On Wednesday 11th June 2025 at 9am we will be hosting a launch event with Sports Direct and Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary in Whiteley for a new retail crime-fighting tool. This proactive initiative will help retailers report crime quickly, while also helping police track offenders, share intelligence and put prolific thieves before a court.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, so I'm Marcus Cater. I'm a Chief Inspector in Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary
00:04and I'm the business crime lead for the force.
00:07So our partnership with the Police Crime Commissioner and UK PAC provides an app that goes on the phones
00:13both for retailers and police and that app allows us to share information.
00:17It's all about information sharing and how do we communicate better to understand what's going on in the community.
00:23That will allow the shops to either make a report online on their app on their phone
00:28that will allow them to make in effect a statement.
00:32So they fill out the app, it takes about 5-6 minutes to go through the app to actually fill out all the details of their incident that's taken place
00:38and if they fill it out correctly that will then come straight into our contact management centre
00:44where we can then file that crime and allocate it to an investigating officer.
00:48So over a period of just about a year we worked with UK PAC to identify 58 repeat offenders
00:54and they pulled together all the evidence around the behaviour of those individuals, the crimes they committed, where it took place.
01:02They provided all the statements and all the CCTV and that came direct into the local officers in the Portsmouth City Centre Unit.
01:09Those 58 people over the period of a year were worked with, they were arrested, they were charged
01:15and the beauty of the way that we've worked with UK PAC is the amount of evidence they were able to produce
01:20around one person's behaviour across their platform and their information allowed us to get better sentences.
01:25So we get an average of about a 12-week sentence for somebody for retail crime which is actually surprisingly high.
01:32But we have had some significant successes where some of those have been getting a two-year sentence
01:37and a three-year criminal behaviour order on the back of that because their behaviour has been so impactive.
01:45Well there are over 20 million incidents of shoplifting across the country every year
01:49and I work for the public and the public here in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight have unequivocally told me
01:54over the last three or four years they want more done about shoplifting across our high streets, our communities.
02:00We're here today in Wightly for me to launch UK PAC, UK Partners Against Crime.
02:05Now I've been working with UK PAC for nearly a year now to get the licences in place,
02:10to make sure that they have access to all of the police systems, to enable retailers just like those behind us here today
02:16to be able to report shoplifting really easily.
02:19It's been trialled in a much smaller area in another police force area but we are the first police force in the country
02:24that are rolling out this app across such a large scale.
02:27And in order to tackle shoplifting and to make this a bigger priority for our local police force,
02:33last year in November I set up the county's first retail crime partnership.
02:38So I've got all of our major retailers, all of our major supermarkets sitting on my board
02:44and they are giving us information.
02:46We're sharing with them the information around serious and organised crime gangs
02:49who are stealing commodities to order such as baby milk that's being shipped off to Asia
02:54and to parts of the world where there's a real shortage of it.
02:57So for criminal gangs that is a product which is worth a lot of money.
03:01Now the police are not only tackling serious and organised crime gangs in shoplifting,
03:05they're also going to be going after the individuals who are perhaps shoplifting to fund their own let's say drug addictions.
03:11But as police and crime commissioner it's really important that the public know that I'm listening, I'm acting,
03:16I'm also listening to businesses and UKPAC is the result of businesses telling me how they want to be able to report crime,
03:23get CCTV in, write their witness statement and get their staff back on the shop floor and working where they need them.
03:29So when incidents happen this is going to make it so much easier for them to report the crimes
03:34and for us to get the outcomes that they deserve.