If it wasn’t for the brazen nature of many of the gangs responsible for the UK’s shoplifting tsunami, the sight of Tesco’s latest weapon in the war on crime might be enough of a deterrent in itself.
The huge screens and state-of-the-art technology unveiled at its new security hub in Daventry, as reported by The Grocer today, looks a bit like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise, and probably cost almost as much.
The fact that it is not the government or the police but a supermarket, albeit one with very deep pockets, spending millions on this facility does, however, again raise the issue of whether the authorities are doing enough to prioritise shop crime.
With the BRC estimating retail crime cost a staggering £1.8bn in 2024 – a figure expected to rise substantially this year – Tesco has been among the retailers calling for tougher action from the police, powered by more draconian legislation.
Tesco gets tough on crime
Last year Tesco CEO Ken Murphy said Tesco was spending “tens of millions” on measures to tackle crime and protect its staff, with other measures such as body cameras and front-of-store entry systems also being deployed across its UK stores.
The new hub, however, which is manned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by a team of tech experts trawling through thousands of hours of CCTV footage, is said by Tesco to be a “huge step forward”.
It’s also a recognition from Tesco that it is very unlikely that even a major toughening of the government’s attitude or a change in police priorities is going to be the answer to tackling shop crime.
With BRC stats showing that in the past year there were 2,000 incidents of verbal or violent abuse of shopworkers each day – up from 800 a day three years ago – it is simply unrealistic to expect the police to have the manpower to tackle it.
Just today we saw more retail attention being focused on the competing priority of knife crime. Add to that terrorism, domestic violence and the war on drugs, and it’s fairly obvious that, like it or not, retail crime is unlikely to be the top priority.
Much more likely is that the likes of Tesco will have to spend more and more money developing systems and dovetailing with the police where they can.
Leading from the front
This is far from the first time a national network of CCTV has been employed.
Nick Fisher, CEO of CCTV monitoring and facial recognition company Facewatch, which works with 125 retail partners including the likes of Spar, B&M and Home Bargains, reveals it is dealing with 100,000 cases a year – equal to a fifth of all cases dealt with by the police.
He says people who expect the police to massively accelerate action on shop crime are “living in cloud cuckoo land”. In the future it will be down to companies like Tesco to help lead the war on this type of crime, he adds, calling the new facility “a good start”.
“Good on Tesco,” says Fisher. “They are a company that has a duty of care to their employees and they are to be commended for what must be a considerable investment.
“[The new security hub] will have an impact on crime even though we know given the shocking numbers we are dealing with that a lot more will need to be done.”
Certainly Tesco’s new centre is a powerful symbol that retailers are not simply sitting back and allowing this crimewave to wash over them with, all too often, innocent staff bearing the brunt of the impact.
There are questions of course over whether all the tech in the world can stand in for boots on the ground. What can IT geeks do from a control room in Northamptonshire to stop thugs rampaging through the shelves in London, Liverpool or Leeds?
However, the alternative – of doing nothing or hoping that somehow the government and the police will wave a magic wand and conjure up the resources needed – is simply not realistic.
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