Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

The car park, as a managed facility, provides a great deal of scope for controlling car crime. Nevertheless, as this and previous studies have shown, thefts of and from cars can be a serious problem in some car parks. Earlier work has largely focused on evaluating initiatives taken in single car parks.

This study takes a wider look at the car park industry, examining the problem of car crime in many different sorts of public car parking environments commonly found in our city centres and towns, and at train stations.

Title: Preventing crime in car parks
Authors: Barry Webb, Ben Brown and Katherine Bennett
Series: Police Research Group Crime Prevention Unit Series: Paper No.34
Number of Pages:
Date published: 1992

Key points

The study shows that there is a great deal that car park owners and operators can do to control the problem of car crime, identifying operating methods which are inherently more secure than others. The task is how to encourage car park operators to take car crime into account in their management of car parks.

The study discusses the merits of two issues currently receiving attention from the police and consumer groups – the development of a market for secure car parks, by providing motorists with more information about the security levels in car parks, and increasing car park liability for crime.

Most of the research studies which have examined car crime in public car parks have been evaluations of initiatives to reduce crime in particular locations. This study was conducted to examine more systematically the risk of car crime associated with the many different types of public car parking environments that are currently provided in this country. The research was conducted in the London area. Three sites were selected for study:

• town centre car parks in Kingston-upon-Thames;

• central London car parks in Marylebone; and

• commuter car parks attached to British Rail and London Underground stations.

Figures from the Metropolitan police show that 85% of vehicles stolen from garage car parks (ie not open air surface car parks) in London are cars, the remainder being commercial vehicles (9%) and motor cycles (6%). 92% of thefts from vehicles parked in garage car parks involve cars. The data presented for the car parks examined in this study will show that the target in nearly all the thefts is a car.

The preventive measures suggested by this study are, therefore, directed mainly at car crime in car parks and may not all be relevant to other vehicles such as motor cycles. The report examines the scale of the problem of car crime in car parks and the findings from each of the three case studies.

Getting a copy

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