If you grew up in Australia before the 2000s, there's a fair chance some of your best memories with your friends happened under the fluorescent lights of your local shopping centre.
We were all ‘mall rats’ at some stage. The shopping centre was where you went when you were old enough to fly solo - dropped off by mum or dad with $20 and a pickup time. Like many others, I have great memories at the local arcade with school mates, catching a movie after school, or just walking the tiles. It was quietly agreed that shopping centres were the safest public places a school-aged kid could be with their friends. It’s then where many of us worked our first jobs; that crucial stepping stone into the workforce.
Today, shopping centres face big challenges. We’ve seen a rise in violent and threatening behaviour in these very places we all grew up in. From smash and grabs at jewellery stores, to brawls with security in front of shoppers, like what we saw in Bankstown last week. Last year, rival gangs chose a food court north Melbourne centre for a machete fight, as families sheltered behind locked shop doors, and a car blitzed through a Victorian centre as witnesses ducked for cover. In seeing all of this, parents will understandably be thinking twice before their kids head off with their friends.
Shopping centres face larger public safety challenges beyond just typical retail theft at the stores within them - they also deal with risk across large crowded areas, and social, transportation, retail hubs with multiple entrances, and large carparks. It’s a hard ask for frontline retail workers, security guards and management.
When a crime event occurs at a shopping centre, there is a 1 in 3 chance it is violent or involves weapons, while for retail stores that figure is 1 in 10. What’s consistent across the board however, is that repeat offenders are driving the majority of crime. The top 10 per cent of offenders are responsible for about 70 per cent of the crime in shopping centres, and across the sector. This is why the key to change is cracking down on repeat offenders to take back these spaces for our kids, the elderly and families.
Retail, shopping centres and police across the country should be empowered to modernise and work together in new ways. We are seeing pockets of excellence, like Operation Percentile in New South Wales, driven by intelligence-led policing, generating thousands of charges by zeroing in on the top offenders. The tide looks to be turning in Victoria, through VicPol’s Operation Pulse which boosts police visibility at shopping centres and connects police on the ground with crime information from those retailers. So far, one supermarket reported a 27% drop in crime events at Operation Pulse locations since the initiative began, while another retailer reported a 58% reduction in crime events. We must be bold, double down on these types of initiatives, and not be reluctant in modernising how retailers work with police on crime.
What’s promising is that Australian shopping centres, supported by the likes of the Shopping Centre Council of Australia, are some of the most responsible and innovative players in combatting crime anywhere in the world. They think about how technology can revolutionise security to stamp out the machetes, stabbings, knife crime, and thoughtless assaults that put shop workers and shoppers at risk.
Centres know more than half of repeat offenders use a vehicle in some way - whether it’s to arrive, load up stolen goods, or to get away. Many use long-established tech like number plate recognition as an outer layer or protection that buys security critical notice when known offenders arrive on-site - some retailers see more than 30x the prevention potential of sites without it. While technology like facial recognition for crime prevention also stands to play a huge role in Australian retail as the inner layer of protection. While the sector looks closely at how this tech can boost safety in retail, countries like the NZ and UK are moving ahead and seeing significant improvements in worker safety.
The reassuring part for the millions of us who just want to do our shopping in peace is that because the harm is driven by the few, the response can be focused and high impact. You don't make a centre safer by watching everyone - you make it safer by targeting your limited resources on serious offenders causing most of the harm, and that’s where technology can help.
No single tool or one-off initiative will be a silver bullet for this problem, but if centres can be supported through police partnerships, embrace proven safety technologies, and work hand-in-glove with the sector, then they become very hard places for thugs to target. That shared responsibility of public safety is how to keep our local centres safe, take back the trouble spots, and establish those shared spaces that we’re all nostalgic for.
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Brett Farley is Vice President of Australia and New Zealand at Auror. Auror is a global retail crime intelligence company that provides a crime reporting platform to the world’s largest retailers to securely and consistently record crime, connect the dots on organized offenders, and collaborate with law enforcement. Auror is used in more than 85,000 stores and in 3,500 law enforcement agencies globally.
