It’s exciting times for business crime reduction partnerships as the national body for BCRPs re-launches, besides a new accreditation scheme. The National Association of Business Crime Partnerships (NABCP) re-launches on Friday, May 18, at Stoke-on-Trent.
One of the organisers is retired senior Nottinghamshire Police officer and since the later 2000s Mansfield BID BCRP Manager and Midlands BCRP chair, David Wilson. He told Professional Security that the previous NABCP decided to close in July 2017 and did so in December. David says: “It’s not been easy; closing an organisation and starting again from scratch is very difficult. We have taken everything over from them and we are now going to be a true members’ group, with regions and regional chairs.”
The NABCP will be supported by the police’s new London-based National Business Crime Centre (NBCC); and the National Business Crime Solution, which gathers and uses data on travelling retail offenders among others for member businesses. David says: “We are now all working together in partnership and it’s all really good and positive.”
To leave David for a minute; a grumble about business crime partnerships for ages has been over what businesses get for their money – which adds up, if a retail chain is paying in each town and city and retail park around the country for Shopwatches and similar partnerships, that typically offer retail radios and exclusion orders for shoplifters, and the sharing of images of those excluded, and offenders and suspects. The questions for chains have been; is every BCRP offering value for money – are they fit for purpose? What are the outputs, for example from those photos – print-outs or shared via apps – of known offenders? Police too have wanted a common standard, to bring consistency in BCRP services, so that police have confidence that they can ‘dare to share’ offender details. Hence the re-launch of NABCP as an accrediting body of the new NBCC owned standard.
While as David says, the new accreditation is not much different from the old Safer Business, a difference is in how you’re assessed; managers of partnerships that go for the award can expect a much longer assessment, and detailed questions about their data compliance, including with the new GDPR (general data protection regulation), and data storage and retention policies.
Speakers at the launch at the Potters Club are Lisa Perretta, the long-time BCRP manager at Brighton and Hove; Chief Supt Jeff Moore on business crime in Staffordshire; Stoke’s long-time BCRP manager Julie Davies; and on the new NABCP and accreditation, Max McPartland; with David to sum up. David argues that BCRPs have got to change, for one thing because so much else is changing – such as the prospect of more CSAS (community safety accreditation scheme) officers patrolling public places and with police-style powers, given the fewer police and council resources. David wonders aloud if we could soon see SIA-badged patrollers of town centres, with the power to hand out fixed penalty notices to shop thieves if the so-called low-level theft is below a set amount. Besides the need to be fit for purpose, David – an attender at the recent annual Pubwatch conference – says that partnerships have more influence in a group. “For us it’s exciting times; providing a better quality service for members and businesses which pay and join us.” The NABCP expects to provide training for partnership managers and assessors; and to be a point of contact, for example for counter-terrorism advice, and on crime reduction and security for business improvement districts (BIDs).
To register your interest in attending on May 18, or find out about becoming an NABCP member or associate member, email David: [email protected].
