In neat offices in the charming Scottish town of Stirling, half an hour north of Glasgow by train, we meet Maxine Fraser, who runs the anti-retail crime membership body Retailers Against Crime. Mark Rowe reports.
On a white board in the Stirling town centre offices of Retailers Against Crime is written at the top: “When we stand together as a family we can achieve great things – Kenny Dalglish.” Now football fans may query what Dalglish is achieving in his second spell as manager of Liverpool Football Club. But there is no denying the sentiment behind that great – Scottish – footballer’s quote. For all time, criminals have taken advantage of law enforcers not talking to each other. So it is on the high street. If shop thieves – or indeed shop staff – do crimes against one shop, and that store does not talk to its neighbours and stores in the same chain elsewhere, the criminals are better placed to do the same crimes, again and again. The word partnership has for some years been all the rage in UK crime-fighting, and Retailers Against Crime (RAC) since 1997 has been collecting and sending to its members information on known retail crime suspects. Maxine Fraser has been with RAC since 1998. She was a civil servant, ‘then I left to have my daughter – no part time work allowed then, you either went back full time or left’. She worked part time in retail when she was young then in banking and local government. She joined RAC as an analyst, then progressed to running the company in 2000.
RAC don’t offer retail radios, let alone CCTV; they manage offender data, and can brief and train members, whether about what shoplifter tools of the trade to watch for, or counterfeit banknotes or methods of distraction theft. RAC puts names to criminal faces. Maxine has found that after these years of working on loss prevention she does not like to shop at busy times; she would rather do shopping in the early morning or late at night, when she is less likely to spot someone or something suspicious, when – as former SDs may testify – you find yourself following the suspect.
Maxine recalled a recent talk to the tourism body Visit Scotland, to inform shop staff from the souvenir shop sector of crime risks. Police spoke alongside RAC on conflict management. Maxine spoke to Professional Security of how retail staff may tend to absorb the problems, and accept abusive customers as ‘part of the job’. That many local shoplifters are substance abusers – whether alcohol or illegal drugs – is widely taken for granted. To feed addictions, thieves must steal a lot and regularly. Maxine, and RAC, point also to national, travelling shop thieves, whether in Scotland, Northern Ireland and England (RAC also has offices in Lisburn and Carlisle, covering Northern Ireland and north west England respectively). Such travelling thieves may be on their own or in groups. “And that’s their business, you know?” Maxine said. “That’s what they do for a living.”
“And then you have teams that are linked to organised crime,” Maxine said. Organised crime is defined as “those involved, normally working with others, in continuing serious criminal activities for substantial profit, whether based in the UK or elsewhere”. Several groups featured by RAC are linked to organised crime, whether to drugs, firearms, protection etc.. For some years she has stressed that many of those teams are responsible for large-scale theft against retail, that can hurt a store in a short time. The teams come, and go, with stock perhaps worth thousands of pounds. That store will have to sell a great deal more to make good the loss – and to replace the stolen goods. Maxine has estimated that more than half of the losses reported to RAC are due to these teams. Scotland has ‘in the region of 12 to 14’ active teams. Such teams may work all over the UK, for whatever reason; whether they are displaced by RAC’s work for members, or the groups keep moving for pickings. Such teams will not be stopped; for one thing, the leaders will recruit the thieves, and ‘sack’ them as the bag-men and women are caught and, known to the authorities, become less useful. (Criminals cannot appeal to employment tribunals!? The leaders of these teams, organised crime groups, family groups or otherwise, make sure that they are not caught with their hands literally or metaphorically on the crimes.)
What RAC can and does do for members is to provide images of known suspects, and act as a clearing house for members or others who can put a name to a nameless CCTV still of a suspect. Members can then recognise the suspect at the door, and say they are not welcome, or otherwise deter a theft. That way, RAC makes a difference.
