Being the nation’s leading provider of physical security solutions, we took a look at some of the recent heists that involved break ins, and advise on how these burglaries could have been prevented with better security.
Back in 2015, a group of criminals broke into the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit despite how secure the vault itself was. The building’s security pales in comparison. Sure, the main entrance was rather secure, being a pair of heavy duty doors to which only a few people had access to the keys for.
However, there was no more than a pair of sliding bolt locks for the basement fire exit. The accomplice entered the building and let the rest of the thieves in from the basement, the group then went and disabled the elevator and climbed down to the vault, they proceeded to drill a hole into the vault and got their hands on all the valuables that they could and got away with it as no arrests were made regarding the case until the following year.
Now, how would we be able to prevent them from getting in?
Well, it’s rather simple really. We’d recommend high-security steel doors, certified to the LPCB’s LPS 1175 standard, in place of the fire exit and any other low-security doorsets. Bradbury Group offers certified steel doors with LPS 1175 accreditation to SR2, SR3 and SR4, offering a range of doors which offer an assured level of security, and an effective physical deterrent. These doors are also available with access control systems that restricts access via different methods, such as numerical codes, key cards or a fingerprint scanner so every entry is traceable.
More recently, a group of at least two criminals broke into the Green Vault Museum in the Dresden Castle located in Dresden, Germany. The heist took place on November 25th 2019, and the group that broke in stole around one billion Euros (£855 million) worth of jewels, mostly consisting of diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds, as well as a plentiful amount of gold. The gems had been part of a collection made by Augustus the Strong, Saxony’s ruler during 1723, so they hold great cultural value as well.
The thieves broke in by removing a part of an iron grille on a ground floor window and smashed the glass to get in. A nearby electrical fire most likely stopped the alarms from working properly, it’s currently unknown if the criminals lit the fire themselves or if it was coincidental, however, this still helped them to get in undetected.
The burglars would have had a much harder time breaking into the museum should they have had better security grilles, such as the LPCB accredited, LPS 1175 SR3 Eclipse grilles, the strongest certified grilles on the market. These grilles are both anti-theft and anti-terror and can be installed in windows and entrance ways or even be used as a standalone partition or several can be formed into a cage.
