At the annual British Retail Consortium crime conference, it spoke volumes that those signing up for the session on ‘protecting against violence’ had as many names as the other three topics put together. Mark Rowe reports from the London, October 21 event.
That’s not to downgrade the other three seminars – on business continuity, technology, and Geoffrey Northcott of Borders’ talk on whether loss prevention has reached the end of the road. The speakers on violence – Duncan Miles, head of security at Iceland; Colin Culleton, head of risk and loss prevention at HMV Group; and Stephen Govier, of Lambeth Business Against Crime – showed how widespread and upsetting the problem is.
In the Norwich branch of HMV, the music retailer, in December 2006, a teenage drug dealer and opportunist shoplifter was looking to steal a disc. Paul Cavanagh, a uniformed loss prevention officer in the store, was stabbed to death. "The impact of this was absoultely devastating on family, friends and colleagues," Colin Culleton told the BRC event. A second officer was wounded. For five months after the murder, Colin Culleton went on, he did little else except deal with the aftermath: talking with insurers, family, and conflict management trainers Maybo. The retailer’s first response was a ‘no arrest’ policy in all 440 stores. The main concern in a full risk assessment was about detention. As Colin later put it, detaining someone for theft, and dealing with the violent customer at the refund till, is the most dangerous part of work in retail. Every arrest, he added, creates a risk. This goes to the heart (as Colin Culleton made plain) of what a retail guarding or store detection work is or should be about. Should a bonus, or the SD’s very job, depend on hitting a number of arrests, which may include assisting guards from elsewhere in the shopping centre or town? Later, he posed the question; are store loss prevention staff dealing with low-level, opportunist shop thefts – sometimes to justify their existence?
Colin, 28 years at HMV, has been head of security since 1992, when the audit department was separate. From 1995, the two functions came together and Colin became responsible for both. Colin questioned if the ‘old days’ of arresting and processing shoplifters – perhaps several in a day – was the most cost-effective use of time, though it was the only measure of loss prevention.
Some 15 briefings across the country gave the change to no arrest to LP staff. Some, Colin Culleton recalled, did stand up and leave, because they did not want shoplifters to be able to walk out after a theft. The tragedy prompted calls, resisted, for anti-stab vests and other equipment. Speaking to Professional Security, Colin Culleton said that Maybo has trained more than 400 HMV loss prevention staff. Colin said of stab vests: "Maybo were superb advisors to us through this process and we referred to their findings and recommendations when choosing not to provide our staff with vests. This was generally received well by our staff at the time and we have
not had a request for vests or other equipment since May 2007."
Shrinkage has improved, although HMV was prepared for it to increase. The no arrest policy has developed. Again after a risk assessment, about 30 per cent of stores have been allowed to make arrests – under specific circumstances. He gave the example of the West End, flagship, store, arresting a handful of people over several months. To do so, officers have to build a case against a known offender, such as through digital CCTV recordings, to deal with thieves if they come back. While he stressed it was for every business to do what is right for them, he did speak of surprise that some retailers encourage arrests; and measure their store LP by numbers of arrests. Is an arrest a successful result? So he asked: "We consider it to be a failure. " That is, the LP efforts to keep a thief out of a store has failed. "We felt we could not continue to be part of the civil recovery programme. It sends out probably the wrong message," he said – that is, he feels that detaining someone for the sake of the civil case is a risk to the LP operative, and the public in the store. As for police response, Colin spoke of it taking a couple of hours – on London’s Oxford Street. Yet, he argued, even in the largest towns and cities, even Oxford Street, the number of habitual thieves is ‘relatively low’.
Duncan Miles is another long-time, one retailer man – 20 years at Iceland, the first 15 years in finance, and head of security since 2005. The frozen food chain has 660 stores. Interestingly, Duncan like Colin spoke of starting with risk; Duncan made a risk profile, based on incident reports, postcode crime statistics, specific risk assessments on stores; stock loss, and offenders banned from a store. This gave a risk rating of the retail estate, so that most manned security, and CCTV upgrades, went to the fraction of stores deemed very high or high risk. The majority of low-risk stores got little or no budget. That said, about 400 stores had upgrades to digital CCTV. reported physical assaults and verbal abuse, however, were on the increase. In the high risk stores, staff accepted abuse, ‘and certainly a lot of verbal abuse was not being reported’. Again, Duncan Miles worked in terms of risk profiling, finding that 80 per cent of violent incidents, verbal or physical, resulted from security or shop staff intervening in a shoplifting. This called for training for security staff, what Duncan Miles called ‘the right man in the right store’. He spoke of ‘quality successes’ from store detectives; going into pubs where stock was being sold to order. Thieves caught were found to be wanted for other, serious offences, and in some cases deported.
