In over 500 town- and city-centre crime reduction schemes across the country Disc enables tens of thousands of local businesses to share information about low-level crime, ASB and prolific offenders. But Disc systems can network together to share information across a county or metropolitan area mapped onto police force areas.

Already county-wide Disc Networks represent a step-change in driving down low-level crime across the UK.

Linking together into county-wide Disc Networks means local Administrators can easily and instantly share important Alerts and other current awareness and identify ID-Soughts and prolific offenders. Each participating Administrator stays entirely in control and can choose which other systems to connect with, how to process information received from them and whether or not to share their Offenders’ personal details with them.

And countywide or metropolitan Disc Networks like these can link directly to police, to help them work more effectively to close the ‘policing gap’.

What are the benefits of linking Disc systems together?

Connecting Disc systems across county or metropolitan areas ensures that all schemes in the area, especially those operating under the same police force’s Information Sharing Agreement, forge close links with each other to drive down low-level crime and ASB.

Working together in this way, the individual Disc-enabled schemes enhance their own effectiveness – and make them essential links in an organised county network. Connecting Disc systems together into Disc Networks makes it easier for the police to access the wealth of intelligence that crime reduction schemes and other local organisations such as BIDs share with their members. Higher levels of collaboration between police and the schemes further enhance the schemes’ effectiveness in combatting low-level crime and, in turn, the level of support available from police and their Police & Crime Commissioners.

What information can be networked and shared?

Cross-Disc publishing keeps local businesses continually – and more quickly – informed. It helps Administrators maximise the flow of useful information to their Members: the more they receive, the more they participate in their local Disc system.

So right across the Disc Network, participating schemes can share latest news, Alerts, documents, information about up-coming events and ID-sought images. The sharing process is simple – just one click is all it needs.

Disc Networks also enable each participating Administrator can allow other Administrators in their network to access their databases to search for Offenders known to more than one Disc system and who therefore are travelling, possibly prolific (in police language – ‘Level Two’ Offenders).

GDPR compliance

Like every other aspect of Disc, Disc Networks are GDPR compliant ‘by design’. Administrators as Data Controllers are always in control of who they share their data with: peer-to-peer sharing enables each Admin to decide who they wish to share with within the Disc Network.

Naturally, as always, sharing of personal data in this way will need to be covered by each scheme’s own compliance documentation, specifically their Legitimate Interest Assessment and relevant Privacy Notices.

Another example of Disc’s policy of ‘compliance by design’ enables Administrators to search across a Disc Network using its Cross-Disc Offender-Matching function at the same time as avoiding any question of ‘fishing’ of personal data – that is searching through shared personal data on the off-chance that it may be relevant.

Disc Networks require Administrators to search only on a ‘reference’ Offender within their own Disc databases. And in Disc, ‘Close Matches’ are based exclusively on the Offender’s relevant characteristics, ensuring the data shared is proportionate to the search.

You can read about county-wide Disc Networks in our factsheet here. Or contact us to discuss how we can help you connect with other Disc Networks across your own county or metropolitan area.

For almost a year now, high street businesses have faced unprecedented challenges.  Covid has closed tens of thousands of retail premises resulting in a temporary decline in shoplifting, while the virtual closure of the night-time economy has reduced the level of associated anti-social behaviour (ASB).  Yet overall, data show that lockdowns, job losses, business closures and social isolation has stoked a new wave of ASB – and shifted it onto the streets of our towns and city-centres.

Anti-social behaviour falls into four categories:

• Personal: when a person targets a specific individual or group;
• Nuisance: when someone causes trouble, annoyance or suffering to a community;
• Environmental: when behaviour affects public spaces or buildings;
• Covid-related: we should (hopefully only for the time being) include a new type of ASB: non-compliance with Covid restrictions.

How does ASB affect local businesses?

ASB impacts local businesses as much – perhaps more – than residents.  Public-facing businesses such as retailers, licensees, and sporting venues suffer not only from the fear, or impact, of violence, but also concern for workers and customers’ health and potential business property damage and the cost of repair.

Research shows a growing demand from local business owners for police forces to deal with anti-social behaviour. Unlike shoplifting, ASB is highly visible and often directly affects customer footfall. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) can help protect local businesses from low-level crime and ASB and naturally their levy payers want to see action.

ASB affects both daytime and night-time economies and often crosses over between the two. Alcohol-fueled or drug-related ASB, for example, poses challenges for both daytime retail and night-time hospitality venues.  Hence the growth of local Shopwatches and Pubwatches over recent years, as well as larger Business Crime Reduction Partnerships.

It is vital to ensure crime information is shared between businesses who open during the day and those that open at night – but Shopwatch and Pubwatch schemes often run independently of each other so there is little sharing of information between them.

How can Disc help?

With Disc, schemes like these can work entirely independently, while sharing information between them (and their members) efficiently, effectively – and compliantly.

Disc also helps them work more closely with police, self-managing their own low-level crime and ASB but also identifying prolific offenders so that the police and other public agencies can focus their limited resources on pursuing them through the conventional criminal justice process.

