It’s more than just anecdote: two sorts of thieves – the disorganised, and the organised – are behind thefts from shops, police said last night.
Unveiled at a business summit by the West Midlands police and crime commissioner was research by West Midlands Police. The force’s strategic analyst Nick Foster and the business crime lead Supt Keith Fraser spoke to a business audience at the force headquarters in Birmingham. Foster looked at police data for 2015 for theft from shops and stalls in Birmingham city centre, Solihull and Coventry (pictured). As a sign of how much retail crime goes unpunished, of some 1462 people that came up, 440 (that is, 30 per cent) had no police national computer record. From a random sample of the thousand remaining, Foster found two types of offenders. He divided these into the disorganised and organised:
Disorganised
The disorganised retail thief is unlikely to travel far to steal. He may do drugs, and anti-social behaviour. He’s visible, well known to police and shops, and often stealing out of necessity. He’s rarely a foreign national. Rehabilitation may be more effective than punishment, it was suggested.
The organised
The organised thief is not like the disorganised. There’s very little intelligence on him on police systems. He focuses on high end and designer goods, and will commit offences in groups, using various methods. They move across force and even regional borders. Nick Foster admitted it was difficult to say how enterprising these organised criminals are. They are thought to be doing counterfeit currency, pickpocketing, ATM explosions for theft from the cash machines (Foster’s analyst speciality, for the SaferCash project), and modern slavery.
PCC evening
Supt Fraser spoke of looking to take the work national, and of working with the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS). More in the February 2017 print issue of Professional Security magazine. Also speaking at the summit were the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, David Jamieson; and the chair of the 12-month-old Wolverhampton city-wide business crime reduction partnership, Anna-Maria McAuliffe.
Background
Late last year the Home Office police transformation fund grant of over £1m to Nottinghamshire Police is, said Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner Paddy Tipping, “the very welcome green light the force needs to lead the establishment of a national business crime reduction hub.” And Nottinghamshire Chief Constable Sue Fish, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) lead for Business Crime said: “I am delighted that we have been awarded significant funding to address business crime through the establishment of a national business crime hub and by taking the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS) to the next level. It is good news for business and the police.”
