Pegasus, a scheme between retailers, private security and police will be unveiled shortly to do something more about organised crime against retail. It could be a case of ‘great, but ….’ writes Mark Rowe.
Briefly to outline Pegasus, numerous retail chains have signed up – Tesco (pictured, Manchester), Sainsbury’s, Next, M&S, B&Q, the Co-operative, TJ Maxx, John Lewis. The membership body the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS) already gathers crime reports from its members, for police to act on. The conference of the National Association of Business Crime Partnerships (NABCP, in the same field as NBCS but a quite separate body) heard yesterday from Supt Patrick Holdaway of the police’s National Business Crime Centre (NBCC), that Pegasus has three aims: to make a threat assessment of SOC (serious and organised crime) against retail; intelligence sharing; and ‘offender management’.
I’d like to consider Pegasus from three angles – for private security providers, retail, and the police. First, background. If the public safety of high streets is in a state, that’s hard to notice, because high streets are in such a state. Once, you could, however roughly, divide the country between the de-industrialised north with depressed and deprived-looking retail centres, and the prosperous south. Now, thanks to new, online shopping habits, the UK has seen a grotesque sort of ‘levelling up’ so beloved of the Boris Johnson-era Government; only, it’s a ‘levelling down’ whereby Salford, and Stafford, Bangor (in North Wales, and Northern Ireland) and Boscombe, look much the same – many empty shop fronts. Even in busy, prosperous-appearing places with lots of tourists and other visitors such as Chester, businesses report (as featured in the March print edition of Professional Security Magazine) homeless people in shop doorways, aggressive beggars, on-street drinking and anti-social behaviour in general, which generates fear of crime. Retailers and others report that shop thieves since covid are more likely to threaten to be violent (and those that are violent, more readily). Police do admit that the statistics from retailers make an ‘uncomfortable listen’.
Hence Pegasus, not least to inform police about the nature of crime against business; because if the authorities don’t know the scale of ‘acquisitive crime’, to use the police jargon, how can they prioritise it and justify an allocation of resources.
As for what Pegasus means for the private security sector, it stands to be a further breakthrough, not only in terms of the actual work, but in the responsibility it is given by the state as a partner, and the intangible but all the same powerful respect that private security can feel as a partner, trusted to process and pass on data from private to public sector.
Whether police decided on such a partnership, or not, and no matter who with, they could not please everyone; because those not partnered with may seethe, if only with envy. It’s one thing for a police force or any state body to procure a piece of equipment such as patrol cars from one manufacturer or another, just as we may buy fish at one supermarket or another without identifying with one – it’s a tendering decision, done one at a time; to agree under Pegasus with the to-and-fro of data implies a continuing relation. It’s arguable, whatever any party will say, that the police are making a commercial endorsement of some and not others.
What does a retailer stand to get? Can it afford not to be part of Pegasus, if those on the outside get a (no matter what the authorities might say) less of a service? Town and city centre streets are already getting a mixed – or shall we say mish-mash – of protective services, thanks to the variously-named and equipped on-street patrollers employed by business improvement districts (BIDs). Only over the road from the NABCP venue, on my way to the event, I saw two patrollers of the Central District Alliance BID, walking across the road from the British Museum.
That high streets might see yet more pronounced two-tier policing might spur a retailer to take a risk-based decision to go ‘ourselves alone’. Their reasoning might go like this:
– For donkey’s years, we like all the high street have suffered inconsistent police response; we might detain a shop thief, and ring 999, and the police tell us they cannot be there for an hour, and maybe they are, or maybe they never turn up and we have to decide whether to keep holding a thief, who might turn violent, and keep staff off the shop floor to keep watch, or we let the thief go. We can no more tolerate inconsistency in police response than in the produce we place on our shelves.
– Instead, we look to ourselves. We roll out body-worn cameras to our security officers and to non-security staff who want them, because we know body-worn de-escalates some confrontations. We don’t bother to share our incident data with crime reduction partnerships or the police, because even if a case reaches court, which means further cost to us if our staff have to take time off to give evidence, the prisons are at capacity. The Government minister Alex Chalk has announced fewer short prison sentences anyway for so-called lesser offences, as if violent, persistently anti-social shop thieves don’t merit being taken off our streets.
– But we insist that our stores report incidents internally, so that we know where and what time of day and week crimes and threats are happening, so we can deploy our static and mobile guards to best effect. We train our staff, and when they are subject to threats and violence we offer counselling, time off, and whatever it takes to show duty of care. That also protects us if, as may happen, ambulance-chasing law firms take on cases of employees who sue for physical or psychological harm.
A more general criticism is not to point the finger at any party to Pegasus, but makes the case for yet further partnership working; beyond policing and criminal justice, to public health. Some or many (no-one can say) shoplifters are drug addicts who steal to pay for a habit. The NABCP conference did mention approvingly the West Midlands Police’s ‘Offender to rehab’ programme, that Professional Security last featured a year ago.
The UK has known for what, 40 years? that it has a mass problem of addicts stealing – which further feeds a market in stolen goods, which enriches the organised drugs trade and which means retailers have to sell more items to make up for those lost, and traps the addicts. To offer easily-available nationwide drugs rehab, to those that genuinely want to stop offending, makes commercial sense to retailers if they part-fund it; they’ll save more from the goods not stolen. Everyone would win. Why then did it take an Erdington copper, PC Stuart Toogood, to come up with a scheme, pre-covid? Why isn’t it rolled out by now, or indeed a generation ago? As one retail crime figure put it to me yesterday: “They [the UK Government] are farting about.”
