Safer Business Action Week runs from October 14. We spoke about it with Hannah Wadey, CEO of London-based Safer Business Network.
To introduce SBN, it may need spelling out that (as the name suggests) SBN is about more than work on retail crime and through business crime reduction partnerships (BCRPs); for instance a strand of SBN work is on infrastructure crime (metal theft of copper cabling affecting broadband networks for example). To turn to the Week, Hannah said: “I would call it a public-private sector partnership. It’s a really good best practice model, an opportunity for police colleagues to work with their business community, their BCRPs.”
As in past Weeks and similar operations in recent years – a Saturday one at Stratford, east London was featured in the June 2022 edition of Professional Security Magazine – numerous forces will run various operations, whether deploying more officers than usual to make life uncomfortable for the regular and prolific shop thieves; or police will offer advice to non-security retail staff, or promote messages such as the Home Office’s campaign Shopkind, which urges customers to be more considerate to shop floor staff; or encourage shops to report incidents to the police (here a BCRP membership can come in, if the BCRP offers crime reporting and data-sharing software, which can spare a shop worker having to go to the back office and wait on the non-emergency 101 number for perhaps 30 minutes to report something; and invariably not hear anything afterwards). On that point, Hannah does suggest that the Week is also of value in showing retailers what’s happening behind the scenes, to keep them safe. The Week can also serve to inform security guarding contractors, particularly smaller firms, that provide guards for doors or loss prevention officers in-store. Those contractors may too not know what’s done in their locality, nor plug into the work of a BCRP, putting names and offending histories to CCTV footage of faces of prolific offenders.
For more about the Safer Business Action Week, visit the police’s National Business Crime Centre (NBCC) website: https://nbcc.police.uk/news/nbcc-launches-2024-national-safer-business-action-week-to-target-business.
More on business crime reduction partnerships in the October to December editions of Professional Security magazine.
Picture by Mark Rowe; Shopkind poster in a shop window at Gloucester Quays shopping centre.