This is ‘filling the policing gap’. Despite rising incidents of ASB, they are woefully under-reported to police. Lengthy delays on the 101 police non-emergency helpline and the belief that police won’t follow up such reports explains a lot.

Disc is a game-changer, enabling local businesses not only to fill the policing gap, but also enabling police to target their limited resources where they can have the biggest impact – on the prevention and detection of more serious crimes.

Disc enables effective information-sharing and through the Alert system, emerging issues and developing prolific offenders can quickly be identified and dealt with immediately. Police benefit through the gathering of evidence for a CBO, receiving information about ID-Soughts and focusing their resources on combatting prolific offenders.

Most importantly, all of this information can be shared securely and processed in full compliance with Data Protection Law and GDPR, including the processing of young persons’ data. Disc has been developed with ‘compliance by design’ at its heart, ensuring information security is embedded throughout its data-gathering processes.

Disc offers a win-win-win solution for crime reduction schemes, BIDs and police forces;  read more about how Disc works here.

To find out more about how Disc, or to book a demonstration of the system, please complete the enquiry form and we will be in touch!

Reduced budgets – and now the added challenge of Covid-19 – have forced police to concentrate their scarce resources where they can be most effective.

For retailers and licensees across the UK this has meant less police engagement in low level business crime such as shoplifting and anti-social behaviour around the night-time economy.

While police continue to urge local retail businesses and licensees to report such incidents to them, the perception is that they won’t follow them up.

Unsurprisingly, as a result there is substantial under-reporting of low-level business-related crime and ASB – and a growth in local business groups which enable their members to manage their own local crime problems without recourse to the police.

Business crime-reduction schemes: self-management of low-level crime

Today, around the country, thousands of independent, business-led shopwatches, pubwatches and other business-run crime reduction schemes gather information about local troublemakers and exclude the most troublesome from their premises.

Effectively they’re self-managing the crime and ASB of which they are victims.

Research shows schemes like these really work.  Typically, where they manage local exclusion schemes, just one out of five first-time offenders go on to re-offend; of those that do, half don’t offend a third time.

Clearly such schemes don’t just benefit their members – they also serve the wider society too, by helping first-timers back on the straight-and-narrow without involving the police or the criminal justice system.

The police are major beneficiaries of such schemes too.  While the schemes look after much low-level crime and ASB (especially in town- and city-centres) police can more effectively focus their resources on more serious crimes and more prolific offenders.

But there’s much more for both the police and the schemes here: the closest possible inter-working between them can generate more benefits still, and important ones too.

Police and business crime reduction partnerships

For police, business crime reduction schemes can help them identify and gather intel about the relatively small number of prolific offenders responsible for the great majority of shoplifting and business-related ASB – exactly the ones on which the police want to focus their time and resources.

They have much to gain, too, by accessing the communication channels that these schemes maintain with their members.  Those using Disc can enable their policing partners to share police news, alerts, documents and information about up-coming local events directly and quickly with a community that is not always easy to reach.

Disc can also increase the level of crime reporting by members which police encourage.  Scheme members who submit incident reports through Disc in order to support their exclusion scheme can quickly ‘escalate’ them into crime reports and send them, with optional Witness Statements, to the local force’s 101 desk or resolution centre with a click.

For the scheme’s part, working as closely as possible with local police brings important benefits in addition to helping them pursue prolific offenders through the Courts, perhaps to obtain Criminal Behaviour Orders or custodial sentences:

• Information sharing agreements: police forces can provide good-quality personal information about local offenders, including names and images; they’ll look for assurances that the schemes they deal with are properly constituted and managed;
• Joint operations: many local policing teams mount regular high-visibility trawls through local retail and night-time areas alongside scheme administrators, working together to identify known offenders in town and deter them from criminal activity; in some towns and city-centres, officers wear the scheme’s radio handsets to more quickly respond to requests for assistance by members;
• Staffing and accommodation: some forces provide low-cost (or even free) accommodation for larger schemes that require office space; officers can also participate in the administration of the schemes themselves, for example being sub-Administrators of its Disc system;
• Serving Exclusion Orders: it is best practice for schemes to serve ‘exclusion orders’ on offenders who have been banned from members’ premises; police can help here – either serving them in custody suites or delivering them to offenders’ homes;
• Contact Police & Crime Commissioners: every police force has a PCC (the Met has MOPAC) who have authority over policing policy and strategy; most are keen to support business crime reduction schemes in their area – sometimes financially; the closer an existing scheme works with local police the more visibility it will have with these important influencers.

Police will always attend serious incidents that involve immediate threat, irrespective of the value of any theft involved. But they are the first to admit that low-level business crime and ASB is a long way down their list of priority incidents.

Business crime reduction schemes provide local business with the tools to self-manage their own low level crime, and reduce its negative impact on their financial ‘bottom line’.

Working together is to the clear benefit of both – and the closer the inter-working, the greater the benefits for them – and the wider community.

Find out more

If you are interested in learning more about self-management of local crime and Disc, please see our website or book a demonstration here.