Last night’s current affairs half-hour programme on ITV, Tonight, featured retail crime, ‘Shops and Robbers‘, Mark Rowe writes.
It spoke of desperate people shoplifting, whether because of a drug addiction that addicts had to feed, or for sheer survival in the cost of living crisis. Arguably most telling was one of the ‘vox pop’ of unnamed shoppers who spoke sympathetically of anyone who had to steal the likes of baby milk or sanitary products, because they were not able to afford them.
But as the programme did mention, without going into detail, as is the unavoidable bugbear of TV, that’s not the whole story; organised crime is also targeting shops and stealing as much as they can carry. As that implies, if as the programme’s sub-title put it the country is seeing ‘high street wars’, then it’s a war on all fronts – thieves stealing everyday items to live, such as meat; and higher-value goods.
And if it is war, then it’s a guerrilla war, as ‘desperate’ (the programme’s word) shoplifters are also giving verbal abuse and assaulting shop staff, as the retail sector trade union Usdaw (mentioned in passing in ‘Shops and Robbers’) has campaigned about.
Only last month Usdaw said it was ‘deeply concerned‘ by police recorded crime statistics showing that in the 12 months to March 2022 there was a 21pc increase in shoplifting over the previous year (a stat from the official ONS quoted in the programme).
Where does security come into this? One convenience store man – the programme featured mainly the convenience sector rather than bigger chains – showed off his panoramic ceiling-mounted video camera that caught the reporter Adam Shaw putting a chocolate bar into his chest pocket, the crime that the store man was able to view on his phone via an app.
As for security guards, these were pictured but without showing their faces (only their Security Industry Authority badges). The only security man interviewed – briefly like all the rest interviewed, as is the way with TV – was David McKelvey, who was interviewed in the June 2022 print edition of Professional Security as the new chair of the industry body Ex-Police in Industry and Commerce. The former cop is MD of TM Eye, the private investigations company.
This could have been the most intriguing part of the programme. More than one retail person interview complained of a lack of or inconsistent police response; would not the obvious response from a national retailer be, if police service is so patchy, to go DIY? The programme did signal that some are using security firms, and going down the civil recovery route (as signage on store windows, as shown in the programme, says).
David McKelvey spoke of his company’s prolific crimes team that works in plain-clothes, and out ‘proactively hunting’ for shoplifters. Indeed Shaw joined two patroller on a ‘busy London high street’. Stores might put messages on a WhatsApp group about suspicious activity from customers; patrollers could and would go in a store, and confront the suspects. What the ITV programme did not pursue was what this means for criminal justice, if businesses were to in any numbers process thieves themselves, from gathering details for a civil court case to collecting damages.
McKelvey was one of those who pointed to the failing of the criminal justice system by the thieves not being arrested and taken into custody, even if the evidence exists of the crime; ‘because you have got to enforce the law’. Given all the stick that police and criminal justice was taking, the programme then gave out a defensive statement from the National Business Crime Centre, which mentioned the ‘action days’ in various cities (Professional Security featured the one at Stratford in east London, also in its June print edition).
McKelvey also was one of those who mentioned the long notorious £200 threshold below which police can (and are routinely) not taking shoplifting cases to court. One of the few mentions of a politician was the then Home Office police minister Kit Malthouse who did write to police about the threshold.
But (as with robbery, as featured in a report that coincidentally came out the same day, by official inspectors of constabulary) the programme made plain there’s far more crime against retail happening than there are police to process cases – and even if there were, there aren’t the courts to handle that.
One answer that the programme went inside and tested was an Amazon Fresh store as trialled by the global firm in London. As we saw, you walk around the aisles, pick up your buys and walk out without till or staff; via an app on your phone, you’re then billed. Is that the answer to shoplifting? Leaving aside (as the programme quoted) most people would not want to shop like that (finding it creepy), why then have I walked past the Amazon Fresh at Ealing Broadway and an SIA-badged guard was standing at the door (pictured, similarly, the Amazon Fresh in Richmond)?
Presumably because like every whizzo tech idea humans can find a way around it – go in and take goods without having the right app on your phone, or someone else’s phone, or not carrying a phone at all!?
Also quoted were the Sussex Conservative police and crime commissioner Katie Bourne, the national lead for business and retail crime; Sussex Police do run specialist investigators (except that the official inspectors’ report on robbery raised how police nationally are short of investigators) to build cases against the most prolific offenders. Even here Sussex Police spoke of taking different approaches to those shop thieves who have ‘fallen on hard times’ and the rest, the presumably more serious and deserving of a criminal justice conviction.
(Coincidentally, on the day of transmission the trade body the British Retail Consortium, BRC, sent a letter signed by more than 100 retailers to PCCs asking them to do more against crime against retail.)
The conclusions, if there were any, were that drug addicts (to repeat, cause of far from all the retail crime) require help from society, whether charities or the state, if they are to get over their addiction and not have to steal to fund it; and crime against retail costs us all in the end.
Visit www.itv.com/tonight.
