About 250 business crime partnerships are at work in UK towns and cities, covering retail and business crime prevention.
They involve retailers and other businesses working with police, local authorities, community safety managers and other agencies to manage crime more effectively. Hence Action Against Business Crime (AABC), established by the Home Office and the British Retail Consortium (BRC) to help those partnerships. Mike Schuck, AABC Chief Executive, explains.
Shared
In each partnership, members share information and photographs on known and suspected criminals through radio links, public CCTV and exclusion notices. Such banning notices allow staff to prohibit known thieves from entering the premises of any businesses in a partnership, not only the shop or other business that caught the thief. Business crime partnerships are spreading their wings into other fields, such as car parks, clubs and the evening economy; hotels, boat yards and marinas. Whatever the sort of business, they are working in partnership to help reduce and prevent crime because it’s better than each working alone. Whatever sector of business, whether town centre retail or some other, data, shared in good time, and often data simply unknown to police forces, helps all partnership members to act on criminals. Mike, speaking from his central London offices, says: “We know there are people who steal from airports; we know there are people who steal from hospitals; people who go around the country stealing from hotels, breaking into rooms or stealing what they can from hotels.” These criminals may well be travelling by car; but how to trace them? Yes, retailers, such as petrol service stations; hotel chains and police are installing automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) with their CCTV systems, to capture car registration numbers. But what good is such ANPR data captured at (say) Bluewater shopping centre to (say) MetroCentre at Gateshead, without the ability to plumb one to the other? Hence the NBIS – National Business Information System – software from Hicom Business Solutions, taken by many partnerships. Data from one partnership can be keyed in by one members and read by another, so a criminal newly caught in one town may already be known in a second – and may come from a third place, unknown to the crime partnership there. This has happened.
By and for business
Mike Schuck talked through partnerships – a legal entity built up of paying members, by a crime manager. Experience has shown that a partnership’s manager should not be a second job of a police officer, say, because inevitably the officer however effective will move to another post and the good work will wither. The partnership has to look after the retail radios that are sold or rented to members; and keep tabs on the photo-albums of known offenders, updated and handed out regularly to retailers and other members. The crime manager has to be something of a salesperson, selling the benefits of membership – and there’s nothing like success against shop thieves to give financial reasons for staying in a partnership. It’s important, Mike stressed, that partnerships are by and for business, while police and the local authority do have parts to play, as partners. Take the Metropolitan Police’s Shopwatch scheme, which trialled in London and is starting to go into the regions, whereby a retailer or other business releases a member of staff – whether a security officer or other employee – to train and give so much time a month as a special constable.
Standards
Part of the work of AABC is ensuring standards in partnerships across the country: hence the Safer Business Award (SSA), a measured standard against which partnerships can be objectively judged to ensure, for one thing, that their work is done legally under the Data Protection Act 1998. Important backers here are the firms that own and manage shopping centres. Mike Schuck and his regional managers have been presenting the awards to partnerships of all sizes – in recent weeks Mike himself has been to Poole, Tunbridge Wells and Aylesbury. And AABC is running a national conference in Birmingham in February to bring together these businesses and agencies, such as the police and town centre managers, appointed by a local authority to make a town centre good for business – not just safe, but clean and welcoming.
For more details of Action Against Business Crime:
