Ensure your business security remains Covid-resilient
The statistics show that lockdowns restrict some crimes and present opportunities for others. Understanding the effect of Alert Levels on patterns of crime and antisocial behaviour can help to ensure your security is a step ahead.
The Covid-19 pandemic and government responses to it have not only created a ‘new normal’ for business owners and employees dealing with limitations on operating and working from home, but it’s also ushered in a new world for criminals too.
With workers sent home during Alert Levels 3 and 4, our routines were collectively altered. Commuting workers were no longer commuting, public-facing businesses were no longer facing the public, and many business premises went idle. Unsurprisingly, this has had an instant and profound effect on crime patterns.
It’s a phenomenon that University College London Professor Nick Tilley describes in terms of environmental criminology, which studies crime opportunities and how they are affected by lifestyles, routine activities and particular goods and services.
“Movement (or its absence) is central to everything because a potential offender must encounter a potential target for a crime to take place,” states Tilley. “The target might be a person, a building or a product. All this means that because lockdowns have changed our movements dramatically, we can expect a similarly dramatic change to the distribution of crime opportunities.”
With more people than ever working from home, many jurisdictions around the world, for example, reported a decrease in residential burglaries and vehicle thefts in 2020 compared to 2019 coupled with an increase in domestic violence and drug and alcohol related offences. On the flipside, property crime and theft in commercial areas have seen spikes, and fraud and anti-social behaviour has moved online.
According to a report in the New Zealand Herald, crime levels plummeted when New Zealand went into Alert Level 4 lockdown last year, with many offences remained at lower-than-usual rates by the end of 2020. “In December 2019, 6,240 burglaries were reported across the country,” stated the report. “In April last year that plunged to 3,832 before rising to 4,999 by the end of the year.”
Contrasting this, One News reported that the Women's Rights Commissioner had raised concerns following the deaths of four women in a fortnight “in what's being described as the "shadow pandemic" of violence against women, created by the wider effects of Covid-19.”
Many of these patterns are reflected in annual data released by New Zealand Police, but the picture becomes complicated when we consider protracted lockdowns and movements between Alert Levels.
Supermarkets, for example, have become as hotspot for occupational violence and aggression as store workers and security guards bear the brunt of shoppers’ frustrations in relation to the enforcement of physical distancing, mask wearing, and contract tracing. These types of antisocial behaviours are likely to become more prevalent as lockdowns become more protracted or if there is ‘see-sawing’ between Alert Levels.
With continuing uncertainties around potential pandemic variants, vaccination rates and lockdowns, it pays to maintain an agile mindset in relation to the security of your organisation, its people and its property. As our collective daily habits continue to change due to the imposition of regulatory responses to Covid, so too will the habits of those who commit crime.
In order to keep one step ahead of this, being ‘agile’ means regularly reviewing your security plans and procedures and adjusting them to fit the circumstances. Review your security and ensure it remains fit-for-purpose. Consider the best mix of physical (locks, fencing, bollards), electronic (CCTV, access control, monitored alarms), and personnel (security guarding, patrols and alarm/incident response).
If there’s one thing that an environmental criminology approach teaches us in terms of managing our security during Covid, it’s to think like a criminal. Adopting the ‘criminal mindset’ helps us to understand the risk-reward calculations a perpetrator considers when identifying crime opportunities. With each change in our daily habits, you can be sure that criminals are adjusting theirs.
Consider also the mindsets of others who aren’t criminals but who may be prone to antisocial behaviour as a result of the psychological effects of a pandemic that’s likely to be with us in some way for some time. Frustrations fuelled by economic conditions and Covid restrictions are more likely to boil over in ‘flashpoint’ contexts, and scenarios such as supermarket queues are looming as such a flashpoint.
If you’d like to discuss your security needs with a team experienced in providing tailored Covid-related security advice and solutions, get in touch with us today.
