Security and Risk Management - Assignment Example

Workplace crimes are in general offences that cause an identifiable loss to an employer. One constituent of such crimes is what is usually termed as employee theft, internal theft or pilferage. It is important to remember that internal theft comprises merely one of a range of misbehaviours indulged in by recalcitrant employees. In addition to this crime there exist five other forms of misdeeds, which are adopted by undesirable employees, these are, disobeying the rules, indulging in destructive practices, resorting to non-cooperative practices, adopting disruptive practices and the misuse of facilities1. The variety of such deviant practices found at the workplace illustrates the reason as to why there is no recognized and unanimously acknowledged definition of workplace crime. The situation obtaining is that although a consensus exists in respect of undesirable work place behaviour like theft, the lack of such unanimity in respect of boundaries between other work-related deviance and allowable behaviour which varies from workplace to workplace is conspicuous by its absence. The prevalence and nature of workplace misconduct renders it a well nigh impossible task to elucidate as to why some employees engage in crime and deviance and others do not. Nevertheless there are some important facts that serve to clarify the issue. Very few employees who steal at work consider themselves to be thieves, further they illogically justify their actions on the thinking that they are not stealing from anyone, moreover since the work group to which they belong "restricts and limits theft by defining what can be taken and from whom"2 they tend to associate a certain legitimacy with their stealing. In addition to an employee's perception that his deeds are not dishonest or that it constitutes a well-deserved perquisite, absence of faithfulness and dedication to the company and job frustration or apprehensions over job security, are significant reasons that tend to induce employees to commit this type of crime3. No organisation irrespective of whether it is large or small, or whether it belongs to the private or the public sector; can expect to avoid problems that relate to drug and alcohol abuse amongst employees at some time or the other. The loss to industry due to this is colossal and the annual cost to industry due to drug misuse has been estimated at 800 million and that due to the misuse of alcohol at 3.3 billion. The problems caused by drug and alcohol misuse are far reaching and not only affect the health, safety and welfare of staff but also business continuity and financial stability. It is to be recognized that all managers have a duty of care towards their employees and the fact to be kept uppermost in mind is that drug and alcohol misuse can not only destroy the individual concerned, but can also have an extremely detrimental effect on the wider workforce, clients, customers and the organisation's performance as a whole. This makes it imperative for organisations to become aware of the potential problem and to achieve sufficient proficiency to state confidently that they have the requisite background knowledge and that the requisite policies have been implemented in order to deal with it. The reason for this is that drug and alcohol abusers will resort to theft in the workplace to sustain their addiction. It goes without saying that dissatisfied workers are more likely to engage in deviant activities than their satisfied counterparts. This calls for reducing such dissatisfaction and this is evidently very important. In some cases this dissatisfaction may originate due to strained interpersonal relations at the workplace and such events do not in general lend themselves to easy resolution, which is to the satisfaction of all concerned. Nevertheless, there are four areas such as the existence bad working conditions, the lack of a comprehensive recruitment and training program in the company, the payment of inadequate wages and a reward system that is clearly insufficient and a standard of supervision by the management that is inadequate that can and should be addressed with the objective of resolution. In addition any attempt to make the work interesting, varied and fulfilling has great value and is to be encouraged4. Opportunities play an important role in the causation of all crime and they are by nature highly specific. For instance the robbery of post offices depends upon an entirely different pattern of opportunities than what is obtaining in bank robberies. Similarly, the theft of cars involves an entirely different pattern of opportunity in comparison to the pilfering of car parts. Crime opportunities are concentrated and dependent on space and time. The pattern of crime changes in general by the hour of the day and the day of the week, reflecting thereby the opportunities that are created at various points of time to commit crime. The routine activity theory and crime pattern theory serve to simplify and make the understanding of the concentration of crime opportunities at particular places and times possible. Crime opportunities are dependent to a very large extent on the daily movements of activity. This is due to the fact that offenders move in accordance to the workplace and leisure locales. A very important factor in this connection is that one crime produces