Carolyn Young: Retail NZ CEO on the new Retail Crime Advisory Group and the focus on facial recognition technology for the sector

Technology is at the forefront of priorities for the new Retail Crime Advisory Group.  

The group will offer the Government ideas on law and order legislation.  

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has appointed four sector leaders alongside dairy and business owner group leader, Sunny Kaushal.  

They include Retail NZ CEO Carolyn Young. 

She says enabling facial recognition technology is of particular interest to the sector.  

She hopes it can be implemented with robust privacy safeguards. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Retail crime up eighty six percent in the last five years.
There are members of the ministerial Advisory Group aiming to
fix that that have been named reps from Retailing, Zed
Food Staff's Michael Hill. They're all involved. Ash Palmer, who
was an act Party candidate, and Sunny Kushell's obviously in
there too. Carolyn Young is on the advisory group Retailians

(00:21):
chief executive and she joins me this morning. Carolyn, Good morning, whatever, Ryan,
thank you for being with me. Are you worried this
will be just another working group that gets nothing done.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Absolutely not. No, We're really determined to make a difference
and we're all actively involved in retail So understand the
impact set retail crime has been having on businesses and
their staff and wanting to make sure that we can
provide a safe environment for staff to go to work
in and for customers to enjoy being able to come
into the stores.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
One of the issues you're going to look at is
the security guards. Are you going to tackle this issue? Literally?
Do you think you should empower security guards to actually
go after shoplifters and get them on the ground until
the cops come.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Look, there's a wide variety of issues that will be canvassing.
And people have got very different views because businesses use
security guards in different ways, and so we need to
actually understand.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
What's your view, what's your view on that.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
So retail in New Zealander we've got a working group
that we're working on and we'll be consulting back into
the Ministry Advisory Group. There's a balance around what you
can do because when you think about, you know, your
word through tackling offenders, I mean, that's a really difficult
thing to do and you have to be highly trained
to be able to do that. If you're going to

(01:45):
hold on to somebody, you need somewhere to be safe
to be able to do that. So there's a lot
of things to take into account. We need to ensure
that security guards are better trained and have greater resources,
that they can have skills that they.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Can sounds to me like that we won't be tackling shoplifters.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, I don't think we'll be tatling shoplifters.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
That's all right. Hey, what about I'm interested in the
facial tech recognition technology. If I steal something, you know,
my face, what happens if I try and enter the
store again? You know, because obviously you're not going to
tackle me. So how and I'm trying to get in
do the doors close automatically? How does that work?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
So how it works as facial recognition is loads up
people that, as you say, have offended in the store,
and the stores have got a photo of that person
who's offended or correct vent test parts from the store.
There's only a couple of cameras at the entry of
the store. They capture image of somebody that's against that photo.

(02:49):
Then the assessment is done to ensure is that the
same person because obviously people look differently on different days,
And then the store can determine a range of ways
in which they can intervene or not. So they might
actively intervene. They might go and talk to the person
and say, hey, callen and young, you know you're not

(03:09):
meant to be in the store. You've been trespassed in
the store would really ask you kindly to leave. And
the police will tell you eighty percent of the time
when you actually go and approach an offender and someone
that's not meant to be there, they will turn around
and walk out. There'll be no further interaction.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
And the rest of the rest you've got to tackle.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
You might also just decide to monitor that person in
the store, so you might just observe what they're doing.
And knowing who's in the store and the types of
offenses have done before actually gives the staff and the
store more confidence that they can manage that potential interaction
that's going to happen. So you've got one step ahead
because you've you know that you've had an alert that's

(03:51):
identified you of a person that's in the store that
has either been violent or stolen stuff.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
And I guess that then all the staff will know
that as well, right, Carolyn, thank you very much for
joining us this morning. Carolyn Young, Retailing ZED chief executive
on this group, which she says is not just another
working group, It will get something done. We will follow
up on progress from that particular group.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
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Speaker 1 (04:17):
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