Criminology professor Emmeline Taylor has launched a new benchmarking tool to help retailers assess and improve their crime prevention strategies.
In Taylor’s new report, called ‘Most At-Risk Stores: How to Engage Others in a Cross-Function Risk Mitigation Strategy’, she has created an exercise that allows retailers to score themselves from zero to three on seven key principles.
These are: people, data, control, offenders, guarding, monitoring, and joining forces, which are ranked against various performance statements.
Under ‘people’, for example, one statement said: “Senior management are taking concrete actions to invest in employees by providing relevant and bespoke training, safety equipment, and enhanced security measures.”
Comparatively, under ‘joining forces’, it read: “The business has made itself aware of public-private partnerships and industry groups that explicitly aim to tackle crime in the most-at-risk store locations.”
The person carrying out the exercise could span all retail roles, including regional managers, store managers, store owners and shopworkers, to ensure “all gaps are identified”, said Taylor.
After completion, it is suggested that a meeting or workshop is convened to discuss and compare the results to see what action is needed.
“By using this tool, functions beyond loss prevention and asset protection are drawn into thinking about how they can meaningfully contribute to risk mitigation,” said Taylor.
“Many interventions required as part of a comprehensive strategy are beyond the loss prevention sphere of control and require the involvement of cross-functional teams, such as hiring strategies, trading hours, or investing in data analysis software.
“Taking a cross-functional approach to risk mitigation involves breaking down silos and generating buy-in from senior management. With this in mind, the benchmarking tool has been designed to involve different areas of the business in conversations about risk-related perception and operational realities.”
Taylor explained the new benchmarking tool was a “new and improved” version of the one she created in her 2023 report: ‘Fortress Stores: Keeping the Most At-Risk Stores Trading’.
Using feedback from 15 major retailers, the new exercise has updated the metrics sitting under the seven key principles and is accompanied with a spreadsheet that “captures the results and automatically translate them”.
“The first tool was a secondary appendix whereas the new one has been trialled, tested and refined into a more standalone benchmarking exercise that we think should be at the foreground of a businesses loss and security planning cycle,” said Taylor.
The benchmarking tool and guidance are free to download from the ECR Loss website.
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