POLICE AND INDUSTRY CONTINUE TO WORK IN PARTNERSHIP TO COMBAT CRIME
The Combined Industry Theft Solutions (CITS) group, in partnership with police and partners, held the last training event of 2024, which was hailed another success, hosted at South Yorkshire Police College.
On the 29th of November, the final CITS police training event of 2024 took place, in conjunction with the National Construction and Agricultural theft team (NCATT), Police liaison officers of the official CESAR Scheme, representatives of Cantrack Global, NFU Mutual, Leica, Clancy’s, Hitachi and J Murphy & Son’s.
The special police training event welcomed over 75 police officers from regional and specialist police forces.
The officers attended a full day's training, which was opened by CITS chairman Ian Elliott, the Group Head of Security for the utility company Clancy’s.
These ‘police only’ CITS training events have been rolled out since June 2022, aiming to highlight the current threats and the importance of working in partnerships to tackle crime, in particular to the construction and agricultural sectors.
The training was delivered by both specialist police training officers and industry experts including, DS Chris Piggott of NCATT, Police Liaison officers on behalf of the official CESAR Scheme, John Mus-sett Director of Investigations at Cantrack Global, who all taught officers about current threats around construction and agricultural machinery theft and highlighted techniques to identify stolen machinery, rogue equipment movements, and common tricks used by criminal gangs to target in-dustry.
The training event was supported by the Home Office industry schemes, CESAR, and MicroCESAR, both identification marking systems used by police to easily identify ownership of plant and machinery used on both farms and construction sites.
The feedback from the officers who attended the event has been extremely positive and highlights the importance of hosting these training days.
CITS Chairman Ian Elliott commented on the success of the day:
"It is really important to continue these training events to help support all police forces, in order to tackle the organised criminal gangs that are making theft a huge problem for farmers and industry.
CITS in partnership with police, crime-fighting organisations and machinery manufacturers provide officers with the knowledge and detection techniques to combat equipment theft and to be one step ahead of the criminals."
A special thanks went to South Yorkshire’s PC Keven Allen, who helped support the day. Keven commented:
"The training will help add to the officer's skill set, it was also a great opportunity to build awareness for surrounding Forces, of the principle OCG not just regionally but nationally, involved in Plant theft. That awareness will help build the intelligence picture for the future".
CITS is an industry forum comprising of representatives from the Home Office, police, insurers, and industry, and will continue to host a series of further, free to attend, ‘police only’ training events in 2025. Officers should register their interest for future events with faye@cits.uk.com.
The next training event will take place on the 4th of February 2025, in Oxfordshire.
Further details can be found on the CITS website www.cits.uk.com
