Home Security lessons often the same for Narrowboats

Ben’s offices overlook the Grand Union Canal in Harefield (Middlesex).  Last Friday he was looking out of the window when his attention was caught by the sight of two characters on bicycles taking more than just a passing interest in one of the moored narrowboats.

What caught his eye in particular was that they both stopped by the boat and started looking through the windows.  Shortly after this one of them went to the stern and appeared to be examining the doors whilst the other kept watch.

It was at this point that Ben became convinced that they were up to no good and called the police.  Unfortunately the suspects realised that Ben and his colleagues were looking at them through their office window and made off.  I say ‘unfortunately’ because the police arrived at the scene in less than a minute and may have caught them. 

The police spoke with Ben and said that there had been several boats broken into in the past couple of weeks along that stretch and thanked him for the call.

On Monday Ben and his colleagues arrived at work to discover that the thieves had returned at the weekend, had broken open the doors to the same narrowboat and stolen two mini-mopeds.

The odds were very much in favour of the thieves as the owners of the boat had been away for a few days, this stretch of the canal is very quiet and is only overlooked by office buildings that were unoccupied over the weekend.

Obviously there are many things that can be stolen from this type of vessel, but in this instance it was the presence of the two mopeds, which were visible though the windows, that drew the attention of the thieves, just as it is the presence of a brand new flat screen TV hanging on the lounge wall that will attract the attention of a house burglar. 

The key to preventing this particular type of crime has got to be curtains or blinds to stop people seeing through the boat’s windows to see what there is to steal.

Of course, the physical security of the boat’s doors, windows and hatches is important, but because so many narrowboats are moored up in such quiet locations with next to no chance of criminal behaviour being seen, owners should seriously consider installing an alarm, which will message your mobile phone.  It might also be prudent to consider a small IP CCTV camera system to capture images of the culprits. 

IP CCTV systems don’t require local recording as they are designed to transmit the captured images across Local Networks, the Internet and Wide Area Networks to a central location, where they can be recorded, viewed and managed.  Very useful evidence could therefore be supplied to the police should you suffer a burglary. (I appreciate you need a good signal in the first place, but this particular location does have one.)

All these things are possible and maybe more boat owners should think about them.

I’m meeting up with a supplier of IP CCTV later today so watch this space for more news about the benefits that IP CCTV might bring to us.