The number of shop thefts being recorded by police is still only a “drop in the ocean” compared with the crime rate experienced by retail, a criminology expert told the House of Lords justice and home affairs committee yesterday.
University of London professor of criminology Emmeline Taylor said in the past 12 months police had recorded 440,000 incidents of shop theft.
However, using the BRC’s figures from its 2024 Crime Survey, she said theft had doubled to 16.7 million incidents a year, suggesting less than 3% of the crime was recorded. It raised “various issues for policing”, she said.
She said the nation was experiencing a “tsunami” of shop theft, caused by a range of underlying social factors, such as poverty, homelessness, mental health issues and drug addition, which had been amplified by the pandemic.
Taylor added that offenders had described having “a licence to steal” if they did not take goods worth more than £200. Section 176 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime & Policing Act made theft from a shop of goods worth £200 or less (retail value), a summary-only offence.
Section 176 of the Act had been introduced in 2014 to deal with the high volume of low-value cases more swiftly. However, Taylor explained this had consequently led to police taking no action for these incidences which by 2015, according to the Sentencing Council, made up 78% of shop theft cases.
She also highlighted the progress that Project Pegasus – a collaboration between 15 major retailers and police to crack down on organised retail crime groups.
Following its official launch in May, Pegasus sees a team of police intelligence analysts working within Opal – the national intelligence unit for organised acquisitive crime – analyse data shared by retailers to build a national picture of gangs operating across the UK.
Opal’s intelligence team had so far identified 152 high harm individuals involved in organised retail crime and made 23 arrests, Taylor said.
While Pegasus focused on gangs operating in areas covered by two or more police forces, Taylor said a large proportion of local prolific offenders were stealing to order to fund a drug habit.
“Many of these offenders have reached a scale of activity and established a pre-arranged network of buyers for the stolen goods they steal that can only be described as organised crime yet they only operate within one area,” she said.
“It’s a very difficult to assess the relative contribution of organised crime going back to the chronic under-reporting in this country so we don’t have the visibility of who’s committing thse offences.”
Co-op campaign and public affairs director Paul Gerrard, who was also giving evidence to the committee, said crime in Co-op stores had risen by 44% in the past 18 months, with violence and abuse against staff up 35%.
“There have always been people who to steal to make ends meet, but that’s not what is driving the 44% increase,” he added. “What’s driving it is people stealing to order. People are coming into our stores with wheelie bins and builders’ bags to steal entire entire meat, confectionery and alcohol sections.”
He added that there was an increased risk to colleagues, with encountering thieves being a major flash point for violence, abuse and threats. However, Gerrard said in early 2023, police didn’t turn up when thefts were reported in 70% of occasions, which “diminished staff confidence in reporting to police”.
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