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‘Walkie talkies will help stem crime’
Landlords sign up to police scheme aimed at preventing bag snatching from bars and clubs
PUB landlords in the West End are to be issued with police style walkie talkies in a bid to combat a sharp rise in bag snatchings in the area.
The scheme called Charing Cross Pub Watch will see around 25 licensees in the pub-saturated Trafalgar Square area in a live link-up over the airwaves, to alert colleagues to troublemakers and report suspicious activity to the police without having to call 999.
While the scheme is mainly to make life easier for pub landlords, police will also monitor the channel, allowing them to react quickly to alcohol-related flare ups or thefts by many of the professional gangs that prey on tourists in the area.
Heaven nightclub and Gordon’s Wine Bar – both in Villiers Street – were two of the first venues to sign up to the scheme, which is one of the first in the borough to use the radio line. It was due to be up and running this week but technical difficulties mean it won’t go live until the end of the month.
Sergeant Ray Duffy from the Strand and Whitehall Safer Neighbourhoods team is overseeing the police side of the initiative.
He said: “It’s basically a sort of neighbourhood watch scheme for pubs. Landlords can use it to share information about their customers. Say if someone is banned from one pub, they can put the information out before they go into the next pub and it’s too late. So it can be used to try and prevent alcohol-related disorder before it happens, but its main use will be to catch criminals.
“Our biggest problem in the area is bag snatching. People come for a drink after work or maybe it’s tourists with their minds on other things, put their bags down, and people are just watching and waiting for them. If they called the police, it would take ages to respond, but if we pick it up a visual description on the radio, we can get someone out there straight away. I think this is where it will be most useful. Obviously it will be most useful on Friday and Saturday nights and in the evenings but there’s no reason why this can’t be a 24-hour operation.”
The bulk of the scheme will be paid for by licensees, with Westminster Council also contributing a sum.
Gerard Menan, manager at Gordon’s Wine Bar said: “It will be fantastic. Bag snatching is a real problem here.
“With the radios, we should be able to banish them from the area and make people feel a lot safer when they come to drink here.”
The accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is based on the Strand and is a big landlord on Villiers Street, will be the location for the central transmitter for the scheme.
Pubwatch is a national scheme run by licensees and police forces up and down the country to combat alcohol related crime and deter troublemakers from drinking. |
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