26
Feb
2014
By Calvin at 10:04 GMT, 12 years ago
This is the headline for a new You Tube video uploaded by Roger Evans, Greater London Authority Assembly Member for Havering and Redbridge
In this short video about crime in London’s High Streets Mr Evans talks about the findings of interviews with 32 retailers across London about their crime experience. Here are the headline findings:
- Official police data shows that 80 retailers a day in London are crime victims, which is more than 29,000 crimes a year
- Ninety-four percent of retailers reported that they had been victims of at least two crimes in the last 12 months
- Almost half of these crimes involved burglary, robbery and other crimes of violence
- Three quarters of the crimes involved theft
- Almost seventy-three percent of retailers had not reported the incidents to the police
When asked what recommendations he had to combat this level of crime Mr Evans recommended the extension of the crime data base used by the Met Police for crime mapping across London – a specialised data base specifically for retailers to help police alert shops about the threat of crime across the city and to identify perpetrators. He also favoured issuing DNA sprays to retailers to mark offenders so that they could be linked to the crime scene and thereby improve clear-up rates for retail crime.
TCPW Comment: It’s good to see the problems of retail crime being highlighted by Mr Evans, because it’s getting worse with theft topping £511m last year, 166 per cent higher than five years ago – See my story Concerns Grow over Increase in Shop Theft.
Retail crime contributes towards the huge dark figure of unreported crime and one can’t help wonder how the whole criminal justice system would cope if retailers began reporting their crime incidents at the same rate as householders.
Compared with household theft I’m sure you can see that retail theft breaks all the rules when it comes to crime prevention. For the product to be sold at high enough rates to make a profit they’re displayed on open shelves and on hangers, often in crowded shops with poor surveillance opportunity for the staff; all rather different to how things were sold 75 years ago!
I’m sure nobody really wants to return to the days of full-width counters and locked display cabinets with customers asking to see a range of green frocks for the upcoming tea dance, which are subsequently fetched from the store room at the back, but something more than improved data bases and DNA spray is required.
We’ve seen how tagged products can be removed from stores without activating the alarm and how many of them can be removed from products without damaging them. We’ve all seen the latest product range displayed at the entrance to the shop, nice and ready for the snatch theft. We’ve all used un-staffed changing rooms and seen tags lying on the floor. Then there’s the corner shop with the windows completely blocked by products and adverts and you wonder why it gets targeted by the robber (because he can’t be seen from the street).
In my early days as a Crime Prevention Officer in the Met I used to give talks to retail staff in their shops about how to prevent shoplifting and what to do when they caught someone at it. Invariably the staff would know the problems with the stores and yet when they asked head office if they could move a vulnerable item of stock to a place where it would receive closer supervision the answer was almost always ‘no’. I’ll never forget the chain off-licence manager who used to secure her expensive champagne with plastic cable ties, because twice as many would get nicked than sold. She was threatened with the sack if she didn’t remove the ties and put the bottles back on the shelves close to the entrance door where they could be seen by the customers (and nicked by the thieves)!
So whilst I agree with Mr Evans’s proposals, I want to see even more attention paid to crime prevention by the retailers. It’s often their own practices that lead to temptation and theft and the spending of more public money on recording the crimes and marking the offenders, which is after the event stuff, has to be more than equalled by measures to prevent the crimes happening in the first place.
You Tube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxLqJjRE8Xc
