see trends in criminal activity.

"The solution gives us insight into where the arrests occur and where those criminals live, and where scrap metal dealers are based," said the spokesman.

"However, a lot of this type of crime is opportunist so arguably, you're not going to catch people using this type of solution," he said.