New Zealand’s Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is moving forward with plans to amend the Crimes Act to allow retailers to detain shoplifters using “reasonable force,” despite being met with opposition from the police, the union representing shop workers, and Retail NZ, which expressed “grave fears.”
The idea came from the $3.6 million Ministerial Advisory Group on Crime, chaired by former National and Labour candidate Sunny Kaushal, who earns $920 daily for his role.
Retail NZ Chief Executive Carolyn Young, also on the advisory group, says most of her organisation’s members strongly oppose the proposals.
“This is extremely dangerous—people will get hurt or even killed. Frontline retail workers, who are often young people in their first job, do not go to work to do law enforcement,” Young said.
“We have been exploring whether extending powers of detention beyond police would be a solution. The great majority of members we have consulted have made it clear that only police should have powers to detain offenders.”
She also pointed out that the proposed change would cause retailers to break a different law if they took advantage of the new freedom.
“As employers, retailers must do everything they can to keep staff safe under the Health & Safety at Work Act. Most retailers train their staff to prioritise their own safety rather than try to recover stolen goods. We cannot condone retail workers putting themselves into dangerous and volatile situations,” she said.
Unions share these concerns, with the NZ Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU) President Richard Wagstaff saying, “Good employers don’t put workers’ lives at risk to save a few dollars. We should be focusing on ways of work that remove hazards from the workplace, not create them. Crimefighting is not within the scope of retail workers’ employment duties.”
Police Association President Chris Cahill said that while police sympathise with the situation created by the current law, the consequences of the change “haven’t been fully understood.”
“They don’t know what these offenders are armed with, whether they’re under the influence of drugs, or even how many offenders there are. By their very nature, offenders are dangerous,” Cahill said.
“Police make hundreds of arrests every day, and when they do, they follow a very clear risk assessment, but even then, officers get assaulted, sometimes seriously.”
He urged the government to consider the practical difficulties of the “reasonable force” defence.“Legally, it’s going to cause some real issues. Police officers undergo extensive training to understand what’s considered reasonable force, and they don’t always get that right,” he said.
“Now the Minister is suggesting untrained people try and make that judgment. I can foresee police having to charge a number of people for unreasonable force and unreasonable detention.”
He warned that police, who are currently facing increasing staff shortages, may not always be available to attend an incident where someone is being detained.
“How is a shop owner going to feel if they call 111 to tell police they’ve detained someone and then they’re told police can’t come, so they need to let that person go?”
Currently, the Crimes Act allows citizens to make an arrest at night if they have reasonable grounds for believing a person is committing any offence.
The offence must be punishable by more than three years imprisonment as a maximum penalty, such as burglary and arson.
How the Proposals Work
Goldsmith’s changes will allow someone to intervene to stop any Crimes Act offence at any time of the day, regardless of its severity.On the issue of what constitutes reasonable force, the Justice Minister says this will be clarified. “Not necessarily a headlock, it’s just holding someone steady,” he said.
He said that he did not want “wild west vigilante-ism,” but current laws were not working.
“The general direction is we need to have some better tools available to retailers dealing with people walking out of their shops without paying for things,” he told RNZ.
He said people were increasingly witnessing supermarket staff unable to stop someone walking out with a trolley full of goods that had not been paid for.
“You can’t carry on like that without undermining people’s confidence in law and order,” he said.
The proposed amendments will be introduced to parliament before going through a Select Committee process.
