A look at retail crime, from our September 2001 print edition.
Theft by customers is considerably higher than staff theft – œ634m compared to œ538m in 1999, œ746m to œ426m last year. Known incidents of customer theft per 100 retail outlets shot up 56 per cent, from 1,450 in 1999 to 2,260 last year. That average of 2,260 masks a range from 129 incidents in furniture and carpet stores to 10,460 in department stores.
Steve Haskins feels passionately about retail security. He is Managing Director of Frances Clarke, a retail security-only provider, based in Middlesbrough. This former police and military police officer and member of the Guild of Security Professionals who has been in the security industry nine years realises that retailers have to watch their costs, but is disappointed when retail security managers go by ?body count? – number of arrests. What of the school of thought that you should deter and warn shoplifters instead of arresting at all? ?I would advocate to any retailer that cares to listen that the aim is not to arrest people but to protect your profit margin by keeping your product on your shelves so you can sell it.? Driving a thief next door is a success, because you do not lose the store detective for an hour or more giving a statement and attending in court – and someone has to pay. ?The other point with deterrence is that you don?t have any violent confrontation on the shop floor? – which may put off customers. ?If you arrest somebody it is potentially violent, because it is a deprivation of liberty.? Steve separates the younger amateur shop-thief (taking from the sweet pick and mix, or a bottle of spirits) that may be easier to spot and arrest than the professional shoplifter making a living from thefts. Steve goes into the pros and cons of guards and traditionally higher-paid store detectives: retailers are recording incidents of violence more accurately, because they have to for health and safety reasons, and there are fewer members of staff around. A lack of an overt physical security presence can be a green light to thieves. ?There are fewer store detectives being employed around the country, and more guards.? Yet, Steve argues, guards on a roster have little impact on staff theft, unlike store detectives, who turn up unannounced and keep an eye on all. At Frances Clarke (with 1,000 employees) the guard-store detective split is 60-40, Steve reports, but there is dual-training and dual-experience, so that an employee may be a detective for one client, a guard for another, using the skills of both – taking note of suspicious body language, for example, because you seldom walk into an aisle and see someone stealing; nor will a thief with any sense steal near a uniformed guard. Thus, as Steve says: ?Often we put a store detective and guard in tandem.?
Ian Vickery writes: As a former Met and Cleveland police officer who now tries his hand at security consulting I am still amazed at the lack of security awareness amongst the smaller retail stores and the lack of knowledge on the part of security personnel who do not have a police background. Those security experts and the stores have not put together a comprehensive and effective security plan for the premises nor do they push staff security training to the extent that they should do hence they are more likely to suffer a range of crimes. I would argue from that while staff thieves are now being caught in greater numbers this may have more to with better reporting and a greater willingness to prosecute rather than effective security. The professional staff thief is still at large. The wealth of criminal intelligence relating to the availability of stolen goods (whose origin could only mean staff theft) is one indicator of their activity and this is evident in the market for clothes, building equipment and computers – not to mention the growing market in stolen information!
Cheque and credit card fraud is still too easy for the professional fraudster and criminal. The training given to retail staff needs to be reviewed and a leaf needs to be taken from police training here with specialised input from the credit card companies. Violence against staff needs to be addressed rapidly if firms are not to face a barrage of litigation from their employees. Already several companies have been successfully sued for large sums of money for failing to protect their staff. The price of a good security survey with the identified risks tackled to reduce or negate them will save a company many hundreds of thousands of pounds [or more] in litigation costs. I have, on several occasions, been asked to assist solicitors in this area and it is clear that several major retailers have got quite serious problems with staff safety. This is so despite having a security plan – but it just did not address staff safety! A few simple precautions with some training can reduce the risk of assault quite dramatically. If the major retailers are at risk what price the small business? Drugs do still play a part in retail crime and are likely to be at the root of violence aimed at staff. However, the more professional criminal is also likely to use violence if cornered. I cannot stress enough that the risks can be reduced by a professional and well-trained security professional who has experience of the criminals and their techniques.
