Chris James is a man spreading a gospel, which is appropriate because he?s ?selling? the Birmingham Retail Crime Operation (RCO). From our September 2001 print edition.
Pavilion Central in Birmingham is not a typical one or two-floor shopping centre. Whereas the Pallasades has passing feet because most New Street railway station users walk through the Pallasades to their trains, Pavilion Central is not a through route. It has a lower ground floor, ground, upper level and food court above. It has therefore an airy feel, which does mean that noise such as a shout travels. Richard Mytton, the Customer Services Manager at the centre, reporting to centre manager Jackie Cuddy, is in charge of in-house uniformed security staff, and health and safety and fire safety matters. He points out that many morning visitors are elderly, and very sensitive to noise. Hence any disruption that could put off centre users is nipped in the bud. ‘We are actively out on the mall, meeting and talking to people – people who are genuinely in there to shop, people who want to loiter and meet the boyfriend, pick up a girlfriend. We will talk to them all. We will encourage those not in the centre for shopping at atll that this is maybe not the ideal place for them to be.’ It’s a matter of making people feel welcome, safe and comfortable – words that trip off the tongue, Richard admits, ‘but they are very, very true.’ CCTV is used as a tool to observe the mall so that uniformed staff can deal with possibly inappropriate behaviour. As Richard says: ‘The peace and tranquility of the place doesn’t come about naturally. It has to be worked at.’ The centre is usually open for business 9.30am to 6pm; shop staff may well work into the evening on stock-takes, and there are always contractors – this summer has seen the food court refurbished. As Pavilion Central is a Retail Crime Operation member, one of of Richard’s staff handles paperwork to go to Chris James at the RCO, and takes to Pavilion retailers the album of excluded persons, that has to be signed for. Richard raises the issue of ‘ownership’ of public and private space; in the mall. It is important to head off anti-social elements by establishing that the mall space is owned; hence a uniformed security officer around the entrance doors.
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What works: harassment law, ASBOs, exclusion notices'<br>
Chris James, Birmingham Retail Crime Operation co-ordinator, stresses the simplicity of exclusion notices. Richard Mytton of the Pavilion Central shopping centre adds: ‘The downside is, if you as a retailer get it wrong and the exclusion notice is inappropriate, you have the individual to deal with who is going to tell everybody about the way they have been handled on the premises.’ But as both men point out, shop managers do want customers and will tend to give the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt about the professional repeat offenders, who as Richard says ‘can hit a store very hard’. Goods with most re-sale value for the shoplifters, such as fashionable clothes, are most at risk. The Labour government has introduced anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) which however have found few takers. Richard points to the amount of time and effort needed to gain an ASBO – the court proceedings can take months. The RCO has not ignored ASBOs. Take the case of Matthew Hutchings. In August 2000 Birmingham magistrates in August granted an ASBO to police. If Hutchins is spotted in any council, NCP or other public car park in and around Birmingham city centre, he can be arrested and put before magistrates. Between February and May 2000, police gathered CCTV evidence placing Hutchins in and around six car parks 24 times. Hutchins, of Stechford, has had an eight-month sentence for theft from a motor vehicle, going equipped to steal, theft, and breaking bail conditions. What of the shop thief who, asked to leave by a manager, returns to swear at and harass that manager’ Chris James is using the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, better known as an anti-stalking law. An RCO member if harassed contacts police. If possible, an officer attends, though a harasser can be officially warned later. Details go in the officer’s pocket book, and the member submits a sighting report. If a second incident happens within a reasonable time, police are contacted again and a statement taken. So far cases have gone no further than a caution, though the Act states offenders can go to prison.
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What the law says
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According to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, harassment includes alarming the person or causing someone distress. Section 1 states a person must not pursue a course of conduct which amounts to harassment of another and which he or she knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of the other. Course of conduct must involve at least two occasions (section 4) but can involve speech.
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What satisfied customers say
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Mark Hill is a plain-clothes security officer at Etam in New Street in central Birmingham. The clothes chain, that recently joined the Retail Crime Operation, is a user of Sensormatic electronic article surveillance. He says: ‘I prefer to be working in a shop that is part of a scheme than not part of a scheme. Quite often I send observation reports to Chris [James, the Retail Crime Operation co-ordinator].’
Adele Bingham is the uniformed head of security at the Pallasades shopping centre in New Street. She says in praise of RCO membership: ‘It’s really handy to have advance notice of baddies, before they even come on the site.’
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About Birmingham Retail Crime Operation (RCO): see www.shopcrime.org.uk. The first members’ forum in June at the Pallasades Shopping Centre in June elected Pallasades General Manager Jonathan Cheetham to the chair; he is also a member of the Citywatch steering group, the private-public sector partnership that brought CCTV to the city centre; current total is 38 cameras, monitored by civilian staff employed by the police. In that monitoring room is a base station for the RCO radio. Forum members include Margaret Evans, Regional Loss Prevention Manager, Marks & Spencer; Robert Blyth, chairman of Citywatch and Chief Executive of Hortons’ Estate; Tony Halliwell, Regional Inspector, National Car Parks; and Robert Lyttle, Principal Enforcement and Security Officer, Birmingham City Council.
About Birmingham city centre’s AB Radio: see www.shopcrime.org.uk. Stun codes are allocated to each Motorola radio so that if it is stolen or lost (as has happened) it is rendered useless. The retail radio is controlled from the Pavilion Central shopping centre, the holder of the radio licence before the Retail Crime Operation. Some radio users are not RCO members. New radio users must attend a training course (held monthly).
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Chris James is a man spreading a gospel, which is appropriate because he’s ‘selling’ the Birmingham Retail Crime Operation (RCO). He gets a buzz out of frustrating shoplifters in Brum. About 900 retailers are RCO members, and more are joining all the time, in central Birmingham and beyond as neighbouring shopping areas want to get on board. Based in a window-less office in a corner of the fifth floor of Rackhams (the city’s House of Fraser department store), within three years he has done what some might think impossible – he’s managed to get rival retailers to talk to each other about security, with the common goal of making Birmingham city centre a secure place to shop for all – which is in the interests of all. He’s brought in exclusion orders – running at between about 36 and 48 a month, totalling more than 800 – a simple way, he argues, of banning people not wanted in the members’ outlets, while keeping within the laws on human rights and data protection (note that there’s no branding excluded people as thieves or fraudsters, or whatever). Members send incident reports to Chris James, who acts as a filter and carries through the exclusion notice paperwork, so that if that excluded person walks into the store that reported him (or any other member of the RCO), a member of staff can say: ‘Excuse me, you are excluded, would you leave.’ As Chris puts it: ‘Think of the saving there!’ The RCO is an umbrella organisation; members, whether with their own dedicated security staff or general shopfloor employees, carry on with their own security policies. But there is no more need to keep a suspect under surveillance by store detectives and CCTV … perhaps for an hour … and in the end the suspect only tries to steal a t-shirt. If that retailer chooses to go down the path of the criminal justice system, security personnel have to escort that arrested person to their security office, ring the police, who may take a while to arrive (and all the time, those security officers are out of circulation). There are statements to be taken, court dates to keep; meanwhile, other shoplifters may be at work.
Chris James stresses how simple the exclusion orders are. The basis is that the RCO members are private premises: ‘And as such there is an invitation to members of the public to come into these premises and shop. Now if you don’t want somebody to come in, you simply say ‘my invitation is refused, please leave’. It’s a little more involved than that. Separate retailers with their own policies decide whether to refuse to invite someone in.’ That refusal takes legal form after the incident report to Chris James. He decides whether there is a bona fide exclusion notice issue. The subjects of the refusal are told in writing that they are not welcome in the member stores (listed), for one year. If excluded people are caught entering a store within those 12 months, the exclusion order can be served again, and it re-starts. Chris says: ‘You suddenly have got a powerful force; you now have some control over what is happening in the city centre by virtue of the fact that you are not giving the invitation to people who would cause a problem. Now we are not a court of law; we do not make decisions on whether a person is guilty or not in the eyes of the law. We keep well away from litigation.’ The level of proof is not the same as in a court of law, so that a person who is seen to attempt a theft, panics, replaces the item and walks out the store (maybe giving a CCTV camera the V sign) can be subject to an exclusion order. Members get an album of excluded people’s photographs (signed for to comply with data protection requirements), and new photographs are issued each month – handy if staff turnover is high, which means employees’ knowledge of suspects leaves when they quit, whereas the book remains as a resource; and handy because if one store suspects someone is shoplifting, the album may confirm their suspicions. In three words, it’s intelligence-led policing. If excluded people defy the order, they are trespassing. Chris says: ‘Everybody is suddenly working together. It didn’t come easily. There had to be a growth over a period of time, but it’s as if in the last six months or so partnership working has actually started to have some substance and people are feeling that yes, this is the way to go, this is the benefits of working together, the retailers, the police, and the council.'<br>
Co-operation between retailers who are rivals on the high street is indeed a hot potato. Richard Mytton, Customer Services Manager at Pavilion Central, a 49-unit shopping centre in central Birmingham, and like Chris James a former West Midlands police officer, backs up Chris. Richard is deputy chair of the RCO members forum that first met in June: ‘I can safely say that yes, we get rivals, in the same meeting, sharing information about criminal activities. There is a common goal to reduce crime and to reduce anything that would disturb the atmosphere of the city centre that would affect trading for everybody. The normal rules of competition don’t apply in this situation. Individual retailers may be a little bit shy about giving raw figures of their losses, but they are happy to say, well, as a percentage it has gone up or down over the last 12 months.’ Co-operation between rival retailers happens all the time. Security teams belonging to a retail member of the RCO will radio a sighting of an excluded person (the RCO runs the radio link – a radio sits on Chris James’ desk during the interview with Professional Security). That person will be asked to leave, and over the radio network a description will go out of where the person is heading. So today Pavilion Central helps the rival Pallasades shopping centre in New Street; tomorrow, the Pallasades helps Pavilion Central. Richard says: ‘We had a family in here [Pavilion Central] using children as distractors to set up opportunities for stealing. The manager of the shop unit within our centre said she didn’t want them in there. They weren’t people who had been identified by the RCO scheme. On the way out the woman’s parting shout to us was ‘I am not going shopping here’ – well, a bit stronger than that – ‘I am off to the Pallasades.’ So we let the Pallasades know that they may get a visit. Yes, we are commercial rivals, but it is in our interests that the Pallasades provides a good shopping venue the same as we do. And as good as gold these people turned up there, so they [the Pallasades] were in a position to monitor how they behaved and they were asked to leave there as well.’ As Richard adds, it is not a case of ‘Fortress Birmingham’; the city council has made efforts to make the central business district attractive, such as pedestrianisation of New Street, hanging baskets of flowers, and street musicians. The radio network comes into its own for missing children searches, though it is not formally used to put out evacuation warnings in the case of (say) a bomb scare.
