The Grapevine service offered by Professional Witnesses Limited (PWL) is developing. Mark Rowe reports from the Manchester-based company, and from the launch of TAPAS at the Action Against Business Crime in Oxford in March.
With a few touches on the screen, David Ryan of Professional Witnesses zoomed up to a view of most of Britain, dotted with colour-coded incident reports. With a few more touches, a user could zoom in to street level maps. All thanks to Google Earth. As featured previously in Retail Security, thousands of post offices have already signed up to this service. PWL based on the outskirts of Manchester reckon that others on the high street – any business with sites all over the place – could use their product too. To recap, if you’re a sub-postmaster signed up to Grapevine. You see something suspicious – a car parked across the road, as if the men inside are up to something, such as doing surveillance before they attempt a cash in transit theft, or a robbery of your premises. Yet while your instinct tells you that you ought to report what you see – a car registration number, a description of the men – it’s the sort of thing that would not merit a police response. Nor could you be sure that the police would do anything with your piece of intelligence. Grapevine will take it, by phone, text or email; and that is only half the story. The control room can send out that intelligence to other post offices in the area. If a cash in transit delivery is imminent, word can go in time to the vehicle to come at another time. Another example of the speed of the service: post offices are known to suffer from moving teams of eastern Europeans carrying out scams to defraud post offices. Even if the losses are ‘only’ hundreds of pounds, that represents a lot of business, and the loss can be distressing to staff. By collecting and crunching the data, the control room can spot trends, such which parts of the country, using which road corridors, a team concentrates on; and pass the information by SMS or email. Police force intelligence bureaux also take the data, which is of use for example if police know that they can charge a gang of offenders with conspiracy rather than single offences. Security departments know what crimes their business is facing; and as reporting is made as simple as can be, by mobile phone, even non-security people do use the service. Security managers can respond accordingly. As David Ryan adds: “It gives people the strength about decisions not to spend money in certain locations, which no-one wants to do.”
Potentially, this tool could be a significant crime-fighting force after several high street names take it. Take banks or betting office chains. You would expect that criminals who target either on the high street do not confine themselves to one brand; they go from one to the other. But neighbouring rival retailers are none the wiser. As David Ryan explains, if a business is sensitive about other users of Professional Witnesses’ service knowing their business, data can be made anonymous, while still letting rivals know about the suspects who are hitting everyone on the high street. Or data can be anonymised to direct rivals only. The possibility, David Ryan says, is ‘the first truly national business-focused intelligence database’. What’s more, it’s real time, the speed of SMS or e-mail, so that staff can with confidence refuse to carry out a dubious transaction because a business in the vicinity – from the same company or a rival – has reported a fraudulent, ‘sleight of hand’ transaction that day from someone of a matching description.
This isn’t the only string to Professional Witnesses’ bow; set up by former senior Greater Manchester Police man Trevor Barton, now chairman, it offers consultancy; it’s a Security Industry Authority approved guarding contractor; Grapevine derived from the PWL’s overt and covert guarding of cash in transit deliveries. The company is now saying, in effect: bring us your data. An attack on one bank or retailer on the high street is an attack on all. The more data in the system, the more patterns and connections that police force intelligence officers can make. Trevor Barton points out that travelling gangs are beyond the ability of individual police forces to tackle. His company’s collected data is, then, something that police detectives like and seek to use; rather than an arrested person being charged as a shoplifter, if security guards and police can hold off (though it’s manpower-intensive, Trevor agrees) and follow an offender to their car, and capture colleagues and equipment and other stolen property, that’s getting to the bottom of something much more serious and organised. Trevor does stress that this is not a private police operation; his operators do not access the police national computer, they do not know of suspects’ previous convictions. What they can offer is interrogated data: a man of such and such a description, scar on arm, wearing a blue anorak. The control room can search the data and come up with cases answering that description, maybe with CCTV footage.
The flat screen on the wall of the control room has been turned about, upright, so it can fit the familiar shape of Britain. If and when TAPAS takes off, the shape of UK business crime fighting could be turned about, too.
About Grapevine: The intelligence-gathering tool went UK-wide at the start of 2007. A registered product, it is owned by Post Office Limited. and managed by Professional Witnesses Limited.
