Ensuring safety on the shop floor
Retailers are facing rising levels of theft, violence and abusive behaviour from the public - body worn video cameras can mitigate the problem, as well as help to increase efficiency and productivity.
More and more retailers in the UK are issuing staff with body-worn video cameras (BWVs). The reasons for this are not hard to find.
Retail staff are facing a rising tide of violence and abuse, while customer theft is also increasing. Despite this, few incidents ever result in successful prosecutions.
Discussing this, a spokesperson for the British Retail Consortium (BRC) – which represents 70 per cent of the UK retail industry by turnover – tells Land Mobile: “Body-worn cameras were introduced to identify those who attack security staff, act as a deterrent to would-be criminals, and protect alleged attackers from false allegations. Body-worn cameras are a useful tool against crime.”
The BRC Crime Survey 2021, which covers the period from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020, makes for dismal reading. Violence and abuse against retail workers rose from 350 daily incidents in 2016-17 to 455 a day in 2019-20. That is over 165,000 a year, or one every 75 seconds if a typical trading day is taken as nine hours. Forty-five incidents a day involved a weapon.
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