How do we tackle the increasing scourge of shoplifting? - Dr Alan Billings

Physical attacks on staff rose by 25 per cent with more than 100 staff receiving serious verbal abuse daily.

Last week we were attempting to raise awareness across the country of some of the dangers that retail staff are facing from thieves on a day to day basis in their places of work. I went to the Co-operative store in the Arbourthorne area of Sheffield to meet a number of people who have a direct involvement – store managers, Co-op regional officers, trade union representatives (from USDAW), together with South Yorkshire police officers whose responsibility is retail crime.

At one time the typical shoplifter might be an elderly person slipping a packet of tea into a shopping bag, stealing for their own consumption. Those days have long since passed into history. The store manager told me about the types of thieves she now has to deal with.

There are those people who largely steal to fund an addiction. They come into the shop and in full view defiantly seize packets of meat – high value, easy to carry – and quickly make off with them. These are the sort of goods that can be sold in local pubs or on street corners, sometimes with the shop’s labels still attached. This is looting on a new scale. In a cost of living crisis it seems there is no shortage of people willing to buy stolen goods.

When thefts are reported and there are convictions, many of these prolific thieves are out of prison within a matter of weeks or months and begin all over again, to the despair of the staff in the shop. The manager told me that she knows many of them not only by sight but also by name.

But increasingly there are also organised criminal gangs who make their way from store to store, coming in groups of three or more to terrorise the staff and make off with as much as they can. Again, they look for those items that are easy to carry and likely to fetch the highest prices. These people are frightening and threaten staff with physical harm. It is also terrifying for any customers who happen to be shopping at the time.

The Co-op officials and the unions recognised that the police cannot be round the corner from every shop all the time. They also recognised that shops themselves have to think about their own security and that of their staff and customers – as most of them clearly do. The cost of extra security, however, is one thing if you are part of a large chain, quite another if you are a small convenience store. It’s also another cost which has to be factored into the price of goods sold.

But such a big and growing national problem will require national solutions as well as local. Since late October there has been a Retail Crime Action Plan and a new national initiative called Operation Pegasus – which the big retailers are helping to fund.

The missing link in all of this is how we stop members of the public becoming unwitting participants in these crimes by buying stolen goods.

A shortened version of the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire’s latest blog post.