opportunities for another crime to be committed and the number of ways in which such events can take place are many. Further, some products provide and provoke more tempting crime opportunities and such opportunities clearly illustrate in particular the value, inertia, visibility of, and access to potential crime targets. For example, VCRs, DVD players and cell phones are high in value and have low inertia because of the fact that they can easily be transported around and also due to the fact that they are often left in visible and accessible locations and in a highly negligent manner. This helps clarifies the reason for the high rate of their theft and their popularity with burglars. Social and technological changes produce new crime opportunities. For example, a new product goes through four stages: innovation, growth, mass marketing and saturation. The middle two stages tend to prone for workplace thefts. Crime can be prevented by reducing opportunities. The opportunity reducing methods of situational crime prevention fit systematical patterns and rules must be formulated to be applicable to specific situations. These methods derive from rational choice theory and their objective is to, 1. increase the perceived effort involved in committing the crime, 2. increase the perceived risks to be undertaken while committing the crime, 3. reduction in the anticipated rewards, 4. removal of the causes for the crime. Thus situational crime prevention is not just a collection of ad hoc methods, but is firmly grounded in opportunity theory. Reducing opportunities does not in general result in the displacement of crime. This means that each employee or organization reducing crime accomplishes some real gain. Even crime which is displaced can be directed away from the worst targets, times or places. Focused opportunity reduction can produce wider declines in crime. Prevention measures in one location often result to a diffusion of benefits to nearby times and places and this is because offenders generally tend to overestimate the reach of these measures. Furthermore, it is generally held that reduction in crime opportunity can contribute significantly to the reduction of the larger crime rates for an organization. The conclusion that can be drawn from the above discussion is that opportunity makes the thief and this old adage has important implications for crime policy and practice. Retailers have long debated over how far their theft losses are attributable to customers or staff. Police statistics have revealed that the average loss for each theft by a customer is much less than those from staff thefts and that the total known losses from employee theft has far outweighed those from customers. However, most of the authorities who study such crimes are of the opinion that these statistics may be totally unrepresentative of the large numbers of offences that do not come to the retailer's notice or even of those that are dealt with internally by retailers. There is no dependable way of ascertaining the correct balance. While indisputably those seeking to avert crime should perforce recognize the wide range of opportunities which staff may have to steal, it should not be assumed that losses will therefore automatically outweigh those inflicted by sheer numbers of shoplifters. Staff integrity, nevertheless, should of course be considered as the central principle of preventive action. However, in order to achieve this endeavor, a lot of thought has to be given to devising foolproof systems for controlling stock and cash, systems that will not only avoid offering staff the temptation to steal and thereby keeping 'honest staff honest' but also provide the means of identifying those who submit to the temptation. In addition to implementing systems checks, most large retailers rely on a number of other methods and some of these are, 1. pre-employment reference checks, 2. fostering high staff awareness through training and the maintenance of clear rules, 3. establishing procedural practices from enquiries by regional security staff, 4. 'test shopping', to staff searches, which are aimed at identifying wrongdoers5. The mainstay of this effort has to be based on the recognition of the fact that it is very important to ensure that those frauds or thefts which do come to light are not viewed as isolated instances, but as an indication of loopholes that others would have certainly found and exploited and should be removed. The information obtained on the age and sex of known offenders can be put to a variety of uses, like it might recommend that the company should ensure a particular mix of employees at each department or shop in order to ensure that high risk groups are better supervised. The result of certain calculations made by Peter Berlin from the 1986 Price Waterhouse Shrinkage Survey of US retailers (Price Waterhouse, 1986b), has indicated very convincingly that for employee thefts to outweigh customer thefts, the dollar value of each employee theft would have to be 20 times greater than those per shoplifting incident. Peter Berlin however, was of the opinion that this was improbable. This estimate however was based on retailers' subjective assessment of the proportion of employees and customers who stole goods and which was calculated at 6.7% and 45% respectively. Some of the factors and details to be considered in such assessments are detailed below: 1. The methods employed to remove the goods. The methods adopted by criminals, by which goods are removed by them vary widely and some of these are for example, stock may be hidden in clothes or bags when staff leave at the end of the day, the goods may be secreted outside the premises, in rubbish as an illustration, for later collection or these goods may be removed by those who put up a pretense of performing 'normal' duties such as escorting and helping a customer to his or her vehicle. Each of these methods of crime entail a different safeguard. 