Business Crime and OUR Response

Have you ever had a crime (anything from verbal abuse right up to substantial theft of property) committed against:

• You and your business?
• Your business premises?
• Your staff members?

Did you report it to the police to be investigated? If you didn’t, why didn’t you?

Did you think it too small to worry about? Did you feel that, for whatever reason it may not be investigated? Did you feel there were insufficient police officers, with the ability or specialist training, available to deal with your specific business crime? Did you think it would involve too many working hours?

If there is indeed a lack of specialist, dedicated police officers for business crime should we the business community accept any responsibility for this?

Approximately only 1 in 8 business crimes are reported to the police! With reported incidents so low we must seriously consider the impact these findings have on the amount of police resources being made available to combat business crime!

How is it rectified? WE REPORT CRIME – EVERY TIME!

Businesses should accept a degree of responsibility for reduced police numbers available! If we do not report criminal activity (no matter how trivial) we will never know the extent and type of corporate crime occurring in any specific area? If the crime statistics are not available how can anyone cater for the number of officers or the specific areas of training required by police forces to combat corporate crime?   

A national campaign is being jointly managed (Northumbria Coalition Against Crime and the FSB) to encourage businesses to:

1. Continue to call 999 in an emergency (or the local police if non urgent)
2. To report criminal activity on-line!

You can help yourself and your community by going on-line, reporting the incident and helping to formulate the statistics we require to back the request for more police officers to be trained in business crime. Every incident, from damage to your business property to crimes that are difficult to classify as either ’Criminal or Civil’ (the kind true con-men like to work on; deciding if the case belongs with your solicitor or the police can itself be sole destroying) should be reported.

For more information and an on-line ‘Reporting’ Form please go to:

http://www.thecoalition.org.uk/ecet 

http://www.fsb.org.uk/ecet

http://www.businesscrimecentre.org.uk/ecet

It can take many business hours collecting all the information needed to report a corporate crime - however at the end of the day unless We Report Crime Every Time we will only have ourselves to blame when there are insufficient police officers to cover our area and those available are unable to concentrate on preventing corporate crime as they are too busy trying to catch the corporate criminal!