To think that shoplifting should be taken seriously by the police and public?

[ScarySpinster]

I used to work in retail. The police would rarely come out for a shoplifter, even if it was £1000s of pounds.

My local village shop may have to close because of teenagers regularly shoplifting. It's just not profitable for them to stay open with the losses they have.

Looking at the bigger picture, shoplifting raids are taking place regularly in London, and all the big cities, with the people involved rarely being prosecuted.

I think that we need to take this crime much more seriously. I don't want to live in a world where there are no repercussions for bad behavior. Because where will this stop? Will burgarly and mugging start to become okay next?

RhymesWithOrange
Things aren't outdated - they just take time to complete and often there is no other way around it. For example, you have to secure a scene for SOCO to attend - otherwise the scene is spoilt, anything you get from the scene in not admissible court. And a SOCO examination can take ages.

Sending teams to arrest people - what usually happens in these 'non urgent' jobs have to be dealt with as and when. So for example, the Caroline Farrow job is likely to be a 'non urgent' enquiry which is sat on some officers job queue to deal with. So they will try and find time to progress it - often you never get chance due to demand, which is why these enquiries drag on. If they get an opportunity to try an arrest attempt, you shout up to see if someone can give you a hand. You my find a unit is close by on another enquiriy, and will pull away from that to help you for a 10 minute arrest attempt. If you need a method of entry officer to force entry, you will have to find that unit who can hopefully pull away from what ever they are doing.

Its not as though there are big teams of cops just sat in the police station waiting to attend then next arrest.

If someone has phoned a job in and it has been classed as a crime (harassment or malicious communications) it has to be investigated. Its not an urgent job, so it just drops onto an officers crime queue to be dealt with as & when. We all have about 10-15 of these type jobs at any one time. Some days/weeks you just never have time to touch them.

PCSO's don't have warranted powers to deal with shop thefts. They can not arrest, summons, seize CCTV, search for stolen property - so they can not help unfortunately.

Ahh another anti police thread. Instead of moaning about the police why don't you main about this shitty gov who have cut numbers so much the police have to choose between crimes with greater threat harm and risk or theft. Police can't do all. Shoplifters don't all turn to burglary because theft from shop doesn't result in prison whereas burglary ( normally) does so it isn't in their interests to risk it

Instead of moaning about the police why don't you main about this shitty gov who have cut numbers so much the police have to choose between crimes with greater threat harm and risk or theft.

I can assure you that people do. Loudly and vociferously. Obviously they keep on voting for them though - isn't that how it's supposed to work ?

Certainly in London, the number of officers has risen since 2003 and been broadly the same since 2010, so this argument doesn’t stack up.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/864928/officer-numbers-of-the-metropolitan-police/

And to Felix125’s point - police should not be the “grown ups of last resort” in society. It appears that this message is beginning to get through, with the Met no longer planning on responding to routine mental health calls.

People get frustrated when they have good, solid evidence (see previous posts on bicycle theft for example, often captured on either city centre CCTV or on mobile phone footage) and it’s ignored. It would be great to roll out Nextbase, which makes it easy to upload dash cam footage to your local police force, as a similar concept for petty theft, for example.

Actually, reading through the Nextbase info, it’s curious that the evidence is reviewed by a police officer before a decision is made. I would have thought that this would be an ideal scenario where triaging could be done by non officers.

Whereas Google tells me that, in WMP, there were 8715 officers in 2010 and 7579 officers in 2022, which does sound like a drop in numbers to me...... approx 15% at a quick estimate.

I can absolutely guarantee you that those gangs of shoplifting teenagers are also involved in the other criminal activities you've mentioned.

If we all just shrug our shoulders and say that nothing can be done, before too long we’ll be living in a South Africa situation in which even the modestly off live in armed gated communities. In fact I can’t see a future where we all walk round freely like today. I think criminality will rise and cities/town centres will be no go areas. Very sad.

Don't let any facts get in the way of your "Tory cuts" dogma.

• the current police officer headcount in England and Wales (149,572 officers) as at 31 March 2023, is the highest number of police officers on record since comparable records began
• the current headcount is 3,542 (2.4%) greater than the previous peak of 146,030 officers in post as at 31 March 2010
• of the 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales, 42 have met or exceeded their force’s allocation of additional officers

source:

Another thing to consider is that some of the large retailers have really strict rules about passing over their CCTV.

In the past, shops would hand it over there and then. So the investigation could be done really quickly.

