Your school is equipped to teach children for several hours a day, but did you know that you can also educate vandals that crime doesn’t pay?

Scrap metal vandals operate solo or in pairs to cut, detach and steal air conditioning unit copper coils and other scrap metal from school grounds. Metal theft vandalism affects school children, just as it does the school administration, teachers and the rest of the community from whom the vandals stole. Sometimes schools must close to enable the repairs to be made safely.

The cost to the school is considerably greater than the few hundred dollars received by metal thieves at the scrap recycler. Replacement and restoration costs can be in the tens of thousands of dollars; in some cases, it’s upwards of $100,000. For this reason, police consider air conditioning metal theft to be a serious offense.

Metal theft offenders can be difficult to track down as they often act quickly, and commit these crimes under the cover of darkness. When serial numbers have been removed and identifying information is not present, the scrap metal cannot be traced.

Create a comfortable, cohesive and safe learning environment for students and teachers, and put vandals on notice. The FlashCAM includes a motion activated voice warning that can be customized to any message recording to alert the criminal that trespassing and illegal activity will be prosecuted. The system integrates well with your district’s crime prevention strategy.

Municipalities continue to feel the increasingly challenged budget crunch. Several leading public safety authorities who share crime prevention tips recommend an effective way to address this revenue problem. They advocate implementation of proactive crime prevention strategies. By preventing nuisance crimes such as graffiti, vandalism, illegal dumping and metal theft reduces the public revenue burden. It’s a considerable savings to avoid expensive graffiti removal, toxic waste cleanup costs and nuisance crimes adjudication.

Even in areas where such criminal behavior has not occurred in the past, it is unfortunately beginning to pop up more. The FBI posted property crime statistics from 2013: “Nationally, a property crime occurred every 3.7 seconds; one burglary every 16.4 second; one larceny theft every 5.3 seconds; one motor vehicle theft every 45.1 seconds.” These offenses touch real people’s lives, and affect the public’s trust and treasury, too.

Proactive crime prevention programs and tools are an investment that saves the city budget and allocates funds to other areas of need. In many cases this is easily over hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that could be spent on training, infrastructure, repairs, or other purposes to enhance the community.

Benjamin Franklin’s adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is just as applicable today as it was in his day.  Take action if you are looking for crime prevention programs that work and experience the difference in increasing public safety. Save costly expenditures of time, money and resources, and watch public confidence grow.  You’ll be glad you did.