Intelligent ANPR helps remove environmental crime in Essex

All Saints Church was a hotbed of antisocial behaviour, with illegal raves, littering and substance abuse becoming out of control. A year ago, security stepped in and decided enough was enough and implemented numerous security solutions, including CCTV, visitor ANPR and more.

The church was left destroyed after an illegal rave on New Year’s Eve where more than 300 people packed into the church, all ignoring the government’s coveted restrictions.

The police arrived on the scene to control the situation, where some tried to stop the officers from coming in but failed, and the equipment was seized once the illegal rave was arrested.

A significant tool that has eliminated those issues virtually included ANPR cameras and manned security. Through innovative technology, community safety is promoted as previous traditional CCTV systems required lots of manpower to watch and filter the footage. Ai technology with automatic alerting and more helps eliminate that requirement.

Ricky Volgo from All Saints Church Security said, “we spent probably about four to five months looking for an ANPR solution; we tried various in-camera solutions, software solutions, and cloud-based solutions. There wasn’t anything that we could find that ticks all the boxes, but it also aligned with our roadmap for how we saw the system evolving.

We found Aero Ranger, and it was almost a eureka lightbulb kind of moment; I remember phoning my developer and saying I think we found it. “

All Saints Church uses Hickvision & Axis cameras and some branded cameras with the ability to collect all that data through Aero Ranger. The data collected includes a vehicle’s licence plate, make, model, colour etc., all by running reports with a single click and has the ability to date back over the last 30 days.

ANPR allows Essex security to control areas that are currently outside of CCTV coverage whilst still gaining a very strong visual presence in the regions that are prone to anti-social behaviour.

One of the main issues they cover is environmental crime, including littering, fly-tipping and littering from a moving vehicle. Initially, they were dealing with 150-200 separate incidents of anti-social criminal and suspicious behaviour, which has now been reduced to two or three a month, with numbers continuing to decline.

The implementation of security solutions has transformed the area and has given the local community the confidence to return to the site to visit the parks and church.

For 10 to 15 years, people avoided visiting local areas within Essex. With the resources to equip their vehicles with a police grade and law encouragement raid hardware, they have seen significant improvements within the community, and people feel much safer when in the area. With this technology, the All Saints Church's illegal rave on New Year’s Eve could have been potentially avoided. Still, they are hoping now with Aero Ranger that they have eliminated the chances of it happening again.

YouTube User Story: RMC Essex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INxs6H-Cfmc