View this article online: https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/west/2005/01/27/50345.htm
Arizona-based Sunstate Equipment Company, an equipment rental company in eight southern states has registered its equipment fleet with the National Equipment Register (NER) in order to help Sunstate and its clients deter theft and increase the chances of recovering stolen equipment.
Through its 24-hour hotline and the Internet, NER provides identification advice and ownership information from its databases of millions of equipment theft and ownership records to law enforcement seeking to identify suspicious equipment. NER will now be able to identify equipment belonging to Sunstate – even before a theft has been detected or reported.
Sunstate’s Corporate Risk Manager, Don Cash, noted that “theft is a significant problem for rental companies and their clients, particularly in southern states. Having closely observed NER’s development over the last two years Sunstate considers that NER’s unique services compliment our existing theft prevention efforts – it is also a very cost effective solution that can be implemented immediately and across our entire fleet. We only need to deter or recover one or two thefts for the service to pay for itself. It is also the right thing to do as it will positively impact our clients and the industry as a whole.”
All mobile Sunstate units are being marked with decals that clearly warn thieves that the equipment is registered on a national database used extensively by law enforcement, and that the chances of being detected while moving, storing or selling the equipment are greatly increased.
What if the thief removes the decal? “It doesn’t matter”, points out David Shillingford, president of NER, “the item is still registered on the database and can still be identified in a number of ways – and thieves knows this.” NER also encourages officers to investigate suspicious equipment through a national training program that explains the common ‘red flags’ displayed by stolen equipment and the basics of equipment identification.
NER now has more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies using their databases regularly, which has reportedly already resulted in the recovery of more than $4 million of stolen equipment.