Vital to report all business crime

Jan 23 2008 by Alistair Houghton, Liverpool Daily Post

Companies are being urged to raise awareness of business crime. Alistair Houghton reports

BUSINESS crime can be an expensive business – as victims like Chris Bradley know all too well. Bradley owns Speke-based plumbing and heating specialists CMB Distributors, and says he endured months of crime directed against his business, costing him thousands of pounds in security measures.

Those measures have helped stop his firm being targeted, but the memories of the raids are still fresh.

So he and other business crime victims are welcoming the Federation of Small Businesses’ latest campaign to tackle crime against business.

The FSB’s “Every Crime Every Time” scheme calls on businesses to keep a record of every crime they are a victim of, no matter how small, and to report it to police.

The federation says a fifth of crime in the UK is committed against businesses, but only one in eight incidents are reported as small business owners feel crime committed against them is low on the list of police priorities.

It wants police forces to be assessed on their record at tackling business crime and says that, if businesses report all offences against them, it will raise awareness of the problem.

Bradley, whose business employs 26 people, says the repeated raids on CMB put him under great strain but says the situation is now much improved.

He added: “It started off in Christmas, 2006, and we had about half a dozen incidents.

“We had a couple in Christmas week, and three or four more after that right up to the middle of 2007.

“We’ve had to put up steel doors and monitored alarms. You almost feel you want to pack it all in.

“It was my son who went out after the raids and I felt for him having to do it. It’s so dispiriting.

“But, touch wood, it’s got an awful lot better of late.”

CMB’s new alarm system links directly to a control centre that can tell the police immediately of any suspicious activity – but that kind of monitoring comes at a cost.

Even though the raiders seldom escaped with large volumes of goods, thanks in part to the swift police response, the price of repairs and additional security soon mounts.

“They don’t get very much because, to give them their due, the police get here very quickly,” said Bradley.

“Also, they can’t go down the pub with a 4m length of guttering on their shoulder. There’s only certain things that are valuable.

“But afterwards it costs us to repair things and these new security measures cost a fortune.”

When FSB Liverpool branch chairman Chris Burgess talks about business crime, it is also with the voice of bitter experience.

Burgess now works as a business adviser but from 1969 to 1997 worked as an electronics engineer, at one point running four retail outlets.

Within three weeks of starting his own business, he was a victim of crime – and says his business kept suffering from crime for the next 28 years.

“My first experience of crime was in 1969 when I was a television engineer and I’d just purchased my own van,” he said.

“I had only been going for three weeks. I was parked in Woolton – which was then seen as an up-market area – and came out of the house I was working in to find my van had been stolen with all my tools and all my components.

“My van was recovered in Halewood a few days later with its mirrors smashed, tyres flattened and its windows smashed. Everything in it had gone.

“That was in 1969 and things haven’t changed much since then – only people don’t report things as much as they used to.

“The reason for that is they think the police are not able to do much about it because they’re so stretched.”

Burgess says he always reported the violent incidents and burglaries that occurred, but by the end of his time in business, he no longer reported “day-to-day” harassment.

‘WE HAD people coming through the ceiling of our premises,” he said. “We had people coming through the wall from adjoining premises, and through the windows.

“Then you’d have the opportunistic thieves coming through the door.

“One of my members of staff was told ‘stick up your hands’ by a man with a shooter.

“Those types of crime would be reported straight away. But that’s not the case with other crimes like people going into retail premises and starting a kerfuffle as a distraction, or violent threats. People are so used to it, they don’t report it.”

Burgess says businesspeople must get over that attitude and get in the habit of reporting every incident.

It is, he says, not a question of solving every crime but of making sure the police have the best possible information about crime trends.

“The police and the Government will then get a proper idea about what the extent of this crime is,” he said.

“Then the chief constable will have some more ammunition to increase the police force and prevent this type of crime going on.

“You’re not going to stop people thieving if they want to thieve. It’s a profession. But by reporting crimes, people can bring the issue to the fore.”

In 2001, Liverpool saw the launch of Business Crime Direct, an independent project based in the city’s Chamber of Commerce, advising businesses on the security measures they can take to reduce the risk of crime against them.

The organisation works across Liverpool and Wirral, and manager Peter Jones, who served with Merseyside Police for 35 years, says it has made a difference to businesses.

He added: “The perception of crime levels in Liverpool has been relatively bad, but we’ve done well over the last few years. I think things have improved a great deal.

“The city centre is probably the best example, where business has got its act together.

“We have the Citysafe partnership, which includes everyone from hospitals to the universities and the Arena and Convention Centre.

“The city centre continues to see new lows in crime. The city centre has relatively few residents and so most of the crime affects businesses.

“In the city centre commercial district, burglary is down well over 30% over the last two years.”

BUSINESS Crime Direct is also working to tackle night-time crime and violence, and Jones says the number of offences has fallen more than 30% over the past two years.

Latest figures from Merseyside Police show business robberies fell 21.6% from April to November, 2007, with 265 crimes recorded. Shoplifting fell 9% over the same period with 6,016 crimes recorded.

But it remains difficult to assess the extent of many crimes against business as they are not recorded separately as business crimes

Jones agrees with the FSB’s call for the police to record business crime separately from domestic and other incidents – and says Merseyside Police could soon become one of the first forces in the country to do just that.

“We’ve had information from Merseyside Police in the last few months that they’re almost there and they’re just looking for the right definition,” he said.

“As the FSB says, if one fifth of all crime is business crime but only one eighth of it gets reported, then it’s not going to be a priority if the police don’t know it’s happening.

“Burglary comes under the category ‘burglary other’, but it could be from a shed or from a commercial premises. It’s not really discernible.

“The same is true of vehicle crime and criminal damage.

“We’ve always campaigned that we should be able to readily identify business crime. Hopefully, we’re almost there with that.”

Jones says business robbery – crimes were violence is threatened or used – remains a problem in Merseyside, with only Greater Manchester having a worse rate, but says the trend is downward.

“We have always been extremely impressed with the way Merseyside Police deal with business robberies,” he said. “We can see the rate is high but the trend is very much down and has been for some time.

“North Liverpool has always been a hotspot but we’re starting to get that under control.

“We have worked with Merseyside Police on this, and we have produced a training video on how not to get yourself robbed. The official parlance is ‘target hardening’ – we advise people on things like shutters and how not to become an easy target.”

Merseyside is second only to Cleveland in the shoplifting league table.

Jones, however, believes the only reason their figures are so high is that both forces have launched pro-active campaigns against shoplifting, including photo-sharing schemes, that mean more crimes are being reported.

North Liverpool, says Jones, remains a crime hotspot, though he is hopeful Local Enterprise Growth Initiative (LEGI) funding will help tackle the issue.

But he acknowledges that life is harder for small businesses away from heavily-monitored areas such as the city centre.

“We’ve worked with people in hard-hit businesses in these tough suburbs,” he said. “We’ve given them grants to improve security.

“But, in suburbs, you may not have the same police or camera presence as the city centre, and also it can be intimidating for businesses because the people causing the prob- lems could be neighbours and more likely to know where they live.”

alistairhoughton