Home secretary urges stores to use new crime-reporting platform

Times

9 hours ago

The images and details of prolific shoplifters are being collected and shared by major retailers on the first national database to tackle the crime.
Marks & Spencer, Boots, Morrisons, Greggs, BP and Travis Perkins are among the retailers using a new crime intelligence reporting platform created by a New Zealand software company.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, urged more retailers to use the software as she launched a three-month policing blitz that will target antisocial behaviour in 500 town centres across England and Wales.
She called on police forces to use live facial recognition to enforce banning orders on individuals responsible for the worst antisocial behaviour. The Metropolitan Police recently installed permanent live facial recognition cameras to catch wanted criminals in Croydon, south London.
Shared intelligence collected by the Auror platform has revealed that 10 per cent of offenders reported by UK retailers account for 72 per cent of all shoplifting offences.
Paul Fagg, who served as a police officer before leading Auror's law enforcement partnerships in the UK, said the platform acted as a 'conduit between retailer and policing' by sharing information, CCTV and other evidence between retailers, alerting them to prolific offenders and helping to enforce banning orders on the worst of them.
In addition to acting as a preventative tool, Fagg said, the shared intelligence helped to close the gap between the vast number of shoplifting offences recorded by retailers and the minority that are investigated by police.
Yvette Cooper visited Derby County FC's Pride Park stadium to launch the Safer Streets summer initiative
PHIL BARNETT/PA
The latest survey by the British Retail Consortium reported that 20 million shoplifting offences were committed in the past year. While there has been a 20 per cent year-on-year increase in the number of offences recorded by the police to 516,971, these make up only 2.5 per cent of all thefts.
Once there is enough evidence that an individual is a prolific shoplifter, the firm then passes the information to the relevant police force to investigate. This overcomes the barrier retailers faced before when reporting thefts to the police.
Fagg said retailers were not reporting most thefts to the police because they faced 'pushback' from forces that saw it as a burden to triage the crime. Auror carries out the triaging process by sending on details of only the most prolific offenders and individuals with sufficient evidence to police, maximising the prospect of success.
It saves police time by taking away the need for officers to visit stores to collect evidence or interview witnesses because the evidence is collected on the platform.
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Superintendent Emma Butler-Jones, of Devon and Cornwall police, said the platform had 'revolutionised how we tackle business crime' in their area. The force's charge rate for shoplifting offences reported through the platform were 7 per cent higher than crimes reported through more traditional means. Crime reports are provided to police officers an average of 8.5 times quicker, which means the force can accelerate their investigations.
Auror is now used by 98 per cent of retailers in New Zealand, where the efficiency savings made by the platform freed up enough money to recruit an additional 451 police officers. The crime reporting platform is also used by 75 per cent of retailers in Australia.
Auror does not use live facial recognition on its platform. Instead, it uses retrospective facial recognition to match multiple CCTV images of the same individual reported on the platform.
Cooper said: 'We do want more retailers, more organisations [involved in] schemes like this, so that we can have that partnership, so that you're tackling the crime but also getting the neighborhood policing reassurance in local communities,' Cooper said. 'I think this hasn't happened for too long. Too often people have been working separately, in silos, and this sort of crime has been treated as low level. It's not. It has a huge impact on local economies and on that sense of safety at the heart of communities.'
Backing police forces to make greater use of live facial recognition software, which has so far only been used by the Met and South Wales police, Cooper said: 'Facial recognition is a really important tool for policing to be able to use, to identify criminals, looking at the CCTV. We do think there is more scope for using facial recognition more widely and we're going to set out more ways in which that can be done as part of a proper framework.'
Cooper was speaking on a visit to Pride Park, the home of Derby County FC, to launch her 'Safer Streets Summer Initiative', a blitz that will run in 500 city and town centres over the next three months with increased police patrols and additional enforcement to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour. Each town centre that will benefit from the increased patrols has submitted a bespoke action plan to the Home Office on how they plan to tackle the specific antisocial behaviour problems in their area.
Many are working in partnership with their local football club to divert youngsters away from antisocial behaviour. Bristol City has partnered with Morrisons to provide free 'turn up and play' sessions for youngsters who may be 'intimidating' elderly customers at supermarkets in the city through antisocial behaviour such as hanging out in groups outside the stores.
Ben McDonald, head of the corporate protection team at Morrisons, said antisocial behaviour was a 'gateway offence' to more serious crime including shoplifting. He said: 'If you can take youths away from that type of offending into something else and bridge that gap where they've got employment, got a job and got responsibilities, you take them out of crime.'