The Scottish based Retailers Against Crime (RAC) is leading the way to make Scotland a safer place by cracking down on retail crime through adopting the crime intelligence platform called SentrySIS.
The crime reduction partnership - whose remit covers Scotland, Northern Ireland and North West England – provide crime intelligence updates, briefings and notifications to thousands of high street brands and national retailer organisations on a daily basis. The essential crime updates sent to subscribing members consist of local, regional and travelling offenders including organised retail crime groups and anti-social behaviour occurrences from across their operational areas.
The new RAC SentrySIS installation will now make it harder for known and unknown offenders to conduct criminal activity across RAC areas, as the RAC management team can use SentrySIS as a secure way to disseminate crime information quickly over large geographical areas or to a specific location.
Retailers Against Crime made the announcement at their annual crime conference which celebrated the award winning crime partnership’s 22nd year of operation and for achieving the national standard accreditation from the National Association of Business Crime Partnerships (NABCP).
The strategic decision to adopt the SentrySIS crime intelligence system, was due to the organisation’s need for a more robust software platform that really understood modern retail crime and loss prevention issues.
Retailers Against Crime’s Managing Director Maxine Fraser, commented on the announcement and said “Retailers Against Crime are delighted to move forward and evolve with Sentrysis. We are excited about the prospect of our members being able to access information securely on the move, which will make such a difference”.
SentrySIS is the main crime management platform used by crime partnerships, business improvement districts and national retailers from across the North East of England, Yorkshire and The Midlands. Now the system is launched in RAC areas, their members can also receive the benefits other businesses in SentrySIS locations are seeing to help reduce crime.
RAC members and their staff working in security and loss prevention capacities, can gain access to RAC crime intelligence via the SentrySIS dedicated smartphone app or cloud-based web portal accessed via any web browser. The system allows users to search for historical incidents relating to known and unknown subjects of interest, vehicles which have been associated with crime and the ability to run their own real-time reports detailing crime analytics and intelligence within their store location and wider area.
Chris Nriapia from SentrySIS commented and said “We are absolutely thrilled to be working with Retailers Against Crime as Scotland has been a key area for us for some time. It’s clear that the work RAC have been doing around retail crime and loss prevention for over 20 years has made a significant impact in Scotland. We look forward to building in what is already a perfect foundation for SentrySIS to offer real value to RAC’s members.
Due to RAC’s national remit, the organisation can choose to share vital intelligence about travelling crime and current trends not only in RAC areas but throughout the UK, as the software includes options to data share with other SentrySIS installations in a secure and GDPR compliant way.
The wider benefits of RAC using SentrySIS as their main crime intelligence system, creates additional opportunities for organisations such as Police Scotland, as retailers can report crime directly online to the police, saving vast amounts of valuable police time.
RAC members can use SentrySIS to automatically generate relevant police witness statements, Business Impact Statements and securely transfer CCTV video as part of the incident reporting feature within the software which can be integrated with the SentrySIS Police Efficiency Software.
The SentrySIS Police Efficiency Software is a cloud-based solution for police constabularies and local authorities allowing them to manage crime and crime processes in a much more modern and efficient way.
Chris Nriapia commented further on the SentrySIS Police Efficiency Software and said “We’ve seen some great successes and substantial police efficiency savings over the last few years with our police work in the North East of England. Hopefully our partnership with RAC will allow us to replicate this North of the border with Police Scotland over the coming years”
RAC members can access SentrySIS by downloading the free smartphone app from Apple’s AppStore or Android’s PlayStore or via the Retailers Against Crime website by clicking on log in.
For more information on joining Retailers Against Crime, please contact the RAC Scotland Office on 01786471451 or via email at info@retailersagainstcrime.org