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We now move straight into one of the most important and high profile crimes in current day South Africa - the car hijacking and/or driveway robbery.
The typical scenario is when the driver pulls into his home and suddenly two men armed with guns approach the vehicle and hold up the driver. They then take personal items such as cell phones, wallets, bags, watches and jewelry off the victim before climbing in to his car and driving away with it.
Almost all of us will have either experienced this type of incident or know someone personally who has been through it. This type of crime is terrifying and traumatic as staring down the barrel of a gun brings you to thoughts of your last moments on this planet. Furthermore as it happens in the "safety" of your driveway, you also feel invaded and no longer secure in your "castle".
So how do we prevent it?
Firstly, lets start by focussing on when and where these crimes happen. Recent stats indicate that almost 50% of hijackings occur in driveways, but in reality for you and I as residents of suburbia, its much higher. Much of the other 50% involves victims who are taxi drivers picking up clients, delivery vehicles and trucks taken for their payload and cars stopped in remote areas and becoming victims of opportunistic criminals. If we take these out of the sample pool as most of us are unlikely to ever be in these situations, the likelihood of a driveway robbery occurring in a driveway exceeds 80%. My personal experience in attending over 200 hijackings in 10 years is that less than 10 occurred away from a driveway.
Our prevention tactic is therefore as follows:
1) When you are driving home and are about 5 minutes away, wake up! This is not a time to relax as you near home after a long day at work. Check you mirrors. Is anyone following you? If in doubt drive to your local police station.
2) As you enter your road check for parked cars in the street, or people you don't know loitering (standing or sitting around). If you don't know them become suspicious. You should be checking for these suspicious people on both sides of your driveway for up to 60 or 70 metres on each side. Simply checking your own pavement is just not sufficient. Either phone and ask your neighbours to come out and act as a deterrent for any possible criminals or phone your security company to escort you home.
3) Check common hiding places such as nearby bushes for anybody that may be there. Get off your cell phone, we need you to concentrate now.
4) Allow any traffic behind you to pass by pulling to the side of the road before getting to your gate.
5) If you have electric gates, wait in the road until they are open. Do not drive up to them before opening as this allows the robbers to block your escape route. There should not be any traffic behind you and if there is, they can wait a few seconds.
6) If you are visiting friends, don't use the gate intercom, phone from a cell phone to get them to open the gate. If you use the intercom the robbers can drive in behind you and block your escape route.
7) Make sure the gate closes behind you.
In essence we are encouraging awareness. Its not necessary to be paranoid, just sensibly aware. By narrowing down the period of such awareness to just 5 minutes from home makes it much easier as you don't have to be so alert your whole day - that is simply not practical. Just about every hijacking victim's statement begins with "they suddenly appeared at my window" or "they came out of no where". This is not true, either they were waiting for you or they followed you.
In future articles we will deal with making your home less hijacker friendly.
We hope this helps prevent you being a victim of a hijacking
The selfsecure team
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