When people shop, they want to feel safe and secure. This may sound obvious but, for many of the shopping centres that sprung up on the outskirts of Britain’s towns in the late 80s and early 90s, security was way down their list of priorities.
Delegates at a recent British Council of Shopping Centres (BCSC) seminar discussed how a number of centres, until recently, had proved a magnet for criminals. The areas where security was lacking, agreed the delegates, were much the same across the board: Toilets situated at the end of long, dark passage ways, which invited muggers; inadequate CCTV systems; heavily-uniformed, confrontational guards; and little or no co-operation between retailers to try and tackle crime. Instead of scaring away criminals, numerous shopping centres scared away shoppers.
All that has changed, says Martin Taylor, chairman of the BCSC’s joint security committee. Taylor claims there has been a seismic shift in the attitudes of most shopping centres towards security: “There are still some shopping centres with old-fashioned technology and heavily-uniformed guards, but, in the main, most shopping centres have finally emerged from the 19th century and moved on.”
Trafford Centre of excellence
The ways in which shopping centre security has moved on are well-demonstrated by the £600 million Trafford Centre.
Situated on a 130-acre site on the outskirts of Manchester, the centre was presented with a Secured by Design Award by ACPO and the Home Office when it opened in September 1998. Last year, more than 30 million people visited the shopping centre, which is home to around 300 retailers.
Chris Chebrika, security manager at The Trafford Centre, has implemented a comprehensive and innovative security operation at the centre. He claims: “The levels of crime here are far below what we expected.”
If you were to visit The Trafford Centre, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’d turned up at a holiday camp - instead of employing security guards, the centre employs “red coats”. “Everyone in the team, from the security staff through to the cleaners, is dressed in red coats, so that our security presence isn’t over-bearing,” says Chebrika. “Another benefit is that, if people look down an aisle and see red-coated staff, they’re not sure whether the staff are security staff or not, which serves as a further deterrent.”
Unlike Bluewater Park Shopping Centre in Kent, which has its very own police station with three sergeants and 18 constables protecting the site full-time, The Trafford Centre doesn’t have any police officers on patrol. Instead, the centre relies on a team of 90 security staff employed in-house. Chebrika - an ex-Greater Manchester police officer - explains: “We made a conscious decision not to request police officers for The Trafford Centre. It’s not that they’re not welcome - it’s just that, when shoppers see a police officer, they think, oh my god, what has gone wrong?”
Not that security staff work unaided in their attempts to detect and deter crime. The entire site, including the centre’s 10,000-space car park, is watched by 285 cameras, monitored from The Trafford Centre’s impressive security control room. Cameras are controlled via a Synectics Tesseract switching and control video matrix system. Security officers that patrol the centre, meanwhile, converse with control room staff “face-to-face”, via mobile video-phones.
Chebrika claims that his officers on patrol now have to apprehend far fewer suspects compared to when the centre first opened: “Retailers put reports into me about known shoplifters, then police provide photos of the shoplifters that we can circulate around the centre. We then send an exclusion notice to shoplifters telling them they can’t come into the centre any more.” In the first few months after opening, the centre served exclusion notices to around 200 youths, but since then the number of exclusion notices served has dropped considerably, says Chebrika: “Shoplifters have got the message that if they come into The Trafford Centre and steal, they will be caught.”
The effectiveness of this kind of security measure is dependent on constant liaison between retailers and shopping centre management. It’s notoriously difficult to get retailers to share best practice with each other, but Chebrika has convinced 60-70 retailers at the centre to get together to talk security on a regular basis.
Even so, 60-70 retailers represent barely a quarter of the retailers based at the centre, and Chebrika admits that he would like to get many more retailers around the meeting table.
Chebrika also has some work to do before he can implement civil recovery throughout The Trafford Centre. The centre was recently hailed by the National Civil Recovery Programme as the first shopping centre to take up civil recovery, but Chebrika says that it’s early days: “Retailers are slow on the uptake as regards civil recovery, although, in the future, civil recovery will reap dividends.”
Shop ‘em till they drop
The One Stop Shopping Mall in Perry Barr, Birmingham, pretty much equidistant from Bluewater and The Trafford Centre, is a million miles away from both those shopping centres when it comes to size and budget. Despite this, the 56-unit shopping centre has implemented a security operation which, it claims, is the envy of neighbouring shopping malls.
The centre, says centre manager John Kelleher, is situated “in the middle of some undesirable areas”. Subsequently, laments Kelleher: “People think this shopping centre is an area of high crime and violence, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Nine months ago, the One Stop Shopping Mall decided to adopt a zero tolerance stance towards crime - anyone caught committing a crime is banned from the centre. This policy is supported by exclusion orders issued to offenders by West Midlands Police; the police force has acknowledged that the centre’s no-nonsense policy has successfully reduced incidents of pickpocketing and theft.
As well as catching criminals, the centre recently invested in a digital CCTV system to help prosecute them. The White Group has installed a 28-camera CCTV system, and images from the CCTV cameras are digitally recorded using Visimetrics’ Octar 2000 hard disk recorder.
