Shoplifting is not a victimless crime. It is a traumatic and violent act that ruins businesses and frightens staff every day.
At the November 2024 Angel Islington BID Board meeting, Chairman Matthew Crawford, who runs furniture and toy shop After Noah on Upper Street described his shoplifting problem by suggesting, 'paying for goods is now optional, its just not everyone's realised that yet'. His is a view supported by statistics that suggest shop theft offences in Engand and Wales increased by 28% between 2022/3 and 2023/4. Something very bad is happening.
Matthew has for years been one of the consistent voices arguing for greater resource to tackle the shoplifting problem in the Angel. His rather literal approach to tackling shoplifters is a regular sight on Upper Street as he attempts to detain thieves on Upper Street waiting for the police to arrive. However risky he knows this is, protecting staff and stock is part - the worst part - of the job.
As the retail sector has become dehumanised, with self-checkouts and online shopping, empathy for the shop keeper seems to be in short supply. Independent retailers are typically individual business owners, sometimes with a few staff. They are in a single room all day worrying about their business: how to encourage customers in through the door, how to manage rising costs. For them, the additional worry of shoplifting is a daily fear of abuse and assault.
Every area has prolific shoplifters, and they are increasingly unphased by the consequences. Gone are the surreptitious days of the long coat and large inside pockets. Now, you might see two or three people enter the shop, clear the shelves and be out in a minute. You're lucky if they decide not to become physical.
It takes a brave person to attempt to stop them, and official advice from the British Retail Consortium is not to do so. If left unchallenged though, they will often return. Some shops become targets. The shop floor is a semi-public space and there is nowhere to hide. Retailers find themselves stuck in constant vigilance mode.
Alongside the fear, you lose a lot of stock, and insurance rarely covers it. Writing off losses is hugely damaging both to independents and multiples alike, but for independents it can mean closure. Retailers can find themselves forced to pass losses onto consumers in the form of higher prices, but the current squeeze means many are unable to pay them.
In our recent survey of retailers in the Angel area, over 70% of respondents cited 'loss of morale' and 'safety concerns' as an impact of shoplifting, with 40% witnessing shoplifting incidents in which threats of violence were used between a few times a month and every day. The effect of such threats on retailers includes workers leaving for other sectors.
We might consider the issue in relation to the commitment of police to tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, where 64.3% of retail sector staff in the UK are female. As evidence mounts around the negative experiences of women in parks, high streets and other public spaces, increasing violence against female shop staff could represent a real step back in their participation in public life. Having to leave the retail sector though fear of violence as we have witnessed again and again in the Angel becomes a problem of inclusion.
As it stands, the current depiction of shoplifting as a victimless, purely economic crime is underplaying what is really happening, and it needs to be taken more seriously. Our retailers refute the notion that shoplifting is a crime of necessity; instead they tell us that many thieves are organised in groups and stealing to order.
Retail crime is a 'wicked problem'. Wicked problems were defined first in the 1970's by design theorist Horst Rittel, to describe complex, social or cultural issues that is difficult or impossible to solve. Shoplifting is a perfect example. It is a symptom of a wider ill in society. It is described in different ways by different stakeholders. We know it will never stop completely and so our aims and measures of success are difficult to define.
Shoplifting is a problem with many stakeholders including the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the courts, retailers, private security, consumers and the criminals themselves. The interrelationships between these various actors form a system so complex and changeable that attempts to get on top of it can seem futile.
Retailers get tired of reporting theft when they believe the police do little about it. Police say they don't have the reporting stats to devote sufficient resources to detecting and preventing retail crime. They can also say that businesses aren't serious about their own responsibilities, such as installing CCTV and redesigning stores to reduce shoplifting. Cases that do go forward for prosecution can be amended or dropped at the hearing stage, and penalties do not always appear to be reflective of the severity or regularity of the offence.
Good police officers rarely stay in a role for long, and a departing officer leaves business organisations like ours back at square one with relationship-building. There are such significant shortages in the force that even when a shoplifter is detained by security staff, officers may not be able to attend the crime scene, and staff are forced to let them go.
IT systems don't talk to each other, GDPR rules prevent the sharing of vital information between agencies, and the rules around what shopkeepers can do to prevent theft are notoriously blurry.
As a society, we seem unable to decide what punishment would befit a prolific shoplifter, particularly with our prisons at capacity. But non-custodial options, including police cautions, convictions and Fixed Penalty Notices are dropping too.
This is a broken system, and broken systems invite obfuscation. Playing the blame game gets us nowhere, however. It leaves retailers feeling abandoned, police frustrated, the town centre experience diminished and shoplifters slipping through the cracks.
So, what's being done? The Home Office has recently announced new measures to address shoplifting, including new offences for assaults on shopworkers. This is in addition to the Met's Operation Retail, which is designed to streamline reporting, target prolific offenders and clarify Police action. This is in itself part of the National Retail Crime Action Plan.
The Mayor of London's new Police and Crime Plan has also just been published for consultation. The focus on prolific offenders is vitally important not just because their impact on the town centre is so significant, but because prolific shoplifters are also likely to be involved in other types of crime, and the high street is where they are at their most visible. This focus would also acknowledge that retailers are among the most regular victims of crime, suffering it almost daily in many cases.
The new approach goes some way towards addressing the broken parts of the system, but individual interventions do not fix systemic issues. As part of the new campaign, we are calling for the following:
- Restoration of confidence among retailers that all reports of shoplifting will be followed up by police, where evidence is submitted, and police will attend in any instance that includes threats of violence or prolific offenders
- Increase in police patrolling resources in town centres, day and night, to encourage an inclusive, safe and resilient economy, and deter offenders
- Specialist business crime officers working alongside neighbourhood teams to address competing priorities
- Retailers to report all shoplifting offences, and act on police advice about secure shopfloor design and CCTV installation in order to receive a 'kitemark' that assures police action
- Inclusion of threats to female shop workers into national VAWG strategy, with specific targets to measure and reduce
- Information sharing agreements to encourage case-based approach and cooperation across social housing providers, police, retailers, BIDs and council community safety departments
- Greater use of Criminal Behaviour Orders and injunctions to ban prolific offenders from town centres and enforce breaches.
- Recognition by the CPS and the Courts that these are serious crimes impacting people and livelihoods
- Better use of research and data to understand economic and social impacts and drive and informed response.
Theft is now so commonplace that it threatens economic resilience at a time when we need as many people coming into town as possible.
Let's not abandon our centres. Instead we must work together to address this wicked problem.
