We journey to a snowy Stirling for an update from Retailers Against Crime (RAC). Retailers Against Crime staff, left to right: Gemma Sellar, Maxine Fraser and Stephanie Karte.
Headed for 18 years now by Maxine Fraser, we reported from their conference in Glasgow in our October 2013 issue. The body is 20 years old in 2017 and plans another conference in Glasgow then; meantime a conference in Northern Ireland is planned this autumn. Maxine begins by picking up a point from the recent British Retail Consortium annual crime survey – a point that the BRC make every year: that police don’t act on retail crime and that retailers lack confidence that police ever will. Maxine does not think that’s fair. She points to RAC’s single points of contact all over Police Scotland, the single police force in the country; and data sharing agreed with police forces in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Cumbria and Greater Manchester. “All of the police we have dealt with have always done everything in their power to collate the evidence and have the individual prosecuted.” She suggests the shortcomings lie with the judicial system, that might throw cases out, or ‘the penalty doesn’t fit the crime at all; and I think we all know that’.
Organised groups
A theme of RAC’s work is the organised groups doing retail theft. Such crime is, Maxine says, affecting the economy, ‘and it has been for a few years’. In a retail chain, for instance, stores not making much profit would be supported by those branches that were. Not now; retailers will shut stores not making a profit, meaning people out of work; or a retailer will reduce staff hours in a store with high stock losses; ‘so of course it affects the economy’. Shop theft, in a word, is not a victimless crime. As with others working on business crime, to get the authorities to take it more seriously, there is progress. In November Maxine and others to do with RAC – Stephen McCourt of department store House of Fraser in Belfast, the chair of RAC’s steering group in Northern Ireland; Mark Kernohan, Security and Investigation Manager at Asda; and Jacqueline Crockett, RAC’s regional executive for NI – met the Northern Irish Justice Minister David Ford. RAC works across Scotland, NI and northern England because so do the travelling criminals. Maxine gives the example of how late last year RAC identified two major ‘teams’ from Scotland in Newcastle, Norwich and Manchester. Maxine speaks of a ‘displacement effect’ as those thieves tend to offend where they’re less likely to be recognised. “That’s why we liaise with other business crime partnerships throughout the UK, because that’s what we are here for, to help them identify individuals.” Such teams may go after high-value goods, such as handbags that retail at £1000; a store doesn’t need to lose many of those before it has to sell a great deal, to make up for the loss.
Known to RAC
Maxine reports that about 40 per cent of the losses reported to RAC are due to organised, travelling thieves. This may include people without a criminal record, who however have been in RAC’s system for many years. She gave the example of a Glasgow man, known to RAC since 1998 for fraud and theft, ‘and yet he doesn’t have a criminal record’, because his crimes are claims for compensation and fraudulent refunds: ‘for example he will fall on a shopping centre or a store floor and say that he has broken his TAG watch or whatever, and then he’s very astute; he knows his rights, and he normally intimidates staff in the store to give him compensation. And another thing he does; he will mention the store manager by name, so he’s looked into all that; he’s done a bit of research before he goes into the store, and he knows the loss prevention manager or the shopping centre manager by name, and he has also been known to be violent. He travels throughout the UK as well, as far down as London; very busy’. Or, there’s a woman in Northern Ireland who makes a good living from stealing clothes, damaging them, and bringing them back to the store and getting a refund. Known to RAC since 2003, she operates in Scotland, and uses various accents and stories, to get her refund. RAC have pushed her face out to members so that she’s being recognised. Often, Maxine says, the same offenders (such as gangs of eastern European origin) will commit their crimes on the mainland, besides Northern Ireland.
Newsletters
As the world has gone online since RAC began in 1997, so has RAC; it runs a secure website for members to report cases and sightings, and to receive newsletters (no more tedious form-filling for shop staff, though if a store doesn’t have an internet connection, the link is through the retailer’s intranet). Being online does mean that RAC can audit who downloads what. Data protection and doing things by the book is all – as Maxine says, to be a good partner with police, and for credibility with retail members, the ones paying for the service. Newsletters will feature CCTV stills of offenders and where they have been, and their methods. Many wear baseball caps, hats, wigs or glasses in store, presumably to hide or disguise their faces from CCTV. RAC also specialises in supermarkets, and hotels, pubs and restaurants, that may suffer card fraud and counterfeit notes. One nationwide grocer member RAC sends daily reports to Stirling, and RAC creates ‘wanted’ posters’ of the offenders for that business to circulate, to make it harder for that offender to carry out the same crime at the retailer’s other stores in the area.
Fitting the crime
Maxine would like the judicial system to work more closely with retailers and crime partnerships such as RAC, ‘because there needs to be something in place that fits the crime’. Note that she, like others in the field for a long time, appreciate that to solve retail crime takes more than technology or guards on doors. A solution might mean sentencing that punishes and deters criminals; or schemes such as restorative justice, that do crop up here and there, thanks to some enterprising individual, usually, that however tend to die when that person moves on. For instance, taking a first-crime shop thief to the retailer he’s stolen from, to show him the consequences of his act: staff telling the offender how he’s hurt their lives and business. As ever, though, there’s only so much that RAC can do; it has a small team; it has to put first things first. RAC will also produce non-restricted bulletins, for non-members. RAC data is sanitised to detail how offenders do their crimes, such as distraction thefts, typically by eastern Europeans, asking shop staff at tills to change banknotes after a supermarket or post office transaction. The thief with skill will confuse the person behind the till and conceal notes. A till can lose up to £500 a day from such crime, ‘and that’s a lot of money, especially for a small retailer’, says Maxine. Hence many stores tell staff not to change notes for shoppers, in case of they skim off notes from the bottom of the pile. Or, if they do get distracted, to stop the transaction and call for a superviser.
PIN and card
RAC released a bulletin in Scotland about a pair who would gain a shopper’s PIN number, and then their payment card, and thus be able to use it: “They turned up across the water [in Northern Ireland].” Tony Jopson, the long-time business crime partnership man in Liverpool, reported that the same two men had been arrested. Maxine got in touch to confirm that the same men did crimes in other police force areas. That allowed the authorities to charge the men with more offences, to show the crimes were more serious and merited more punishment. “That’s why working in partnership works so well.” And non-members will get in touch with for instance CCTV footage of crimes: “We are hardly going to turn around and say no,” Maxine says. “We want to help.” That said, members come first, and the members from the start are still there, Maxine notes, except for the clothes chain no longer in the UK, C&A. As for hopes for the future, Maxine speaks of working with Government, with a view to finding a solution to repeat offenders. Violence, by many offenders, is absorbed by a lot of shop staff, many now working on their own, Maxine says. She argues for store guards, and retail radios in store.
About Retailers Against Crime
A retail crime partnership founded by high street retailers. A Northern Ireland office is in Lisburn. Visit: www.retailersagainstcrime.org. Email: [email protected].
