The centre of Bath is keeping its City Marshals after a trial scheme in mid-2008.
They’re paid for by members of the Bath & District Business Crime Reduction Partnership, whose co-ordinator is Penny Coatsworth. While other partnerships may have ambassadors, or meeters and greeters, or paid-for Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), it’s quite rare for a partnership to pay for on-street marshals. The pilot scheme was set up to look ahead to when SouthGate was opening in 2009 and to deter what city traders feared was the inevitable displacement of shoplifters and anti-social behaviour from SouthGate, privately managed. It proved a success, organisers report, and helped establish a regular City Marshal presence, to deter those who are set on behaving badly in the city centre and to reassure and serve partnership members. The City Marshals, who are Security Industry Authority licensed and badged, are supplied by RS Security of Trowbridge, appointed for a year to deliver suitably trained staff. They work a variety of shifts per week to patrol the city centre, providing a visible deterrent, to prevent crime and protect member businesses. Their patrols also deter anti-social behaviour and shoplifting incidents thereby reducing the public fear of crime. Working alongside Bath police officers, PCSOs and through the council’s CCTV Control Room, the marshals carry the partnership’s City Link radios so they can talk with the 110 members of the partnership and partners. Insp Steve Mildren, Neighbourhood Inspector, Bath City Centre, said: "The Bath City Marshals are a great asset to the city centre. We work closely with them, for example exchanging information on known offenders. They are also another set of eyes on the street and there have been several occasions where their early reports to police has led to the arrest of a suspect."
The marshals assist the partnership members and their security guards to detain violent shoplifters or with anti-social behaviour where it is clear there is a threat to a member or to the public. They can help members by providing a presence in a member store if a shoplifter is asked to show what they are carrying out of the store or asked to provide receipts to prove innocence. Line-managed by, Penny Coatsworth who is also SIA-door-badged, the marshals have proved also to be ambassadors for the city centre when tourists ask for directions or help.
Charlie Beardall, one of the marshals, and Penny Coatsworth were among attenders of the British Retail Consortium crime partnership conference at Reading in March; they talked to Mark Rowe.
What’s interesting about the marshals what you could call the soft work they do, besides the hard work of managing all the ne’er-do-wells who are attracted to the spa town as much as the day-trippers and weekend break stayers. So while Charlie Beardall says: “We have had to act where female [shop] staff have suffered from stalkers,” the marshals have besides come to be the glue keeping everyone in the retail centre of town informed – letting everyone know of developments when they return from a day off, passing on news for example if a product de-tagger is in town that ought not to be. Or, even more up to the minute, if the security guard from store A is busy because he has detained a suspect, and store guard B needs help because he is on his own. Penny adds that (as in other towns) photographs of the worst offenders are distributed, mainly to the store guards and marshals. She says: “I keep saying: no scheme is perfect, but we have had some cracking successes.” Charlie gives one example of team work: while he was on a routine visit, a store discovered a theft. A suspect description went over the retail radio. People answering the description had been asked to leave a store for messing about. The city’s public space CCTV picked them up, heading towards the station. They were stopped before they got on a train, and goods recovered, stolen from three shops. Police were on the scene almost instantly – the police station is not far from the station. As that story suggests, some shop thieves travel, and hence Penny’s keenness for data sharing with other schemes. Keenness in fact is a hallmark of the Bath scheme, due to the handful of staff. As so often in life, you get out of work what you put in, and Bath like any partnership is most aware that it can only offer what members can afford. The BRC conference though highlighted the paradox that while the authorities – political and civil service – urge local partnerships on businesses to combat crime, partnerships only flourish thanks to enthusiastic and hard-working, often under-appreciated, local managers – a recipe that London-based authorities cannot simply order into existence everywhere. Asked how she does it, Penny answered: “You either have to generate a need from the members, or come up with a very good reason why they need to be interested; and our reason was, Southgate was being developed.” Specifically, retailers knew that new shopping centre would have its own private security; would that displace criminals to the rest of the city centre?!
A sign of the confused public space policing as a result of the last dozen or so years is that at night, Bath has street marshals; quite separate from the City Marshals. And a third uniformed group, taxi marshals, paid for by Bath and North East Somerset Council, manage the late-night taxi ranks, as in other cities. That said, every city is unique. Arguably Bath has been better able to ride the recent slump, thanks to tourism; and the Southgate centre may mean a rise in Bath’s early evening economy – whereas between the day-trippers and the pub- and theatre-goers, Bath looks somewhat deserted. Does Bath offer a model to other cities? Sadly in one respect – as elsewhere, all too often retailers join the crime scheme after suffering a major shop theft.
