Head of Department of Criminology

Contact Details

• Tel: +44 (0)116 252 5702
• Email: bna@le.ac.uk
• Office: Room 1.03 1st floor, 154 Upper New Walk
• Office Hours: By appointment only

Biography

After graduating from the University of Leicester in 1988, he joined the newly formed Centre for the Study of Public Order as a Research Scholar. He was then promoted to a lectureship in 1991, becoming a Senior Lecturer in 2002 and a Reader in 2005. In 1991 he set up the first ever postgraduate degree in Security Management and has lectured widely on crime in the work place and policing post soviet societies. Since 1999 he has been an academic advisor to the ECR Europe Shrinkage Group. He has completed two pan European studies on the extent of the problem of shrinkage throughout the European Fast Moving Consumer Goods Sector, and completed a range of projects looking at loss prevention in the retail sector, including: the way in which dishonest members of staff exploit processes and procedures to perpetrate their crimes, and evaluating the impact of loss prevention technologies. He recently started work on a project looking at the use of self scan technologies in retailing and whether they encourage or inhibit criminal behaviour. He has published widely on the subject of loss prevention and has just completed a major book on the subject, entitled New Loss Prevention: Redefining Shrinkage Management, which was published in late 2009.

Research Interests

Crime and policing in transitional societies; community policing; retail crime and loss prevention; staff dishonesty; technologies and crime prevention; national identity cards; surveillance and RFID.

PhD Supervision

Adrian would be interested in supervising PhD study in the following areas:

• Policing in post soviet societies
• Democratic policing
• Crime and loss prevention in the retail sector
• Technologies and crime prevention
• Violence in the workplace
• Dishonesty in the workplace
• Surveillance and social control and surveillance technologies

Teaching

• Crime, Technology and Social Control (Undergraduate year 3 option module)
• Surveillance and Society (Postgraduate option module)

Administrative Responsibilities

• Head of Department

Most Recent Publications

Publications (2011)

Beck, A. (2011) ‘Self-scan Checkouts and Retail Loss: Understanding the Risk and Minimising the Threat’, Security Journal, 24 (3): 199-215.

Beck, A. and Palmer W. (2011) ‘The Importance of Visual Situational Cues and Difficulty of Removal in Creating Deterrence: The Limitations of Electronic Article Surveillance Source Tagging in the Retail Environment’, Journal of Applied Security Research, 6 (1): 110-123.

Beck A. (2011) The Impact and Control of Shrinkage at Self-scan Checkouts, An ECR Europe White Paper, Brussels: ECR Europe.

Publications (2010)

Beck, A. (2010) Packaging Design for Shrinkage Prevention, An ECR Europe Blue Book, Brussels: ECR Europe.

Beck, A. (2010) Securing the Cathedrals of Consumerism: A UK Case Study on Shopping Centre Security, Research Paper, Helsinki: Helsinki School of Economics.

Full listing of publications