While digital technology represents a big outlay for a shopping centre such as One Stop, Pc Trevor Davis of West Midlands Police claims that the investment has helped his force to solve more crimes at the centre: “The new system is working well and has already resulted in arrests for theft,” he comments.
We made a conscious decision not to request police officers. It's not that they're not welcome - it's just that, when shoppers see a police officer, they think, oh my god, what has gone wrong?
Tony Chebrika, The Traford Centre
Pc Davis is one of two police officers based full-time at the One Stop Shopping Mall. In contrast to Tony Chebrika at The Trafford Centre, Kelleher is a firm advocate of “bobbies on the beat” in shopping centres, and decided to follow the lead of Bluewater Park.
“Bluewater doesn’t have any security guards, which is a very good idea,” reckons Kelleher. “We have some police officers down here on a regular basis; they’re not my staff but they’re as good as. People like to see police officers, and the police deterrent is still the biggest deterrent you’ll get. Also, they come at no price.” Or at least at a lower price than a team of security officers, he claims.
Nevertheless, the combination of a zero tolerance regime, digital security and police on patrol has yet to rid the centre of shoplifters completely, so further steps are required. Kelleher reveals: “Some of our tenants are going for civil recovery - we’re looking to set up our own scheme.”
You’re on your own
Civil recovery schemes for shopping centres are encouraged by Pc Richard Flynn, service crime prevention officer for the Metropolitan Police, and speaker at the recent BCSC “Shopping and Leisure” seminar.
Flynn warns shopping centres that they shouldn’t store much faith in pursuing shoplifters through the criminal courts: “Only 2% of shoplifters are prosecuted in the criminal courts,” reveals Flynn. “Shopping centres should look to introduce their own civil recovery schemes.”
When it comes to deploying security manpower at shopping centres, Flynn favours The Trafford Centre’s “no police officer” approach. London-based shopping centres shouldn’t hold out much hope of obtaining police officers to patrol their sites, admits Flynn, who says of the Met: “We’re 6,000 staff short, so we really need shopping centre management to use security guards to maintain order. As long as officers are properly trained, this should be achievable.”
Indeed, the use of security officers by many shopping centres has been cited by the Home Secretary Jack Straw, and some senior police officers, as a good example of how private security companies can lighten the police load when it comes to patrol duties.
A design for strife
A number of shopping centres make problems for themselves before they even get around to deciding what security manpower to deploy, claims Robert Addison of Healey & Barker. Addison’s company took over the management of St Georges Shopping and Leisure Centre in Harrow four years ago.
On taking over the reigns, Addison found some serious faults in the centre’s layout, particularly when it came to keeping shopping and entertainment facilities separate: “To locate a pub on the first floor of a building is possibly not the most ideal location,” observes Addison. “If you’re going to have a pub, then at the very least the pub must be capable of acting in isolation from the rest of the scheme. Unruly customers should not be dumped into the public areas of a shopping centre.”
The Trafford Centre’s Tony Chebrika agrees with Addison: “We have three places that have got late-licences, and a cinema which closes at 3am.
However, we’ve managed to segregate the leisure and shopping areas using gates and electronic shutters.” The shutters prevent clubbers who’ve had too much to drink from wandering into shopping areas and vandalising shop-fronts. “It also means that I can contain any problems in a smaller area, which makes things more manageable for my security staff,” adds Chebrika.
According to Derek Barker, an architect at Haskoll and Company, surveillance cameras are the key to nipping late-night shopping centre crime in the bud. Barker helped design The Oracle Shopping Centre which recently opened in Reading. He specified extensive use of CCTV cameras at the centre.
Haskoll was influenced by a visit to the Block at Orange, a giant shopping and leisure mall in California, USA. The Block’s leisure facilities include a skateboard park, and are aimed at the 16-25 age bracket, which is normally a recipe for trouble, claims Haskoll. Yet he comments: “The mall adopts tight alcohol controls, and more than a hundred security cameras keep an eye on the leisure areas. Subsequently, there was not the feeling of intimidation that I expected.”
David Miners is security manager at Lock Meadow, a shopping and entertainment complex in Maidstone in Kent, which is attracting around 5,000 visitors each week. The complex, run by Rank Entertainment, houses a 2,000-capacity night club, two bars, a nine-screen cinema, numerous restaurants and a Saturday “street” market. While Lock Meadow doesn’t plan to ban alcohol in its bars and clubs, Miners claims that a mix of security systems and security manpower have helped keep crime levels extremely low.
Lock Meadow recently introduced a 68-camera security system featuring a mix of Panasonic, GBC and Pelco cameras. In addition to CCTV surveillance, security guards patrol the complex around-the-clock.
Miners is strict when it comes to employment of door supervisors to protect late-licence venues: “Door supervisors at all our bars and clubs are badged under the local authority door supervisor scheme. Also, we circulate photos of offenders around all of our venues, so that door supervisors know who not to let in.”
Whether it’s use of security officers with customer care skills, discreet CCTV surveillance or non-confrontational door supervisors, security managers at Britain’s shopping centres tend to adopt a far more subtle approach to security than some of their foreign counterparts.
Source
SMT
