In a joint effort by the North East Counter Terrorism Unit, BACIL, West Yorkshire Police and Leeds City Council, retailers attended a terrorism awareness event aimed to better equip business in the event of a terrorist incident in the city.

The well attended event was held on the 19^th June 2017 at the Leeds 02 Academy in response to the recent terrorist events throughout Spring in Manchester and London.

BACIL crime partnership members received vital information on the awareness programme that provides a broad understanding of the threat to the retail economy called ‘Project Griffin’. The initiative included how to best manage and survive a weapons attack and what retailers should include within their own evacuation strategies.

Crime Manager for BACIL, Sean Walker commented and said “All retailers play a very important role in keeping the city safe and working with our partners here today, only further reinforces how important partnership work is. Working together as a business community is essential in helping manage the threat from a terrorist attack.”

SentrySIS was also in attendance to give members an overview on how best to use the SentrySIS crime reporting and monitoring platform via the BACIL website.

Chris Nriapia from SentrySIS commented and said “As we can see from recent events in other parts of the UK, terrorism is a real threat. Using the SentrySIS platform is another tool retailers can use help keep people safe. The notifications in SentrySIS sends out alerts in real time so retailers can be kept up to date instantly about any issues that might occur within city.”

The event concluded with ‘Project Argus’, an interactive exercise simulating a terrorist attack where participants answer questions about what to do next and why.

For more information on what your business should be doing to help keep people safe, please contact BACIL on 013 241 3893 or visit www.bacil.org