2. The collusion of outsiders with employees in committing such crimes. In respect of collusion with outsiders a separate provision will have to be made in order to monitor thefts perpetrated by this particular means. These methods of committing such crimes generally vary from the relatively simple for example the instance of the friend of the salesman who receives additional goods to those legitimately purchased or any other favours such as discounts or the 'replacement' of goods bought elsewhere, etc, to the bolder ones such as the deliveries which are dispatched to a spurious customer via a particular carrier, in order to deal with such crimes checks and balances will be required. 3. The time at which the theft took place. It is essential to realize that it should not be taken for granted that staff will only steal during their departure from work in the evening. Some examples of the times when staff steal are during lunch or tea breaks and on particular days when the situation is conducive to theft such as on days when the manager or cashier are absent. 4. The stratagems adopted by such criminals to conceal information about the stolen goods absence. In general and quite frequently, it has been noticed that employees carrying out thefts, especially if they are in a position of authority or intend to continue the practice, will take considerable pains in order to conceal the loss, because this will result in the avoidance of expected enquiries when their branch or department is next submitted to audit. Proper identification of the means by which such employees try to conceal the missing stock, like for example, by claiming particular items on a delivery never arrived, provide an invaluable means to familiarize oneself with the modus operandi of these criminals and this can prove to be indispensable in detecting other offenders. 5. The method by which cash was taken. Similar to the method adopted in pilfering stock, there are a variety of techniques, each involving different degrees of complexity or levels of access to the till, which serve to facilitate the theft of cash. This is because the simple removal of cash is not a very attractive proposition, because at the close of business the cash will have to be tallied and failure to do so will prompt an immediate investigation. The details of each method, from the under ringing of a purchase to more complicated transactions such as those involving credit agreements etc. have to be collated in order to understand this process. In the 1920s, as part of the famous Character Education Inquiry undertaken in the USA, researchers gave schoolchildren the opportunity to cheat on tests, to lie about cheating and to steal coins from puzzles used. The researchers found that only a few children resisted all these temptations and that surprisingly, most of the participants behaved dishonestly at some time or the other during the test and this lent support to the idea that opportunities cause crimes6. In another experiment, researchers scattered stamped and addressed letters in the streets to see the reaction of the general public and to ascertain, whether people who noticed these letters on the street would pick them up and post them. The observation was that people were less likely to post the letters that they found, which containing money. This clearly indicated that many people are swayed from the straight path if sufficient opportunity and incentive is provided to stray. Further, it was noticed that people were more likely to post letters addressed to males than females, indicating that a person makes a considered decision whether to respond to temptation7 or not. The theory of crime settings is based on the single principle that easy or tempting opportunities serve to entice people into committing criminal action. This principle is present in all the new opportunity theories of crime, including the routine activity approach, crime pattern theory and the rational choice perspective. The routine activity approach to crime had its origins in the explanation it offered for predatory crimes. It assumed that for the occurrence of such crimes there must be a convergence in time and space of three elements, namely, a likely offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian against crime. Such a guardian need not in general be a security officer but on the other hand could be anybody whose presence or proximity would serve to discourage the commission of a crime8. In this approach to crime, the term target is preferred over victim, who might be completely absent from the scene of the crime. Four elements serve to influence a target's risk of workplace offences, and these are value, inertia, visibility and access. Value of the article as compared to its price, an illustration of this concept, is that the chances