To celebrate 25 years of partnership working, SentrySIS last week attended the Retailers Against Crime annual conference in Glasgow. The well attended conference was made up of industry exhibitors, loss prevention personnel from major national retailers, various officers from Police Scotland and a variety of retail crime reduction professionals from across the sector.

The event was opened by ACC Tim Mairs from Police Scotland, who gave an overview of the work Police Scotland were undertaking in relation to retail crime and the challenging times the sector faced.

Retailers Against Crime’s Maxine Fraser also shared some background on how RAC had grown over the last 25 years and discussed the latest issues impacting the sector in light of the ever-changing retail crime landscape. This was followed by Stephanie Karté, National Operations Manager at RAC who highlighted the work they do with police forces in particular focusing on organised crime and how the partners work together to disrupt these teams. Stephanie also highlighted the important work they do in local communities, in particular educating the younger generation on the effect of crime.

Chris Nriapia from SentrySIS shared his experience of the partnership work both SentrySIS and RAC have undertaken over the last 3 years of working together. Chris also gave an insight into some of the useful tools, reports and functions within the SentrySIS platform that helped RAC identify serious organised crime gangs who offend right across the UK.

The conference delegates also heard from PC Stuart Toogood and Jacqui Every from West Midlands Police, who spoke about a very successful offender rehab programme they manage in the West Midlands. Laura Walkerdine from Security Industry Authority closed the morning session by sharing the work SAI do within the private security sector.

The afternoon session started with a group discussion with Pinnacle’s Colin Stanford and Amazon Web Services’ Peter Trimble, covering topics such as cloud computing and data centre security. This was followed by Sgt John Brown from Police Scotland who shared a number of case studies covering his work within local communities in Scotland.

Towards the end of the afternoon, the audience heard from Steven Franklin of Lithium Systems who covered cybercrime in retail and how this is a very growing trend.

The penultimate speeches saw Helen Wilde, Chief Commercial Officer at SAI Group share what the SAI Group were doing around self-scan crime detection, which led perfectly to Tesco’s Garry Black who discussed his experiences as a long term RAC member.

The conference came to a close with an awards ceremony where Duncan Miles, RAC Chairman and Head of Security at Iceland thanked all the partners, attendees and members for their part within RAC’s multi decade success.

The overall event was a huge success where networking over lunch created much debate and ideas to help improve the sector as a whole.

Maxine summarised the event by saying “Whilst I acknowledge that the focus of this conference was to celebrate 25 years of Retailers Against Crime, none of what we do would be possible if it wasn’t for our members and strategic partners in Scotland, Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK which we are grateful for their support today and over previous years.”

To find our more about RAC and how to become a member, please visit https://www.retailersagainstcrime.org/contact-us/ for more info.