Meet Corporate Security & Business Protection Superhero Pete Harwood

The Corporate Security and Business Protection team does a vital job protecting and safeguarding Jaguar Land Rover and its people everyday.

In this series we will be looking at some of the superheroes within the team. This week we meet Solihull Senior Investigator Pete Harwood.

Pete Harwood – Senior Investigator at Solihull

I left British Aerospace as an engineering apprentice to join the Warwickshire Police Force in 1983. I spent 30 years working for the thin blue line, starting out in uniform dealing with everything imaginable, before specialising in criminal investigation.

Working across a whole raft of teams as a detective constable – from the drug squad to proactive units, and the reactive Criminal Investigation Department – I went on to join the major investigations team, which deals with murder, manslaughter, severe sexual assaults and other serious crimes.

In April 2013, I joined Jaguar Land Rover’s global investigations department. At the time we were building up to deal with the number of cases coming in, both internally and externally.

The majority of cases come through the ‘Speak Up’ whistleblowing phone line. We also get a number of ‘tip-offs’ from employees who’ve seen something on eBay or another auction site. If we can process something like a serial number that we can link back to Jaguar Land Rover, then we will secretly purchase it, identify the seller and work the connection back to the business.

A lot of the cases we deal with, people don’t intend or realise what they’ve done. We don’t judge people, we just look to protect Jaguar Land Rover from crime. We just look at the circumstances and try and get to the bottom of what happened. We work closely with Case Management to determine the most appropriate level of punishment, which is not always a criminal charge or a gross misconduct dismissal but often is.

Currently, we’re implementing changes at Solihull starting with a challenge culture, security is everyone’s responsibility not just Corporate Security & Business Protection. If you walk into a sensitive area, you should expect to be challenged. People here are proud of what they do and they don’t want thieves among them, so getting into a security mind-set is helping us all and protecting our future.

Another big part of what we do is police liaison work. We get a lot of police enquiries with regards to employees who are of interest to them outside of work and about stolen items, all of which we can verify using our databases. If they find a stolen engine for instance we can tell them – which vehicle it should be in and when it was built. It’s amazing the level of detail we can drill down to.

We also work closely with engineering, to find new kit being used by thieves and feedback on creating a fix. When we find out how criminals do things and what’s about to happen on the streets, we purchase the equipment covertly, test and reverse engineer them to find a fix for our new cars.

It’s a game of cat and mouse as criminals reverse engineer our work but we are proactive to what criminals are doing out there, that’s for sure. We care passionately about Jaguar Land Rover and we are not only here to protect the company’s future but continue to make it great.

Gallery