News

First CESAR Champion of 2021

Last year, the CEA launched its CESAR Champion initiative to recognise the efforts of any police officer who uses the CESAR technology to identify a stolen piece of machinery. Police Constable 'Hutch' Hutchings of Northamptonshire Police is the first CESAR Champion of this year and joins the prestigious ‘Champions Club’. 

Hutch is one of the UK's most proactive rural crime cops and a very worthy winner of the much-coveted CESAR Champion badge. Hutch 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 drive down rural machinery crime. 

Dave Luscombe head of special projects at the CEA presented the award to PC Hutchings in a socially distanced handover ceremony. Hutch 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 local machine owners to protect their older machines with CESAR. Providing advice and information on how to fit CESAR to owners of machines through the dedicated CESARnetwork. CESAR, powered by Datatag, can be fitted to any construction or agriculture machine that is at risk of theft. The tamper-evident label acts 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 quickly and easily.

The first ever recipient of the CESAR Champion Award was Detective Constable Chris Piggott.

Got a news story? Email news@earthmoversmagazine.co.uk.