Why a brief at all
Most shop theft is never reported. Each theft is small, the staff are busy, and nobody expects much to come of a call. The result is that the Gardaí’s own figures for a centre can show very little happening while the shops are being hit every week.
The brief closes that gap. It is not a complaint and it does not ask the Gardaí to attend. It is the centre telling its liaison, once a week and in one place, what actually happened.
What is in it
- The week’s totals: incidents and estimated loss, against the week before.
- What reached the Gardaí: how many incidents were reported, how many not yet, and how many will not be.
- Incidents by day, and the trend over the last eight weeks.
- Incidents by type and by shop, with estimated value.
- Time of day, so patrols and security cover can follow the pattern.
- Descriptions that came up more than once and vehicles seen more than once, with the shops involved.
- The week’s incident log, with the PULSE reference wherever a shop has one.
What is not in it
- Names. Lookout has no field for one.
- Photos or CCTV stills. The brief carries the written record and the patterns.
- Any claim that two descriptions are the same person. It says a similar description came up again; linking people is Garda work.
How it reaches the Gardaí
The centre names its Garda liaison once. Each Monday the brief is generated and emailed to them as a private link. The link is long and random, is not indexed by search engines, and stops working after 90 days. The page is designed to be printed and can carry the centre’s own logo.
Shops still make their own complaints
Lookout never reports to the Gardaí on a shop’s behalf. If a shop wants an incident investigated, it makes the complaint itself and records the PULSE reference in Lookout, so the shop’s complaint and the centre’s brief match.
How it works for a shop →