Interviews

Violence: part two

by Mark Rowe

Our first article covered how widespread violence is against retail and other staff, by customers and the public. Here we look at what businesses can do for themselves; and how that can only take them so far, without support from the state.

Retailers learn from each other, and not only by listening at events such as the annual Association of Convenience Stores crime seminar, to case studies; such as, how Asda has rolled out to many (not all) stores body-worn cameras for security officers, and how the Co-op like some other retailers has camera systems with loudspeakers for staff to press a button in incidents, to alert a remote monitoring centre whose operators can warn those causing the incident that they are under surveillance. Any tech and policies and training have to go with the grain of how a retailer does business; significantly, many of those measures can improve the general operations of a shop, besides make staff and stock safer. For example, Co-op staff now have headsets to speak to colleagues. That’s more secure – no need to make a tannoy message that may alert criminals or disturb customers. It’s also more efficient – if someone at the check-out asks for help, they ask direct to a head-set; no chance of the person appealed to not hearing because they’re in the back office. And it can give better customer service – if the customer gets their problem attended to faster, they are less likely to turn irate (a shortage of staff or slow service being among causes of reported triggers for violence). As an aside, the main causes of violent incidents are staff intervening during shoplifting, staff asking young people for proof of age for cigarettes, alcohol or – under a voluntary code – high-caffeine drinks, and refusing to serve drunks with alcohol. In other words, most of the time staff are assaulted for doing their jobs, or simply keeping to the law on under-age sales (which local government will test them for and prosecute them if they fall short).

Significantly, besides speakers on actual violence, many of the ACS seminar speakers covered cash – or rather, how to protect it in-store, until it’s passed to a cash in transit contractor and the bank. The move to a cashless society or at least a society with less cash, suits business, for the sake of general efficiency, besides security. Consider that cash has to be accounted for perhaps several times before it leaves a store, at the till and the cash office away from the public. That takes time. Opportunist or petty thieves can see that cash is in tills, and snatchable; although Terence Bourke, head of loss prevention at Cardtronics UK, spoke to the seminar of units a retailer can fit at or inside a counter, to take cash, without staff having to handle it; removing the risk of staff theft, and releasing staff to serve staff (serving coffee, for instance).

That may reduce risk, but it will not eliminate it, as the seminar heard. For one thing, the high street typically has ATMs – and a convenience store may be the only place in a village or rural community that hosts an ATM. That brings the risk of criminal attacks to remove the ATM. Even if the attack fails – and, the seminar heard from Terence Bourke, most ATM incidents do not result in a cash loss – the retailer may have a loss from having to take months to repair the damage – and the community has the loss of having to go perhaps miles to withdraw cash. Hence what Bourke termed the ‘continual cat and mouse’ between criminals who seek methods to steal, and the retailers to protect their ATMs. And criminals are becoming more audacious.

The ACS event heard that police are working according to ‘high harm’. An assault on a shop worker is indeed a ‘high harm’. Why then are businesses grumbling that police do not take crimes against them seriously enough? Priorities in a word; also, businesses when reporting crimes are perhaps not savvy enough. If they have had a theft, are they mentioning prominently enough or at all the assault?

Tech will only do so much; the camera or fogging product or forensic marking product that will spray an offender and link him to a crime, will never carry out an arrest. Police are simply not around as much. Hence the CSAS (Community Safety Accreditation Scheme), dating from the mid-2000s, and perhaps not as widely used as once expected; but, as Hampshire Chief Insp Patrick Holdaway, the new man in charge of the New Scotland Yard-based National Business Crime Centre, told the ACS seminar, Hampshire no longer has police community support officers (PCSOs); instead of those officers doing the traditional bobby on the beat patrolling, without arrest powers, the county has ‘city rangers’, CSAS-accredited, and working well. Some places, such as Brighton in Sussex, have ‘business wardens’ making police-like patrols of high streets, doing the face to face work that police – dashing like the fire brigade from 999 call to 999 call by car – cannot do. In other words, there is good practice, but patchy. And as Holdaway admitted, reporting crime is still different between forces; and it’s easier for businesses to report crime to some forces than others (and let’s not even touch on cyber-crime). Each police force on its website has different advice on shop theft; why can’t there be one set of crime prevention advice?

Stumbling blocks to tackle violence, then, are only of a piece with wider shortcomings on how the police and wider criminal justice system tackles crime against business.

Violence part three; the future.

Picture by Mark Rowe; ram raid damage to Co-op convenience store in Yoxall, Staffordshire, autumn 2017.

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