Now, some stores need to send a message to their head office. Head office then send a password to a specific manger to access the CCTV. The password only lasts 24 hours, so if the manager was busy or not at work that day - they have to re-apply for it. Or sometimes head officer don't send it or send the wrong password for the wrong store. They won't allow any other staff member to access it. And if this scenario goes beyond the 31 days, it's overwritten.

So without it, the police have to bail the suspect and often it gets no further auctioned due to lack of the CCTV footage and hence lack of evidence.

Having retired from a career in criminal justice, one of the reasons people dislike the police is because too many of them tell far lies in court. That certainly was my conclusion after listening to 40 years of police evidence on oath.

But as for shoplifting it is usually a non-violent, acquisitive crime of modest value. It should not be a priority for our cash public strapped services. I am all in favour of raising taxation to improve public service, but policing shop-lifting is way down the list of my priorities.

Good job you are retired, then, @58HappilyRetired , as you seem concerningly ambivalent about crime “Acquisitive” indeed!

Clearly not a broken windows fan then ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#

Keen students will have noted that - like all initiatives - the broken window premise leads to the situation when landowners have to spend money as a class on their stock.

And it was at that point that capitalism lost interest.

(People sneer about individuals who "live off the state" which rather blinds them to entire industries which are on the taxpayer tit, as USians colorfully say).

Poverty as an excuse is crap. No one is stealing basic foodstuffs.

Yes they are!!!!!!!

In our shop generally people don't steal basic foodstuff. It's not that we don't catch people stealing it, it's just that very little of it goes missing. People steal household stuff like laundry pods and detergent to sell for drug money, they steal booze because they're multi dependent drug and alcohol abusers, they steal meat and cheese but to sell in pubs. They steal anything you can knock out for 2-5 quid

There was one woman who used to buy a basket of shopping most days but she'd also have been putting about another basket worth into a shopping bag she had next to the basket. She'd been coming in for years. When my colleague clocked her the shopping bag had plenty of luxury items that weren't from our shop, so I'd struggle to define this as stealing basics.

Occasionally a homeless person comes in and tries to steal sandwiches or snacks and we often give them food.

Stealing basics does happen I'm sure but our own experience is that it's rarely about hunger and 99% about drug money

I was told some old ladies recently stopped a store security guard from chasing a woman with a baby who'd shoplifted a box of nappies a tub of margarine and a block of cheese.

Should try living in Scotland, police Scotland are to trial a scheme in Ne Scotland that not all crimes will be looked at and thus enabling officers to get back to members of the public as to why they are doing fuck all about what you reported. Oooo that's a good idea. Snp turns everything they touch to shit.

'But aren't you concerned about the domino effect that ignoring shoplifting might have on a criminal?

You start with shoplifting. Next you try burgarly. Then it's mugging randomers. After that, ?'
*

Wow that's very ignorant. *

I'm sure I've just heard on the radio that Scottish police are going to concentrate on major crimes - so a free ticket to shop lifters.
Why would you puclicise this unless trying to prove they are so different from the UK Gov Suella Braverman (who also comes up with stupid ideas).

It should be publicised because the people of Scotland deserve to know what dodgy schemes the snp and police Scotland are cooking up. It's being trialed in Ne Scotland and not any of the snp strongholds like Tayside for example.

Wowzerdowzer · Today 07:00
'But aren't you concerned about the domino effect that ignoring shoplifting might have on a criminal?

You need to change the process though - as we simply do not have enough cops to deal with all the shop thefts.

One theft can tie a cop up for their entire shift. Perhaps you can look at people being caught red handed can go straight before the next court - you don't need a case file, CCTV, statements etc. Verbal confirmation by the shop staff & police should be enough.

Its the process which becomes the problem for not having enough resources.

Yes, the paperwork required is ridiculous. Home Office, ACPO ranks and the CPS all competing to add their own bumph, often duplicating information. We need to look at the likes of Canada so see how they manage to deal with straightforward stuff in a fraction of the time.

Summary only cases shouldn't even need CPS involvement.

To be fair, most shop thefts don't need any CPS involvement - but you still have a mountain of paperwork for the case file.

You can see the argument of the cost of a prosecution - officer's time, shop staff time etc etc - when its a theft of £2.50 sandwich. When does it become 'not in the public interest'?

It's not a £2.50 sandwich though, is it? We're talking hundreds of pounds of meat and alcohol.

DdraigGoch

Absolutely - and things like that should be prosecuted.

But you can see when it is a £2.50 theft, where the argument comes from for not being in the public interest to pursue it.