A BBC1 documentary showed Barclaycard and the Bluewater shopping complex in Kent as heroes in the fight against credit card and cheque fraud. The July 16 half-hour programme Shops Robbers and Videotape quoted Geoff Wortley of the anti-fraud unit at Barclaycard near Northampton: ?We have a system in place in our building which identifies spending out of the ordinary for that customers, so it the thief uses that card for large transactions we become alert even before the customer is aware the theft has taken place.? The documentary screened one 16-year-old seeking to use a suspect credit card at an Argos store; one Barclaycard member of staff stayed on the line to the shop – even encouraging the shop assistant to complain about how long a supposed check was taking, to lull the suspect into thinking nothing was suspected – while another Barclaycard worker rang police. The broadcast switched to the Bluewater centre, with some 330 shops, 700 CCTV cameras and a Kent police station and staff of 20 officers. PC Jody Gaygon was shown being guided by radio link and CCTV surveillance to fraud suspects. The question of sentencing of fraud criminals was left in the air: the Argos teenager was given a ?police reprimand? while a woman who admitted obtaining property by deception at Bluewater was given a conditional discharge for one year and fined … œ50. After reporting that the UK lacks a police register of stolen credit cards, the programme quoted Carl Clump, Chief Executive of Retail Decisions, a firm behind one such database of ?hot? cards, who said that his firm was responsible for the stopping of some 210,000 fraudulent transactions last year. He added: ?I don?t think we should underestimate fraudsters. They are clever people, mobile, and this is what they think about all day.?
Small and medium retailers are harder hit than average –
Mike Shuck, one of the authors of the survey, was one of the speakers at Great Yarmouth?s seminar on crime reduction partnerships. Yarmouth?s town centre manager Martin Blackwell finds the survey pretty accurate. ?We are one of the biggest resorts in the country – three million visitors a year. The population doubles in summer, but the police force doesn?t, and that does bring issues. So we do have crime and disorder and criminal damage issues, and like a lot of ports there is a drugs problem. And that does fuel a lot of shop thefts.? The town is fairly typical of the UK, he agrees. Yet before its 27-camera CCTV system covering the town centre and seafront went live in the summer, Great Yarmouth was the largest urban area in the country without CCTV, Martin says. The system, monitored 24-hours, is run by a not for profit body, Community Safety Limited. Tourist businesses, the local authority and the crime reduction partnership are major backers. The cameras are JVC with Pentax lenses, with digital recording by a Sony HSR-1. The resort was late in the day with CCTV because of finance – and the way that Martin Blackwell and his team have got the sums to add up is, in a word, by selling a package to retailers. It?s worked well enough for Martin to be a speaker at the July CCTV User Group conference in Bournemouth. As he says: ?It?s got to be the way forward, because a lot of local authorities are saying, ?we just can?t afford it.?? Besides CCTV and a radio network, the town uses Retail Loss Prevention, the civil recovery firm headed by Professor Joshua Bamfield. ?Civil recovery is very good for the independent retailer, becaue it protects them against shop theft and fraud. There have been some fairly good successes recently in the courts. It?s about deterrent, really.?
Violence against staff
David Parker has been with Safeway 17 years; he is company security controller and a member of the Guild of Security Professionals. He stresses that violence against staff is the biggest concern – not just for Safeway, but other supermarket chains. He has seen a rise in such violence over the last five or six years: ?People come in to steal – when they are stopped, challenged, then they become violent. The drug addicts and the like will resort to anything.? How do you combat such attacks? It?s difficult, David replies, because what happens in stores is a refelction of social trends on the streets. Safeway runs an in-house course on how to manage theft and conflict in the workplace. Demand for guards is increasing, and so is the cost of contract guarding: ?Whilst a guard can be a comfort factor for members of staff it isn?t necessarily going to stop the violence – in fact it won?t stop it, it?s just somebody else there.?
