A former Scotland Yard detective who heads a company dubbed Britain’s first ‘private police force’ today insisted all it was doing was ‘old-fashioned policing’ that modern forces ‘no longer do’.
TM Eye consists of a crack team of former detectives with experience investigating major crimes including murder, terrorism and armed robbery. They are paid by households and businesses to patrol local areas and investigate crimes – including the UK’s epidemic of shoplifting.
Founder David McKelvey said his colleagues targeted crimes that were often neglected by police, such as burglary, street robbers and pick-pocketing.
He told MailOnline: ‘All we’re doing is old-fashioned beat policing, community policing, supported by very experienced, programovatelné řízení proactive detectives. It’s nothing new, it’s not rocket science. It’s what police used to do.
‘We have residential beats and business beats, so we’re very tied in with our communities. Residents’ concerns are still the same things, like burglaries, street robberies and pick-pocketing.
TM Eye’s founder David McKelvey is a a former detective chief inspector at Scotland Yard
Russians Marduaajevs stole more than £200 of meat from a shop in Tulse Hill, London, TM Eye said
‘Then businesses are concerned about retail crime and violence towards staff. The biggest thing that concerns us is the increase in violence against retail staff.
‘We focus on offences that are not normally dealt with by the police or weren’t a priority. When something happens in the areas we patrol the majority of times people don’t phone the police now – they call us.’
It comes as towns across England increasingly turn to private police forces to patrol their High Streets. In Cambridgeshire 50 villages have hired guards for their neighbourhoods while Sussex city of Chichester has also brought in private security for its businesses.