Cork Business Association want more reporting of crime in city

THE establishment of a Community Safety Warden Scheme in Cork and efforts to increase reporting of thefts are among the key issues which will be explored by a newly established committee of the Cork Business Association.

The organisation has formed a new retail specific committee which aims to work with various agencies to address some of the key issues affecting members.

The CBA’s retail spokesperson and former chief executive Lawrence Owens told The Echo that the committee was formed to “get the key players together and look at what we can do, because there are issues in Cork” adding:

“We can sit and complain about everything, or we can see what we can and can’t do.”

Mr Owens said it has emerged a lot of retailers are not consistently reporting thefts from their shop premises and this is something the committee will look at.

“We heard from gardaí that if we are not regularly reporting, then crime stats are completely skewed,” Mr Owens said.

“It takes time to make a report, to wait for gardaí to arrive. There are challenges in terms of staffing, making a report might not be the easier thing to do, but it’s the right thing to do.

“If we don’t report then we can get a picture that the city is fantastic, there’s no crime, but the level of crime is actually far greater,” he said, explaining that this data was vital to getting more gardaí on the streets.

Mr Owens said that in addition to improving communication with authorities, another thing the retail committee could do to reduce theft is improve communication between stores.

“If in-house security staff could communicate with those in other businesses, they could alert them to issues in city in real time, such as reporting the presence [of] known individuals ... we’re very conscious of GDPR with this, but it was up and running a number of years ago — it’s about individual security staff trying to do something proactively,” Mr Owens said.

The committee is also looking at the establishment of the Community Safety Warden Scheme in Cork, which sees special wardens who look at anti-social behaviour and other issues in Dublin.

“We hope to see additional gardaí, but this is something different we could also try to bring about for Cork.”

Mr Owens stressed the importance of information gathering for retailers and said the committee is also looking to see the expansion of footfall measurements in the city.