The Crime and Policing Act is now law, strengthening protections for retailers, their staff and the communities they serve. It marks a welcome, if overdue, step forward for Britain’s struggling high streets.
Passing a law is only the first step. To achieve real change, we must be clear-eyed about the challenge and focus efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
There are three key tools we have at our disposal to start delivering the right outcomes.
First, focus on repeat offenders. Most retail crime is not being driven by local, one-off offenders stealing a sandwich for lunch. The reality is that a small number of organised, prolific offenders are responsible for most of the harm.
Around 70 per cent of retail crime is committed by just 10 per cent of offenders. They are also four times more likely to be violent, threatening staff with physical attacks and weapons, including knives or bottles.
Prolific and organised offenders aren’t store or brand loyal, they have an impact on all retailers, regardless of town, jurisdiction or region. Single offenders commit crimes at stores from London to Manchester to Edinburgh.
This is exactly why no retailer can fight this alone. When big brands act collectively, they’re not just protecting themselves, they’re identifying the same offenders who target the independent retailers that rarely have the resources to fight back. This collective approach to tackling the problem supports the entire community.
The police are already spread thinly, responding to a seemingly endless stream of one-off reports of offences. We need to help police focus their resources on the top 10 per cent of offenders plaguing our communities
The Bill gives police stronger backing. But this must be matched with a relentless focus on linking the hundreds of these apparently ‘one-off’ offences to the prolific offenders committing them and stealing the vibrancy of our town centres in the process.
Second, embrace technology rapidly to keep ahead of the crooks. The only way to see the true scale of this widespread offending and connect the dots to those top offenders is by consistent reporting from retailers. Then technology can rapidly and digitally bridge the information gap to get on top of fast-moving organised crime.
Once police have all the intelligence, they can identify the patterns, the highest harm offenders, and begin to prevent rather than simply respond to the issue.
Retail crime today is organised, mobile and sophisticated. Yet in many cases, information about incidents is trapped in spreadsheets, paper files, USB sticks or exchanged in WhatsApp groups, or unsecured emails. That fragmentation has allowed criminals to stay anonymous - and anonymity is how criminals thrive.
The Government is right to encourage closer working between police and retailers. But collaboration needs to be operational, daily and powered by secure technology - it is the critical enabler that can assist police deal with such a volumetric problem.
For too long, retail managers, staff and shoppers have felt defenceless in the face of organised gangs of thieves. The prime minister’s recent remarks about technology calling time on the “shoplifting free-for-all” will have struck a chord with store workers who has been threatened, shoved or assaulted while simply doing their job.
Finally, we need to drop the language that trivialises this crisis. The word “shoplifting” sounds almost quaint, like a naughty rite of passage for young scamps. These words utterly fail to capture what’s really happening. What we’re dealing with is organised retail crime, frequently violent, often linked to wider criminal enterprises that resell stolen goods to fund drugs, gangs and exploitation.
Words shape priorities. If we characterise this as low-level crime, it will always be treated as such. Tell that to the shop worker who goes to work fearing abuse, or the independent retailer pushed to the brink after repeated attacks.
This Bill shows the Government understands the scale of the problem. To make it count, we must focus on the repeat offenders doing the most damage, break down the walls between policing and technology, and start calling this crime what it really is.
Police do a fantastic job. They put themselves in harm's way every day to keep us all safe. Retailers are on the front line of this problem and invest millions everyday tackling the issue. We should all want them to be as efficient and effective as possible. This isn’t a blame game; it's a contest that we must all win if our neighbourhoods are to thrive.
Our high streets are the hearts of our communities. They deserve nothing less.
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Mark Gleeson is Vice President United Kingdom and Europe at Auror. Auror is a global retail crime intelligence company that provides a crime reporting platform to the world’s largest retailers to securely and consistently record crime, connect the dots on organised offenders, and collaborate with law enforcement. Auror is used in more than 85,000 stores and in 3,500 law enforcement agencies globally.
