After Professional Security drove away from seeing David Wilson over a coffee, we went over what main points had arisen from our hour’s conversation.
Two points were opposite, yet connected. First, that business crime is local. Even if shop theft is by a travelling gang, a theft of stock is local somewhere, and that gang’s members will live somewhere. And yet – which is where the National Association of Business Crime Partnerships (NABCP) comes in, which David heads – some national body is required, to take an overall view, for members to share best practice, and for them and others to know what good looks like. Otherwise, as all too often and as still happens, people keep (in ignorance or wilfully) re-inventing the wheel.
Time flies – was it really May 2018 that the NABCP re-launched, at a meeting in Stoke-on-Trent (pictured; from the June 2018 print issue of Professional Security magazine)? And we last saw David at the Retailers Against Crime (RAC) conference in Glasgow (featured in the December 2019 print issue), and asked if we could meet him for an update, and nearly three months passed seemingly in a flash before we arrange to meet at a Starbucks off the motorway. “We’re doing really well,” David says. The association is covering the whole of the UK, counting for example Belfast as among its members (as featured in the magazine in the October 2019 issue, after the first ST19 Belfast event); and indeed Stirling-based RAC. The NABCP is split into regions – ‘we’re trying to match the counter-terrorism [policing] regions’ – and has links to the CSSC crime and hazard reporting and sharing scheme.
To recap, about David personally and the NABCP. Business crime reduction partnerships (BCRPs) have been around for years, but it was felt – by some retail chains, notably, the ones paying considerable amounts to join partnerships around the country – that BCRP work was patchy. Some did better work than others; some complied with data protection better than others. But who was to say, or prove, which partnership was worth spending on? Hence with police backing the NABCP re-launch, as an assessing body of partnerships, which may be stand-alone, or part of a business improvement district (BIDs), under the central police body PCPI (Police Crime Prevention Initiatives). Another body, Revive and Thrive, has ceased assessing; another assessor is the NBCS (National Business Crime Solution). Briefly, the BCRP accreditation process is based on a set of standards owned by the National Business Crime Centre (NBCC), an arm of PCPI.
David (pictured second from right), a retired senior Nottinghamshire Police officer, set up the Mansfield BCRP in 2006. In 2010 the partnership was taken into the Mansfield Business Improvement District (BID), that saw the employment of two daytime ambassadors and two part time night time ambassadors. Whether by BIDs or local government, that idea – of directly employed or contract staff doing patrols or ‘meet and greet’ work with shoppers and business premises – is an idea whose time has come, as shown in features lately about Solihull, and Winchester and Basingstoke BIDs, in the magazine.
More in the March 2020 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
Visit https://www.nabcp.com/.
