A new “zero-tolerance” plan will be agreed between ministers, police and retailers to crack down on shoplifting and the organised crime gangs fuelling the problem.
At a summit in Downing Street, police chiefs will unveil plans for how they intend to tackle shoplifting, which has soared by a quarter of the last year to reach more than 1,000 per day.
Police have been accused of not taking the crime seriously enough as the number of cases solved has fallen over the same period, with just one in eight shoplifters caught and charged.
For the first time, shoplifting will have a dedicated national unit that will investigate the crime from an organised crime perspective. Six new intelligence analysts will be employed within Operation Opal, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s (NPCC) unit for tackling serious organised acquisitive crime.
A group of 13 leading retailers including John Lewis, Coop, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Next have helped fund the new unit with a £600,000 investment through an agreement called Project Pegasus.
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In return, the new Opal unit will analyse footage from CCTV, dashcams and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) as well as information collected from crime reports from different police forces with the aim of identifying organised crime groups that are behind mass shoplifting of goods.
A policing source said: “They will analyse data from all forces from stores and crunch it into actionable packages to hand to police forces to make arrests in the New Year.” Another source said: “This is the first time we’ll be tackling shoplifting from a national perspective and will enable us to work across boundaries, which is crucial because that’s how organised crime groups are targeting retailers.”
The huge spike in shoplifting has been driven by organised crime groups who deploy individuals to steal higher value items from supermarkets such as steaks and bottles of alcohol on mass that they sell to pubs, corner shops, car boot sales, and at marketplaces both offline and online such as Facebook Marketplace.
Under the new partnership, police forces will also run each CCTV image of shoplifting offences provided by retailers through the Police National Database, which includes facial recognition technology.
Police forces are also expected to sign up to a new commitment to attend the scene of every shoplifting incident reported to them that involves a threat of violence to store staff or security. Store security guards are also expected to be issued with new guidance and best practice for how to detain shoplifters under a citizens’ arrest. The guidance will ensure there is a blanket policy in different retail shops across the country that security industry leaders have asked for in order to clarify and boost protection for staff.
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Chris Philp, the crime and policing minister, ordered the new action plan in order to tackle the surge in shoplifting and improve the police’s response to the crime.
A meeting will be held on Monday in 10 Downing Street that will be chaired by Philp and attended by Amanda Blakeman, the chief constable of North Wales police who also leads on retail crime for the NPCC; Katy Bourne, head of retail crime for the Association of Police of Crime Commissioners; City of London Police; the UK’s biggest 13 retailers; the Association of Convenience Stores and the British Independent Retailers Association.
A government source said: “The reason this is so important is because if we don’t take hard, decisive action now, it could continue to escalate as it has in some American cities like San Francisco. We’re determined it won’t happen here and we clamp down on it very hard. That’s the reason for gripping it so decisively. Launching this plan at No 10 will show how seriously we are taking this.”
Shoplifting offences recorded by police soared by a quarter in the year to June — to 365,164, a record high, but the rate of cases solved has fallen, with just one in eight cases leading to a suspect being charged.
The true scale of the crime is estimated to be far higher, with retailers reporting eight million incidents in the previous year, according to research by the British Retail Consortium, costing stores a combined £1 billion.
