Crimes against the convenience sector cost an estimated £246m over the last year. That’s equivalent to over £5,300 for each store in the UK, or what amounts to a 7p tax on every transaction. That’s according to the annual crime report by the Association of Convenience Stores (ACS), launched at a seminar in central London.
The top three triggers for aggressive or abusive behaviour are, first, challenging shop thieves; then enforcing age restrictions, for example refusing a sale to someone without ID; and refusing to serve alcohol to drunks.
ACS chief executive James Lowman, who chaired the event, said: “The financial implications of crime are clearly damaging for our sector, but we are most concerned about the impact of violence, abuse and aggression on people working in local shops. These people go to work to help their communities and to serve customers, but are being subjected to threats of violence, physical attacks and horrific incidents where their personal lives are being permanently affected. There is no excuse for abusive behaviour, and more needs to be done to ensure that offenders are prosecuted with the full force of the law.”
For more on the 2019 Crime Report visit: http://bit.ly/ACSCrimeReport2019.
The report, and many of the event speakers, stressed the human cost of violence and abuse against retailers and shop workers. Another theme was police response, or lack of it; the report suggested that most, 79pc of thefts against a convenience store are by repeat offenders.
Easily concealable and desirable items such as alcohol and meat are among those most stolen. While the value of loss on average may be lower than for supermarket retail, it may well fall below a threshold of £100 (or £200) set by police before they will attend to a reported theft, in effect meaning that crimes against convenience retail go unpoliced, the event heard.
Some of the ACS findings echoed other reports by the union USDAW and the British Retail Consortium (BRC); such as, that offenders are resorting to more extreme and intimidating violence than the returns may appear to merit, including threatening or using weapons, mainly knives.
It’s not all bad news; a Home Office-funded campaign to be delivered by the Association of Convenience Stores urges shop staff to report every incident of abuse. Campaign supporters include Crimestoppers, the shop staff trade union USDAW, the National Federation of Retail Newsagents, the Co-Operative, McColls, SPAR, Nisa Retail, Booker, Costcutter, Londis, BP, Sewell Group and James Convenience Retail.
Besides securing cash, violence was a main theme of the seminar speakers; and to show that ‘violence is violence’, as Jayne King, Head of Security & Site Services, Guys and St Thomas National Health Service Foundation put it, she and British Transport Police Supt Mark Cleland and Nicole Vazquez of Worthwhile Training described their work to safeguard staff and lessen violence and aggression, at the central London hospitals and train operator Great Western respectively. From retail, Stephen Perkins, Security Asset Manager, Asda and Jenny Alleyne, Head of retail risk and Jayne Crowe, Security and Investigations Manager, The Co-op were among those describing tech and training work.
More in the May 2019 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
