Let’s work together to set up your own Business Crime Reduction Scheme

If you’re thinking about running a Business Crime Reduction Scheme, you may be wondering how easy it is to set up and manage?

Establishing a Business Crime Reduction Scheme is a smart and cost-effective way for your BID to directly address the impact that crime and anti-social behaviour is having on your levy payers. Evidence is clear that BIDs whose members actively share information of incidents and offenders through Disc either stop re-offending outright or arm the police with the evidence they need to prosecute prolific offenders more effectively.

Disc is configurable to suit any scheme, whether retail schemes for daytime economy, night-time schemes for pubs and clubs, or schemes focused on, for example, hotels, charity shops and betting shops.

Once you’ve decided to set up your own scheme, you’ll need consider two important issues:  compliance with Data Protection law (including GDPR), and how to administrate your Disc system.

The GDPR implications of setting up a scheme which shares offenders’ personal data with members might seem daunting. But Disc gives you the reassurance you need by aligning with GDPR’s key concept of ‘data protection by design and default’ with built-in features to help administrators comply with their obligations regarding privacy information for offenders and users alike.

With Disc, you can breathe easy about GDPR:  Disc itself provides the comprehensive technical security you’ll need, use of ‘model documents’ necessary for GDPR compliance, plus tools to ensure the compliance of the levy-payers who’ll use the system.  We’re proud to be GDPR Geeks and will provide all the expert advice you’ll need as issues arise.

Setting up and administrating your new Disc system may seem like a mammoth task, but in fact both are easy – Disc is designed to be extremely easy to use for your levy-payers, and quick to configure and administrate for yourself or your staff. We provide full training through the implementation phase and, with years of experience behind us, we help you every step of the way not only to going ‘live’ but after that, when you’re up and running.

For BIDs new to Business Crime Reduction Schemes it’s critically important to liaise closely with levy-payers and their businesses and to explain and promote what the BID is doing in the run-up to going live, as well as maximising their engagement with the scheme thereafter.  Disc makes that easy too, providing a powerful and compelling communication platform with levy-payers and their businesses, and with key local partners including the police and council.

A recurring concern in any town or city-centre is the low level of reporting of business crime by businesses. They often believe that police give business crime a low priority. Your Disc system will hold a significant amount of information about what’s occurring within your area, and if there are lots of reports of issues that appear not to be being addressed, you’ll be well positioned to justify your levy-payers’ concerns to partner agencies and ensure that local business crime is given the attention it deserves. Disc can also enable levy-payers to report crime online direct to police, as well as to record other types of incidents of concern to your levy payers.

Making sure police are aware of business crime is critically important: under-reporting of crime within a town or city-centre might suggest a year-on-year crime reduction, perhaps resulting in cuts to your local policing team. Disc can demonstrate in such circumstances that, instead of reduced level of criminality, the real issue is a lack of reporting to police.  Ensuring that businesses, police and council share a true picture of what is actually happening is the only way to ensure appropriate policing resources are focused on local business crime and related ASB.

Conversely, where partner agencies are doing a great job, the level of reporting into Disc will demonstrate that fact. It’s important that businesses can see what has been achieved and how they themselves have helped achieve it, and that entering evidence into Disc in the form of Incident Reports assists police in doing their job effectively and achieving positive outcomes for all.

By using Disc you can not only improve the perception and experiences of businesses, customers and visitors to your town or city-centre, but more widely too. So Disc has been designed to enable effective and secure information-sharing between any number of separate Disc systems to maximise effective collaboration between neighbouring areas and wider, across county and policing areas.