Co-operation does not end at the city level. Birmingham and neighbouring retail crime groupings such as in Coventry, Wolverhampton,Walsall, Harborne, Merry Hill, Shrewsbury and Leamington Spa exchange information in the Midlands Retail Crime Initiative, chaired by Roger Bache at the City Centre Company, Coventry. Even wider spread is the Home Office-backed Business Information Crime Systems (BICS) between retail crime partnerships in the West Midlands, Warwickshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Leicester, Greater Manchester, West Mercia and Newcastle, and the firm Retail Decisions (ReD). Chris James praises the ReD database, that is on trial. The aim is a central database managed by ReD. Each retail crime member feeds data about incidents into it, and gets relevant information back. The database could also provide some intelligence of use to every retailer – for example, just how real is the problem of travelling shoplifters’ The Birmingham RCO seeks exclusion orders against people to do with car park crime and street robberies too. If someone is banned from a car park by an exclusion order, it applies across all members – namely retailers. Chris James takes the view that retail and car park members alike want to exclude people whether the trigger is car crime, shop theft or muggings. Chris is seeking to expand the RCO into the pubs and clubs around Broad Street. Door staff have to be registered with the city council, and the RCO radio link network is not in use by night when the leisure outlets are busiest. He thinks that any people excluded as unwelcome on licenced premises would not be mixed with the retail-car park members, as he feels that people unwelcome in the night-time economy are separate from those excluded from retail members by day. The RCO is also expanding to other business districts beyond the city centre, such as The Fort shopping centre and the Star City leisure complex. Other likely RCO developments could be use of facial recognition technology, so that if an excluded person enters a member outlet, and there is a biometric match between the person’s face and the database of excluded persons, an alert is sounded for security staff to ask the person to leave. Chris would like to see a standard retail incident report form across the Midlands, ‘because we are dealing with very busy people, who have enough forms to fill in anyway. We need them to fill in a form of some description as an audit trail’ – because all excluded people in the photo-album for RCO members are there as a result of a reported incident. Chris James is enjoying his job: he advises people across the UK interested in doing something similiar; he speaks to members’ staff on personal safety, and brings in speakers of interest to retailers (this year, on credit card fraud and drug awareness). The RCO is catering for large and small members; this year, for example, the operation bought equipment to print out stills from videotapes where members have CCTV but no printer. Chris retired in 1996 as a sergeant after 31 years in the police, then worked as an insurance investigator before setting up a retail crime scheme in Sutton Coldfield, a suburb of Birmingham. That experience helped him gain the job of RCO manager three years ago. Chris James has got results, and he’s out to get more: ‘We’ve got to stop retailers being charities for drug addicts.’
Retailer members of the Birmingham Retail Crime Operation (RCO) get a monthly update of excluded person photographs; the chance to exclude offenders
from your and other members’ premises (the ban total has topped 800); and invites to monthly security meetings with police, British Transport Police and other RCO members. Topics this year have included drug awareness and card fraud. The first members’ forum in June at the Pallsades Shopping Centre in June elected Pallasades General Manager Jonathan Cheetham to the chair; he is also a member of the Citywatch steering group, the private-public sector partnership that brought CCTV to the city centre. Forum members include Margaret Evans, Regional Loss Prevention Manager, Marks & Spencer; Robert Blyth, chairman of Citywatch and Chief Executive of Hortons’ Estate; Tony Halliwell, Regional Inspector, National Car Parks; and Robert Lyttle, Principal Enforcement and Security Officer, Birmingham City Council.
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Members are not just retailers and shopping centres, but Aston University and National Car Parks. Business members get photos of street robbers, business repeat offenders and car park offenders besides excluded persons. The RCO caters for large and small members; this year, for example, the RCO bought equipment to print out stills from videotapes where members have CCTV but no printer. RCO retail crime manager is Chris James, a former West Midlands Police sergeant, also a member of the CItywatch steering group. In June, the operation took over the radio link in the city centre.
