Safety Concerns for Store Staff Amidst Surge in Shoplifting
Retail chains across the US and UK have reported significant losses, amounting to billions of GBP, due to shoplifting. Store staff, whose objective is to ensure that customers have a pleasant experience while shopping, now find themselves in an unsafe work environment. Even the UK government acknowledges this as an issue that needs immediate attention. The government is reportedly working on introducing a specific offence related to assaulting a shop worker – something that was featured in the King’s speech on July 17th, 2024.
Intervention Fraught with Liabilities
This puts additional pressure on the staff as most retail stores are short-staffed, and the personnel on the floor are not trained to prevent shoplifting offenses. As intervention can potentially lead to violence or use of weapons, it should only be done by qualified personnel such as security staff or the police. Casual intervention by the staff can put the retail company at risk of steep expenses – medical, insurance and even legal expenses – to name a few.
“SAI Safe” is a violence detection product, which works on retailers’ existing cameras to provide a range of automated solutions to improve colleague safety. For instance, the product can report a violent incident to the retailer SOC (security operations centre) as soon as such an incident happens. Another way it can help is by integrating with public address systems to play a security message as a deterrent.
Evidence Collection is Time Consuming
The police need clear evidence and a trail of events to consider intervening to stop habitual shoplifters. The police typically do not attend to isolated instances of shoplifting as they have higher priority offenses to address. Providing evidence to the police becomes an arduous task as the store staff needs to sift through hours of CCTV footage to locate and identify the specific repeat instances, extract the relevant footage on to a portable storage device like a pen drive, and submit the same to the police.
With most retail stores being short-staffed, collecting evidence and reporting to the police becomes a huge burden on staff, who have their hands full trying to meet the various needs of genuine customers. On the other hand, profitability takes a hit when shoplifting is allowed in an unhindered manner. This puts the onus on the security staff deployed at the store to identify and prevent such crimes.
The SAI dashboard can be of immense help to the security teams. SAI products automatically identify such incidents and upload the relevant footage to the dashboard. On the dashboard, multiple incidents related to the same perpetrator are brought together as investigations and are made available as a ready-to-go report. Bespoke integrations with various police systems can also be taken up by SAI team on request.
Physical Security is Ineffective
In many shoplifting cases, it was observed that the offender has done some homework to ensure that the event takes place when the store has the least number of security personnel, or when the security is lax. In quite a few instances, shoplifting incidents got reduced drastically when the security staffing and shifts were adjusted based on the analyses of shoplifting patterns. However, to react to such situations manually and to arrive at these adjustments prove to be time-consuming and can derive only minimal returns as the offender gets enough time to plan the next move.
In all these situations, technology is the only effective solution. At SAI Group, we have helped identify tens of thousands of shoplifting instances, enable staff to nudge customers to scan items that were concealed, and help staff or security personnel retrieve evidence swiftly and report offenses to the police in a timely manner.
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About SAI
As a leader in computer vision technology, SAI Group delivers cutting-edge, multi-modal AI solutions into retail environments. Using a unique platform approach, its technology uses existing camera systems to target losses, increase store safety, and underpin operational efficiencies.
All solutions are built from the ground up to ensure the highest levels of security and data protection, respecting the privacy expectations of the public and operating to stringent ethical standards while delivering substantial value to our clients. Globally, SAI monitors millions of transactions per day, protecting the revenues from tens of millions of product sales and hundreds of millions of customer interactions. Its models also accurately identify anti-social behaviour, aggression and violence, helping to de-escalate situations with real-time interfaces to security officers and operations centres.
