Police forces in the West Midlands should be more visible over the next two months as they tackle crime in urban areas as part of the national Safer Streets summer campaign. This is taking placing across over 500 town centres until the end of September.
Police and Crime Commissioners across England and Wales have developed bespoke local action plans with police, businesses and local councils to crackdown on crime this summer. These plans include increased visible town centre policing and ramping up the use of targeted enforcement powers against troublemakers – including banning perpetrators from hotspots. West Mercia and West Midlands Police are among those involved with areas covered including various suburbs of Birmingham, Redditch, Droitwich, Kidderminster and Worcester.
The summer initiative is part of a wider retail crime strategy, Tackling Retail Crime Together launched last month. This brings together police and partner agency initiatives under one cohesive national campaign and brand. Its goal is to highlight the work already underway to tackle retail crime and to send a clear message to offenders that their actions will have consequences.
The strategy includes:
- The development of a ‘Fusion Cell’: This aims to fuse retailer knowledge with policing powers, to better identify and manage the threats from crime. There will be a six-monthly assessment showing the emerging and predicted trends and outcomes from previous activities.
- A continued clamp down on organised retail crime: The sharing of intelligence relating to organised criminality to policing so they can investigate, arrest and work with the Crown Prosecution Service to achieve successful convictions.
- The identification of high harm places: This aims to target the root cause of criminality with the intent of achieving a reduction in crime impacting retailers.
- Offender management: Interventions that address the different motivations of those with the intent and capability to commit crime.
When the Labour government came to power in July 2024 it pledged to tackle shoplifting and antisocial behaviour as part of its mission “to take back our streets”. It was reported that there was a 60% increase in shoplifting in England and Wales in the two years up until June 2024.
The government has implemented the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, which means from July there are named, contactable officers in every community, increased peak time patrols in town centres and anti-social behaviour leads in every force.
Additionally, its Crime and Policing Bill is now in the House of Lords. This law will introduce a specific offence for assaulting retail workers and scrap the rule that shop thefts of a value of below £200 are not prosecuted. When the Bill was introduced into Parliament these measures were welcomed by trade bodies and Usdaw, the trade union representing shopworkers.
Meanwhile the National Business Crime Centre has announced that its 2025 Safer Business Action Week will commence on Monday November 10th as part of the ongoing police and partnership response to tackling retail crime, anti-social behaviour and other crimes impacting businesses in local communities.
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