of a CD containing the latest popular hit songs being stolen from a music stores are greater than that of a CD containing works of a symphony orchestra and this is attributable to the fact that the employee thief would prefer the former CD as it has greater sale value. Inertia is nothing other than the weight of the item and this is the reason for small electronic goods, which weigh relatively less, are stolen more frequently than heavier and bulkier items. Visibility connotes the exposure of theft targets to offenders, an article which is clearly visible to an offender is always more tempting than what is seldom seen. Access refers to the workplace patterns, placement of goods near a door, or other features which makes it easier to steal them. Another important aspect of such crimes are the local crime patterns which indicate a lot about how people interact with their physical environment, resulting in either a greater or lesser crime opportunity situation. Crime pattern theory is a central component of environmental criminology and it gives cognizance to how people and things involved in crime move about in space and time. It involves three main concepts, namely, nodes, paths, and edges. Nodes a term from transportation, refers to where people travel to and from. Each offender searches for crime targets around personal activity nodes and the paths among them. That is the reason for crime pattern theory's concentration on the geographical distribution of crime and the daily rhythm of activity. Edges refer to the boundaries of areas where people work, because some crimes are likely to occur at the boundaries. The distinction between insiders and outsiders helps underscore the importance of edges since insiders usually commit crimes. The rational choice perspective deals with the offender's decision making. It mainly assumes that offending is purposive behaviour whose objective is to benefit the offender and that they have goals when they commit crimes. Rational choice theorizing endeavors to view the world from the offender's perspective and tries to unravel the offender's mind when it makes crime choices driven by a particular motive within a specific setting which offers the opportunities to satisfy that motive. With regard to violent attacks by employees, it assumes that the violent employee may have a grievance and the attack is made to remedy a perceived injustice or that the preservation of self esteem after a perceived insult was involved and although the outcome may seem unjustified and frivolous at a later stage, it makes sense at the time to those involved9. Obscene and threatening phone calls depend upon telephone access and the possibility of the caller to hide his own identity. Since offences differ, reductions in opportunity are highly specific and removal of one crime opportunity may not affect another, for instance devices that prevent stealing the car do not necessarily prevent breaking theft of items in the car. Focused opportunity reduction reduces crime. For instance, CCTV cameras reduced car thefts in three car parks at the University of Surrey and as a spillover crime declined in other car parks that were not given camera surveillance. Similarly, installation of CCTV cameras on five double decker buses in the North of England, stopped vandalism by schoolchildren for the whole fleet and not just those with cameras installed. In the University of Wisconsin library electronic tagging of certain books in order to sound an alarm if they were removed illegitimately brought about a decline in the theft of video-cassettes and other untagged materials. In New Jersey an introduction of a discount electronic retailer into the regime of daily counting of valuable merchandise in a warehouse was made. This drastically reduced not only the thefts of these items but also of other items which were not repeatedly counted10. These are a few of the examples of the diffusion of benefits of crime prevention measures. In their totality they suggest that potential offenders may be aware that new prevention measures have been introduced, but they are often unsure of the precise scope of these. Diffusion of benefits greatly increases the practical appeal of opportunity reduction programmes and an important method is by giving wide publicity to such programs in order to deter offenders. Employee crime prevention is greatly aided by recognizing that opportunity is a major cause of crime. This creates the opportunity for implementing new crime prevention policies aimed at reducing opportunity to commit crime. Further, these policies do not merely complement existing efforts to diminish individual propensities to commit crime through social and community programmes or the threat of criminal sanction but on the other hand, these newer policies operate on circumstances much closer to the criminal event and are thereby much more effective in bringing about an immediate reduction in crime. Bibliography. Brantingham, P. J., and Brantingham, P. L. (1984). Patterns in Crime. New York: Macmillan. Brantingham, P. J., and Brantingham, P. L. (Eds). (1991). Environmental Criminology. Prospect Heights, OH: Waveland. Clarke, R. V . (Ed.), (1997). Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies Second Edition. Albany, NY: Harrow & Heston. Clarke, R. V., and Felson, M. (Eds.). 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