Retail crime – thanks for the new weapons. Now, how do we use them?

Good news - the Government has announced a £55 million investment in new AI facial recognition tools to crack down on shoplifting. Not such good news - it is unclear how this AI technology will be used to help tackle this growing, but vastly under-reported crime. 

Will this be live time monitoring to prevent crimes or will it be used after a crime has happened to check suspects against police databases? The two options have different impacts on crime levels and very different responses from civil rights campaigners.

But £55 million spread across England and Wales won’t go very far on its own. It’s got to be the catalyst to generate private sector funding for each local scheme. That means hard-headed cost/benefit analysis to demonstrate return on the investment.

So we need to look beyond the current headline-grabbing problem of retail theft, a relatively easily quantifiable cost and include violence towards retail staff and store security, currently running at 1,300 incidents a day according to the British Retail Consortium. It is harder to put a monetary cost on this type of crime, but the introduction of a new offence of assaulting retail workers shows that government and industry already recognise that it’s a problem serious enough to merit legislative investment.

So, back to the key question – are we preventing crime or detecting offenders?

After 31 years as a police officer and seven years advising the industry on security, AttisTowns director Tony Nash is firmly on the side of Sir Robert Peel, “The priority of policing is to prevent crime. But this is not just a police priority. This should be the broad position of the wider community too. We all have a role to play in keeping our society safe and secure.”

We have a responsibility to work with retailers and their staff to ensure that their working environment is as safe as is reasonably possible. And if we all play our part, then our combined efforts will have the added benefit of making our high streets and shopping centres feel more safe and more secure.

Creating safe places and tackling retail crime is a central part of the mix of elements we bring together when we advise Business Improvement Districts, landlords and retailers on what tailored combination of measures are needed to enhance the vibrancy, vitality and sustainability of their particular place.

Retail crime is complex and varies in each situation. The solutions are equally complex and varied which is why we developed our unique approach. By creating bespoke project teams made up of diverse experts we can tackle the various factors that hold an area back. So when it comes to crime, we have the elements necessary to create an effective response to any particular case. 

Of course, security experts are central to this but we can devise and deliver more robust responses if we have inputs from our expert partners on issues such as insights, placemaking, place management, behaviour studies, public relations, technology, and design.

So it’s great news on these first steps to harness the newly emerging powers of AI to support town and city centres and good to have new sentencing power against those who attack our retail staff. The key now is to understand how to incorporate these and other new weapons in our armoury so that we can deliver the multi-faceted approaches necessary to tackle the ever-changing, complex problems that our town and city centres constantly face.