Abstract
The author develops a novel methodological approach to measure the harms of crime against businesses. He bases his work upon the analysis of data from over 8000 businesses in what has hitherto been a much-neglected area. His work serves to highlight the important role of security in building resilience to crime and the need to better understand the linkages between business tolerance to crime harms, security and resilience.
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Notes
- 1.
This includes crime detection and prevention costs (such as security). It also includes the cost of insurance administration.
- 2.
This includes emotional costs of crime, lost outputs and health service costs.
- 3.
These sectors include wholesale/retail; agriculture, forestry and fishing; construction; accommodation/food; arts, entertainment and recreation; manufacturing and transport/ storage.
- 4.
Using median values produces lower direct costs than those observed in Heeks et al. (2018).
- 5.
For assaults, violence with and without injury is used; for fraud by employee and by other, the fraud measure is used; for cybercrime, the cybercrime measure is used.
- 6.
The range of cyber-enabled or genuine cybercrimes makes it difficult to identify a sentence length. As a high number of online thefts were recorded in the data, a proxy measure using theft offences has been used.
- 7.
A better measure of financial capacity would be by considering ‘cost of crime harms’ and ‘security spend’ as a proportion of profit. However, a measure of profit was not available in the data.
- 8.
The harms of fraud—both financially and on victims are becoming a growing focus of research—see Cross (2019).
- 9.
Z scores calculate the position of an observation relative to the rest of its distribution. It returns values of −1 to 1 for a distribution. They can be used to identify how high above or below a mean value a business is.
- 10.
These variables were correlated beforehand to check for multicollinearity.
- 11.
Organised crime is defined in the survey as ‘Serious crime planned, coordinated and conducted by people working together on a continuing basis. Their motivation is often, but not always, financial gain’.
- 12.
The Nagelkerke R Square is a measure of the proportion of variance the independent variables explain.
- 13.
The CVS only asked 50% of respondents about security provisions, meaning the sample in this section is 4429 businesses
- 14.
One of the limitations with the CVS data is that it is unclear whether spending on security took place after victimisation or before. Therefore, it cannot be said with certainty whether security spending is proactive or reactive.
- 15.
This figure is calculated out of the total of 56 measures asked about in the CVS.
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Hopkins, M. (2022). Business Resilience to Crime: The Harms of Crime, Security and Crime Tolerance. In: Gill, M. (eds) The Handbook of Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91735-7_45
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