Maxine Fraser, pictured, the head of Scotland-based Retailers Against Crime (RAC) is among the speakers at the next Security TWENTY event, the free to attend ST21 Glasgow at the Hilton Hotel in William Street, Glasgow, on Tuesday, October 5. Mark Rowe rang her up beforehand to get a flavour of what she’ll talk about.
Characteristically, she doesn’t want to dwell on the covid pandemic; bad though it was, for victims and for the high street. In any case she has plenty to say about RAC’s work and retail loss prevention and crime reduction more generally. To introduce RAC briefly, it’s a membership group that takes in shops’ reports of shoplifting and other crime, and seeks to identify offenders and stop them. Maxine spoke at the last ST event in Glasgow, in 2019.
RAC now has a new database, which allows for quicker and smoother sending of info to and from member stores – which is what this kind of work, also in each town and city by business crime reduction partnerships is all about, because after all retail staff have enough to do, earning a living. On that point, Maxine has welcomed the Scottish Parliament’s law passed in February, for the ‘protection of workers’, whereby it’s a specific offence to assault a shop worker, just as it is a specific offence to attack the emergency services.
Whether England and Wales ought to follow suit was part of the debate by the all-party Home Affairs Select Committee of MPs, which looked into violence and abuse of retail workers. Its report in June followed the taking of evidence virtually including from retail, such as Boots and The Co-operative; featured in the June print edition of Professional Security magazine.
That evidence is echoed by what Maxine says; that retail staff come to accept daily swearing and abuse from customers, including from shop thieves. RAC’s anonymous case studies of what members have suffered (‘some of them were horrendous’) were used by the crime reporting charity Crimestoppers in its poster campaign to publicise the new law from Holyrood.
It does however remain to be seen, whether or how the police in Scotland, given their resources and all the other crimes they have to take on, will be able to make the Protection of Workers law work. And here Maxine airs what others who have been in the crime reduction field for a long time also have come to believe: that the judicial system is not working against retail crime. The treadmill of arresting shop thieves, many of whom have substance abuse problems – whether alcohol or illegal drugs – does not change; RAC has had some offenders on their books (proverbial books – as due to covid it’s gone completely paperless) for 20 years. And society could do better.
It remains to be seen what will come of the UK Government’s proposed drugs strategy, which is due to be published later in the year; more in the November print edition of Professional Security.
“Offenders need to be steered away,” Maxine says. She mentions one man on the books of RAC, who is ‘plaguing’ stores in his city, on a daily or weekly basis; ‘but nothing can happen to him, because he isn’t a priority’. Lots can be done to divert such people away from crime, Maxine argues. Such as, going into schools and talking to children, even of primary school age, of what can become of those who fall to peer pressure or for other reasons turn to shop theft or other crime; something Maxine spoke about to ST in 2019.
As for the treadmill, Maxine says that in her experience the police in Scotland, Northern Ireland and other places where RAC has information sharing agreements with police forces, where offenders are particularly active, ‘police arrest them, they charge them, they do everything, they work together with RAC to target teams of individuals’ – that retail is particularly badly hit by travelling, ‘lifestyle’ shop thieves is a theme of Maxine’s – “however they get released because the police can’t keep them. Now these are prolific offenders and especially those that travel throughout the UK; they are requested to appear in court, they don’t appear, they are gone. Nothing ever happens. It’s frustrating, and it’s frustrating for the stores and it’s frustrating for the police, because they [police] have built a case and nothing happens.”
About attending ST Glasgow
Doors open at 8.30am for visiting the exhibition with the conference running between 10am and about 1.30pm. The exhibition will close before 3.30pm. ST is free to attend, whatever your interest in private security, whether as a security manager or installer, consultant or specifier, or something from another field that wants to stay up to date with security products, services and issues. While you can turn up on the day, we do ask that you sign up beforehand, to help us gauge numbers, for catering – there’s tea and coffee in the morning, bacon butties first thing, and a hot buffet lunch around 1pm.
Visit the ST section of the website, or email organiser Liz Lloyd at [email protected].
For the 2022 cities and dates for Security TWENTY, visit https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/security-events-and-conferences/security-twenty-home/.
As pre-covid an informal networking dinner for exhibitors and their guests will run the evening before at the hotel. In eight years of ST events so far, the diners have raised upwards of £100,000 for various UK good causes; ST21 Glasgow we will be raising funds for Children 1st Scotland, a charity to help survivors of abuse, trauma and other adversity to recover.
