It has been identified through our Crime reporting system that over the last 10 days there have been several reported Burglaries to Places of Worship.  

Items taken have consisted of Petty Cash, Sound system equipment, cleaning items and on one occasion the Silver Challis, Silver Pyx have been taken.

This type of Crime against a place of worship is very rare.  Petty Cash theft from any place can be linked to survivalist crime, but the theft of Sound equipment and Silverware are very rare.

This weekend, As many of you join each other at your places of Worship, please take time to make everyone aware, to take time to look at your place of worship and see if there are ways of securing or removing items of value to prevent their loss.  With the nature of most places of worship, they want to be open calm places for you all to attend and reflect and I'm sure that the thought of having to secure and potentially limit access times may not have been a consideration before now.  This is something we would ask you all to review and look at ways to protect your places of Worship.

Have you got a full list of your assets?

Have you got photos of your assets should we ever need to identify them?

Are there any identifying marks, serial numbers or engravings on anything that would assist anyone to identify them as yours?

Have you an alarm system to the church?  

Do you have secure storage that is alarmed or monitored in any way?  Sadly, should someone gain entry to your place of worship, they could be there some time unnoticed committing their crime.

There are covert and overt marking systems, depending on the item you wish to mark available to you.  We would always recommend a system that has the Secure By Design affiliation to it as this has been tried and tested.  www.securebydesign.co.uk 

Consider at least a Simple PIR alarm system that can activate and call a phone number in areas where visiting public shouldn't have access to.  (signal in some areas my not support this system)

Camera systems to protect you and your place of worship.  There are so many options out there for you to look at offering Solar powered systems with 4g connectivity, to WIFI connectivity or hard wired in systems.  Every location will need a professional assessment as to what would work best for you.

Could Items be removed from the place of worship and secured elsewhere?

Any sound systems, overtly mark with the church name & postcode.

Prevention is key with any crime.  This message has been to bring to your attention that this crime has happened in Northamptonshire over the last 10 days and for you to please look at how you can prevent yourselves becoming the next victim.

We have a Crime Prevention team in Northamptonshire Police and also links on the Force website to Crime Prevention too.

Crime prevention advice | Northamptonshire Police (northants.police.uk)

Many of you will have contact with your local Neighbourhood teams.  Please, if you would like a visit or further advice make contact with them or contact me and i can forward your request on to them for you.

 Should anyone have noticed any suspicious activity around their church over the last 2-3 weeks, please let us know.  You may think its not relevant information, but to us, it could be the vital piece of the jigsaw we need.