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Practical steps to prevent credit card and payment fraud as an independent cycling retailer

4 Dec 2024

As credit card fraud becomes increasingly sophisticated, taking these steps could help you stay ahead of the fraudsters…
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Scottish retailers call for urgent business rates support as gap widens with rest of UK

29 Nov 2024

Scottish independent retailers, including those in the cycling sector, are urging the Scottish Government to provide crucial business rates relief in its upcoming budget, as the disparity in... Read more…

Bira and ACT welcome new House of Lords report on high street regeneration

28 Nov 2024

Independent retailers back call for local leadership and simplified funding.
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Seven-in-ten cycle traders boycott Black Friday as cost pressures mount

26 Nov 2024

Seven in ten cycle retailers across the UK will boycott this year's Black Friday sales event, according to a survey of the bicycle trade by the ACT.
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Cycling club raising funds for youth bike maintenance workshops and 'go slow' inclusivity initiative

21 Nov 2024

A local cycling club is raising money and seeking donations and assistance in order to teach bike maintenance to young people through a series of workshops in 2025.
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Bira meets with Treasury members to discuss Budget concerns and business rate reform proposal

17 Nov 2024

Bira has held a meeting with members of the Treasury team to discuss concerns following its robust response to the Government’s recent Budget announcement.
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ACT teams up with Saledock to supercharge bike shop efficiency and customer experience

14 Nov 2024

The ACT has announced a dynamic partnership with Saledock - an all-in-one POS, eCommerce, and inventory management platform tailor-made for bike shops and workshops.
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'Devastating and out of touch' - independent retailers react to Budget bombshell

1 Nov 2024

Independent retailers across Britain have reacted with dismay to yesterday's Budget, with many warning of store closures, job losses and cancelled expansion plans.
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Devastating Budget Delivers Triple Blow to Independent Retailers, Says ACT and Bira

30 Oct 2024

The British Independent Retailers Association (Bira) and the ACT have condemned today's Budget as the most damaging for independent retailers in recent memory, with... Read more…

Retailers paying one-third of all UK business rates despite making up only 9% of economy

30 Oct 2024

Retailers and hospitality businesses are paying three times their economic share in business rates, according to analysis by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and UK Hospitality.
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Police deploying facial recognition technology to target shoplifters and other retail criminals

Posted on in Business News, Creative News, Outdoor News

“Game-changing” facial recognition technology is targeting prolific retail criminals, including shoplifters.

ShopliftingTwelve leading firms were approached for a police pilot scheme and asked to provide images of their worst unidentified offenders. Within 60 seconds, the technology generates a match report for an officer – who can determine whether to make an arrest. Of the images supplied, 302 were suitable to use in the scheme and 149 matched shots from the It then creates a template, comparing this to the same biometric template that was created in the custody image database when the person was arrested in the past. Within 60 seconds, from the image being inputted into the system, the technology will generate a match report for a police officer to look at manually before determining whether to make an arrest.

Images can come from CCTV stills or smartphone footage. The technology is so sophisticated, it managed to find an accurate match from a grainy image where the person pictured was wearing a mask. Ms Chiswick added: “If we didn’t have this, the alternative would be an individual sitting and manually looking and comparing that picture with the other ones, which could take weeks or months.”

Lindsey Chiswick, director of intelligence, said: “From a policing perspective, facial recognition is absolutely game-changing. “We’ve been using it for a while in the post-incidence sense, but it’s only recently in the last year or so that the algorithms have really come along and it’s really accurate now.

“We can use it to point our resource at the most wanted, who have committed the most prolific offending and that ability to prioritise is really key at a time when our resources are spread quite thinly.” Instead of taking into account characteristics such as whether a person is male or female or dark or light-skinned, the biometric tool calculates the individual measurements of people’s faces.

Kyle Gordon, commander frontline policing with responsibility for business and retail crime at the Met said while the force does not have a threshold of the value of items stolen when investigating thefts, he expects the new facial recognition technology to be deployed for the most harmful incidents in shops, such as assaults and hate crime.

This comes on the back of news that shoplifting offences recorded by police forces in England and Wales have risen by a quarter in the past year, according to official figures. The data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) last week comes after warnings from major retailers about the rising cost of theft from their stores.

Some 365,164 shoplifting offences were recorded by police in the year to June - up 25% on the previous 12 months.

The figure is 2% above the 359,236 offences in the pre-pandemic year of 2019/20, but not as high as the 375,350 offences in 2018/19.

ONS data shows total police-recorded theft rose by 10% in the year to June 2023, which is still below pre-pandemic levels.

The government has come under increasing pressure to tackle the rise in shoplifting, which has been blamed on the cost-of-living crisis and organised crime.

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