Shoplifters are walking free after being caught by undercover guards because police are failing to show up, says supermarket Co-op.
Co-op said on Thursday that despite government intervention to crack down on retail crime, the failure of police to respond when security guards have detained thousands of thieves sends the message that shoplifting is free from consequences.
Since the introduction of the Retail Crime Action Plan, police non-attendance rates had improved, Co-op said, but noted that officers are still failing to attend three in five cases where a shoplifter has been detained.
Record-High Shoplifting
The food retailer also revealed that it had experienced its highest-ever levels of shoplifting in 2023, soaring by 44 percent on 2022.In total, Co-op recorded 336,270 incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence, and anti-social behaviour across its food stores, equivalent to 1,000 cases a day. More than 100 shop workers receive abuse from criminals daily, the retailer said.
Matt Hood, Co-op’s managing director of food retail, said that organised criminal gangs and repeat offenders were behind the increase in incidents.
The retailer said it has developed partnerships with several police forces across the country, including in Essex, Nottinghamshire, and Sussex. In the past year, that cooperation has resulted in the removal and management of 100 prolific repeat offenders, who had received a combined 30 years of custodial sentences.
Co-op said it has been using security measures such as dummy or empty packaging, locked cases for expensive goods, and secure kiosks to deter theft. The retailer has also invested in CCTV and even body cameras for employees.
Mr. Hood said, “Despite the extensive measures and the £200 million we have spent putting things in place to protect our colleagues, the reality is that every day four of our colleagues will be attacked and up to a further 116 will be seriously abused.”
Shoplifting Rises by One Third
Data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in January showed that the number of shoplifting instances in England and Wales was up 32 percent in the year to September 2023, with 402,482 offences compared with 304,459 in the year ending September 2022.Mr. Philp had said: “The law says that this is still a criminal offence and police should be enforcing it comprehensively.
“Shoplifting affects businesses up and down the country, large and small alike, and often entails violence or threats to retail workers.”
Crime Like San Francisco
In July 2023, Mr. Philp had warned MPs that failure to take shoplifting seriously could result in an escalation of thieving to the levels seen in the Californian city of San Francisco.He called any form of retail crime “completely unacceptable” which “should not, at any point, be dismissed or treated by the police or anyone else as somehow minor or to be disregarded.”
“If it is left unchecked, it simply escalates,” he said, continuing, “What might start off as pilfering or what some would wrongly describe as low-level theft can escalate into something much more serious and widespread.”
The minister told MPs: “We have seen that elsewhere in the world—I think in particular about San Francisco, as well as other American cities—where both the police and store security guards appear not to intervene and, as a consequence, stores are raided and stolen from on a large scale multiple times a day.
“In San Francisco, a number of shops have had to close down completely because shoplifting has become so rampant and out of control. For all those reasons, it needs to be taken extremely seriously.”
