A good policeman uses a combination of knowledge, experience and instinct to determine when to pull a car over or stop and search a suspected criminal on the street.

Retailers too must employ intelligence to counter the criminality and loss that they experience in their businesses.

A Home Office and police report that has received much media coverage this week estimates that 80 per cent of CCTV pictures are not of a high enough quality to identify offenders. If retailers want the police and prosecutors to take retail crime seriously then they must provide good quality evidence. And this means investing in surveillance.

In this week’s issue, Retail Week will look at the latest video surveillance technology, including the software such cameras can run, adding intelligence to high-quality pictures. These surveillance systems can tell you when someone is hanging around a fire exit in the middle of the night, or when a high-value item is removed from a display. They can even tell when a camera has been tampered with.

Meanwhile, fraudsters are also attacking online retailers aggressively. Again technology can help retailers identify suspicious activity.

Online fraud prevention company Retail Decisions says that the number of attempted fraud online incidents last week was up 131 per cent on the same week last year. Sure, online retail volumes last week were up too – by 88 per cent – but fraud is far outpacing sales growth.

Furthermore, when criminals shop online, they tend to make more extravagant purchases. Retail Decisions says that average attempted fraudulent transaction is almost£525, compared with an average of less than£200 for genuine shoppers.

Retail Decisions uses technology to identify the most popular country of issue for fraudulent cards used in attacks on UK retailers. In September, for example, fraudulent non-UK cards were most likely to have been issued in France, followed by the US, Ireland, Norway and Germany.

Systems can also identify postcodes to which fraudulent deliveries are most likely to be sent. For example, the London SE postcode is the most fraudulent delivery area, accounting for 5 per cent of all UK online fraud.

Patterns can also be detected in products ordered by fraudsters. Retail Decisions says the phone of choice for criminals in September was the Samsung U600 – it saw that 46.7 per cent of all online sales for this item were fraud attempts.

While retailers can’t be expected to have large numbers of people on the ground as the police do, they can certainly use technology to gather intelligence and evidence to target criminal activity.