Verbal abuse, though it may be frequent, goes unreported, seen as ‘part of the job’, even though, as Duncan said: "It’s commonplace that we read the incident report and it says that ‘we are going to come back and get you at the end of the day. A lot of those statements, the offenders don’t necessarily mean it, but we have had exceptions." He gave cases of store detectives approached by knife-carriers who knew the detective’s name, and where he lived – ‘one store detective was threatened in a mosque where he was worshipping’. Stores can change risk, perhaps over two or three years.
Duncan went into details about till snatches, which have fallen greatly so far in 2008, though where the crime happens, it affects the till staff. Responses have included overt CCTV at checkouts; or reinforcement of protection for the cashier at the check-out. Similarly he gave details about counter cache thefts (also down). As for armed robberies, methods varied, as did times – perhaps before the start of trade, or the end of a day. The Identicom lone worker protection device was trialled. In one urban area, Iceland has tried a mobile security patrol vehicle, in G4S livery. Several stores have staggered opening times, so that the patrol van is aprked outside for the arrival of each store’s key-holder. Once staff are inside safely, the vehicle drives to the next store.
Staff do not feel that police are there for them, Duncan Miles summed up, giving a London example of a store manager and security officer taken to a police station for three hours and on bail for two months, after a shoplifter accused the staff of assault. Meanwhile, other offenders tried to claim the same. Police dropped charges when the accuser came in the store again, and assaulted staff.
Stephen Govier, speaking on the south London borough of Lambeth, spoke in terms of prevention to protect staff and make a safe environment for businesses. "Mark out an area as unsafe and custom goes elsewhere. If it [an attack] happens in a supposedly ‘safe’ area of a town or district, other areas will be painted with the same or worse perceptions and fear. Staff retention, performance and honesty are all directly impacted by levels of intimidation and abuse." If staff turn a blind eye or give in to intimidation, business is put at risk. Lambeth has seen highly visible, micro-beat policing; the radio safety net, and a radio emergency button connected via the CCTV suite to MetCall, resulting in dispatch of police. "Clearly, we all have to walk the talk to create a set of meaningful consequences for those who subject staff and customers to violence." CR:IISP, one of the exhibitors at the event, is the software for a pilot sharing of information about business crime offenders, keeping in mind that criminals may travel. As he ended, there is a way to go: "I know a regional manager who has on numerous occasions had to deal with the consequences of assaults on his staff. He has been through the victim process side by side with his staff as part of his job. Recently, he was the victim of an assault. When I asked him if he had reported the crime, the answer was, ‘what are the police going to do?’. One more unreported crime …"
For all the criticism of police – rather regular at such conferences – Colin Culleton made the point that police are a ‘precious resource’ (sent where they are by despatchers). By calling police less often, accordingly, police know that when called to Oxford Street HMV, it is for someone who has been deterred many times before.
Nearby, dropping in on another seminar, led by Geoffrey Northcott, head of loss prevention at Borders, the booksellers, the help or lack of it from police cropped up too. His theme: loss prevention people would happen to change, but how? He argued for retailers to work together, and share data, going so far as to suggest a ‘retail loss prevention – for want of better words – police force. To me, that would be a far more effective way to deal with retail crime’. While on a show of hands it found some favour from the audience, few believed it could happen. As Northcott put it, if a retailer spends on loss prevention technology because of a good year, ‘you are just pushing blancmange’. That is, next year another retailer will put in technology, and move the crime back again. In other words, retailers were in danger of displacing the same criminals around a town or a shopping centre.
Geoffrey Northcott was alive to the obstacles to collective action: for one thing, every UK LP manager measures shrink differently. (Hence, according to some in the audience, a flaw in the BRC crime survey.) Or as Northcott put it: "One of the biggest barriers to sharing information are senior loss prevention managers." With characteristic bluntness, he said: "Whatever you do in a business; if your shrink number comes in above budget, you are toast. It’s a really simple equation." Perhaps for that reason, as he said later: "I rarely hear about a bad LP manager; they get pulled very quickly."
