Intelligence-Led Elite Guarding for the Midcounties Co-operative

Background

ASEL has been working in partnership with The Midcounties Co-operative, delivering mobile security guarding and store support to over 200 stores. The key focus for Midcounties is the safety and security of its stores, customers and colleagues, alleviated by ASEL security who actively target store crime, including violence, anti-social behaviour, robbery and theft which pose a significant risk in the communities where they operate. As a co-operative, communities lie at the heart of Midcounties business, so it’s crucial we work collaboratively to help make an impact to crime.

Intelligence-Led Elite Guarding for the Midcounties Co-operative

To improve outcomes, as part of our service, ASEL has recently piloted a new type of enhanced guarding deployment completely driven by incident and offender data to further reduce theft and violent crime by targeting and removing persistent offenders.

This new model is based on our deep understanding of volume retail crime and associated offenders. We have demonstrated that roughly 20% of offenders commit 80% of the harm and by directly targeting that 20% of offenders ASEL increases its productivity outputs significantly. Removing one of these offenders from the Midcounties store estate reduces risk and harm to multiple stores, as opposed to just protecting a site with a single static security guarding model.

This unique approach brings together Midcounties store incident reports, data and intelligence from our own Command and Intelligence Centre (CIC) and our specialist elite guarding team and also uses intelligence from our external partners across both national and local partnership organisations. This approach has been proven to stop theft and anti-social behaviour in its tracks, by monitoring and targeting the most prolific offenders within their communities.

How it Works

When a store colleague or officer reports an incident, the report is automatically sent to our Command and Intelligence Centre (CIC) where we compile a Police crime report on behalf of Midcounties, removing the task of Police reporting from store colleagues.

Following this, the incident report data that is captured is then analysed and detailed in ASEL created dashboards which enable us to identify offenders, trends and patterns of activity and create series linked investigations. The data is then cross-referenced with other information from our partners such as National Business Crime Solution (NBCS), allowing us to build complete trending and mapping algorithms that accurately predict criminal activity.

We also share this intelligence with all stores about connected incidents and organised crime groups, enabling a proactive rather than reactive focus on identifying repeat prolific and persistent local offenders.

With the information, we identify patterns of behaviour and probability analysis of the next offence, allowing us to strategically deploy our ‘elite team’ to specific locations at the correct times to enable a high percentage chance of being in the store at the ideal time to detain the prolific offender. This approach has resulted in successful apprehensions by ASEL’s elite security team and through collaboration with the Police we have achieved significantly improved sentencing outcomes.

The Results

Our innovative and targeted approach has resulted in significant improvements to Midcounties loss prevention and security.

Following five targeted deployments across Midcounties stores, we have had a 100% success rate, with five subjects detained and subsequently arrested by the Police for multiple thefts and anti-social behaviour.

Outcomes

Aided by real-time reporting and targeted use of intelligence, ASEL:

• Report crime to the Police on behalf of our client based on priority triage
• Personally serve exclusion notices against those prolific offenders removing their implied right to entry
• See the process through and support the police with evidence gathering, statement writing and follow the process through to outcome
• Help to bring civil court injunctions against individuals to reduce crime including theft, assaults on staff, criminal damage, robbery and anti-social behaviour