As Maxine said, retail crime was always thought of as victimless; against big-money retailers. However retail surveys – she gave the example of the latest British Retail Consortium annual crime survey – show the cost to all of us, and retailers. “We know some of our clients close their stores because of the problems with theft.” Criminals, she added, are known to stand in a store and say to staff, ‘I don’t know what you are worrying about, it isn’t your stock.’ Leaving aside the dubious morals, that it’s all right for the criminals to take stock without paying, Maxine’s point is that stock loss is a major concern to staff in stores and they do as much as they can to protect it; if not there could be cuts in their security; loss of staff; and if stock loss becomes too bad, that shop is too unprofitable to stay open. “A lot of organised crime groups are quite ruthless; some threaten staff.” If a shop thief is reported to be violent, RAC can warn staff to avoid possible conflict.
The things that make modern business ever smoother also makes life easier for criminals: such as the motorways that allow quick get-aways from edge of town retail parks to the next city. Technology does work for the good guys, too. Time was when the monthly newsletters with the offenders and offences went by post, a time-consuming task simply to put them in the mail, never mind keep track of them for data protection purposes. Now 40 per cent of RAC’s clients receive their information over the store intranet. Everybody is happy: RAC have to pay less for printing and postage (and have a smaller carbon footprint!), and retailers receiving the RAC newsletter online can read it securely in their lunch break on a computer; it doesn’t have tea spilt on it, it can’t go missing from a restroom or notice board. And over the internet RAC can securely send out updates of information – on the latest sighting of a prolific offender, for example – is better sent to members at once, rather than waiting for up to a month for the next regular newsletter.
Some frauds and scams come and go, but Maxine reported that ‘ringing the changes’ has gone on for five years. Most RAC information is restricted, but RAC will show non-members the (unrestricted) methods of this distraction theft. Take an example: travelling groups will change foreign currency, confuse the employee at the till by speaking in broken English (or pretending to), and asking for their notes back, when they will skim off notes from what the employee has already counted, so the unsuspecting person at the till will not think to count the notes again. RAC has footage of such a crime from a colour CCTV camera at a till, and even experienced shop staff have to be sharp to see the thief’s handiwork, on the first viewing. And as for this idea of crime against retailers as victimless: without CCTV to prove the distraction scam, where does the till operator stand at the end of the day, if the till is £10 or £100 down? They are suspected of stealing from their till, and how can they prove they are not guilty?
Another gain from the internet, and company intranets, is that they make it much easier for shop staff to report sightings or incidents, because paperwork only takes retail staff away from the job of selling they are there to do; and takes guards and store detectives off the shop floor. As ever, and as Maxine said, you get out what you put in; the more retailers get involved, the more identifications of offenders (‘idents’), the more useful is RAC’s intelligence. The model of sharing images and known offences can apply beyond retail, because we can hardly expect these professional thieves to be good citizens the rest of their waking day. I made the point to Maxine that even readers not to do with retail should take note of these offenders, as they may do other frauds, when staying in hotels, hiring cars, buying petrol, letting and renting property, and so on. If foreign purse-snatchers come to this country to work crowds at annual UK events, shouldn’t the border police be told?! Maxine spoke of the human cost of retail crime to people, including the most vulnerable – such as old people who have their purse taken from their shopping bag, a crime far more distressing beyond the cash loss. It was interesting that she, like others who have worked in retail crime deeply and for some time, addressed the need for some wider action against such thefts, to go upstream of the crime, if you like. If prison is but a revolving door for the habitual shoplifter, might restorative justice, a ‘community sentence’, work? (But would the criminal ever turn up?!). “I would love to see retail crime disappear, but it isn’t going to disappear,” Maxine said. RAC could be in place for some time, indeed – with its pot plant in the window, furry meerkat toys on a filing cabinet, and the inspirational thought of Kenny Dalglish. Talking of Dalglish, the quote came to Maxine recently by email from the Liverpool Crime Direct man Tony Jopson, after a prolific team of shop thieves from Glasgow were identified at work in Liverpool. RAC is very aware that all over the place there are good crime partnerships and RAC does not want to tread on their toes, so to speak. The colour map of the UK on the back wall of RAC’s office has many red dots, showing where RAC are at work, making a difference.
