THE first CESAR Champion of 2021 has been named as PC Hutchings of Northamptonshire Police.
The CEA’s CESAR Champion initiative recognise the efforts of police officers who use the CESAR technology to identify stolen machinery.
PC Hutchings contacted the secure CESAR contact centre over 50 times last year to check the provenance of agricultural plant machinery as part of his commitment to tackle machinery crime.
Dave Luscombe, head of special projects at the CEA, presented the award in a socially distanced handover ceremony. PC Hutchings said, “During my career, I’ve worked in various roles ranging from road crime, road policing and now rural crime officer, and a vehicle and plant machinery examiner. One of the biggest issues whilst policing in these roles is being able to identify the unidentifiable. Where fitted the CESAR scheme allows simple identification and I’m glad to see it expanding across a variety of brands and machines.”
PC Hutchings has run a number of ‘CESAR-IT’ days across the UK to encourage machine owners to protect older machines with CESAR.
CESAR, powered by Datatag, can be fitted to any construction or agriculture machine that is at risk of theft. The tamper-evident label acts is intended to work as an initial deterrent and the multiple layers of technology help to identify the machine. All the owner and machine details are stored on the CESAR secure database for police to double-check any machine.
