Arrests of shop thieves divided opinion among police, and retailers, in the 1980s as today, as laid out in Home Office file at the National Archives around a crime prevention study of a prominent West End shop.
That study was by Dr Paul Ekblom, now one of the worldโs authorities on designing out crime, an emeritus professor; then working in the crime prevention unit at the Home Office. In April 1986 he published a study of theft from the HMV shop at 363 Oxford Street in Londonโs West End. Ekblom found that most of those apprehended in the store were 16 or under, and most were first time offenders. Because records and cassettes (the two ways people bought music in those days) were in their sleeves on the shop floor, and that flagship store had a relatively high number of store detectives, that made for lots of arrests. Besides the insight into shoplifting, a broader point was that such Home Office research showed the value of analysis โ the when, how and why of crime could inform how businesses took preventative measures.
The study shed light on public policy too. Police at the local, Marylebone station โ and Vine Street station which covered the HMV branch at the Trocadero at Piccadilly โ were considering not apprehending first time offenders, because of the sheer numbers and a view among some police (and the public) that displayed goods were tempting young people into crime, unlike some record (and other retail) stores that did more to prevent theft. Some retailers took exception to Ekblomโs report โ feeling they were being blamed for crime and being told how to run their business. Some in retail did accept they should take some responsibility for the rise in shop theft. Some in retail, while they might not have wanted to say so (then or now) felt that crime prevention did not pay.
Hue and cry
Ekblom, in file HO 287/3654 kept at the National Archives at Kew, wrote in August 1986 that stores should consider moving away from a โrigid policyโ of prosecution. The file included a hand-written letter from a member of the public to Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, complaining that supermarkets were irresponsible and dragged thieves back into store, after a โmedieval hue and cry and chaseโ. Such dashes by security and even general shop staff were once a staple of high streets, as late as the 2000s, only to fade away due to more violence by cornered thieves and less of an appetite by retailers for taking such risks, by the 2020s going to the other extreme of punishing staff for challenging thieves. Also a factor has been police inconsistency in their response to detained thieves. In the file, itโs recorded that some police wanted shops to prevent theft, rather than arrest offenders. Some, senior, police liked shoplifting arrests, because (in the name of looking good statistically, no matter how spuriously) police could bring in a lot of โTICsโ (offences โtaken into considerationโ and therefore cleared up).
And Virgin
As more background, in a briefing paper of January 1987, the Home Office Liz France (a future chair of the Security Industry Authority) noted that shop theft was โgrossly under-reportedโ, whether done by staff or customers. Many retailers agreed that they didnโt know what was stolen. Hence they could do more to train staff; to control stock; and to be โcarefulโ at the tills and to design store layouts and have suitable security systems. She suggested that too many retailers were content to write off losses from theft; such โapathyโ was unhelpful. In July 1986, the Home Office noted that Virgin Records (a rival to HMV, also on Oxford Street) also displayed music on the shop floor, and had much less reported theft than HMV. Police and the Home Office put this down to Virgin employing very few (plain clothes) store detectives; and Virgin had a policy of absorbing the cost of theft, rather than reporting it to the police (which also, we might add, was a cost, if a detective was off the shop floor, doing paperwork). Kevin Heal was head of the Home Office crime prevention unit. In February 1986 he wrote of HMV at Piccadilly as โflooding the Vine Street police station with shoplifters to the extent that the local superintendent is again threatening to withdraw police supportโ.
Cost to police
HMV accepted Ekblomโs study for publication by the Home Office; and carried out its recommendations, namely, putting situational crime prevention into practice. The Oxford Street HMV as described by Ekblom belongs now to a bygone age of browsing music record sleeves. Detectives passed caught shoplifters to a Marylebone shoplifting unit of four supervisers and 14 constables, costing ยฃ127,000 a week. Ekblom pointed also to the cost of security and the โdiminishing returnsโ โ because the more arrests made, the less time detectives sere on the floor to guard against other offending. Ekblom acknowledged that non-security store managers might find it hard to choose a preventative technique โ and HMV in Oxford Street had four sales floors (easy listening in the basement).
Floors
The store had one entrance that had a permanent, uniformed guard. Some 80 sales staff compared with six uniformed guards, and five plain-clothes detectives; besides CCTV in th ceiling, with monitors in an office (although none of those in the study were caught due to CCTV), and alarms on the more valuable goods, such as video tapes. Daily sales turnover was ยฃ60,000; some 20,000 might enter the store on a busy day. As Ekblom added, if you were to assume one in 100 would steal something, that meant possibly 200 offenders. Each detective caught about one shoplifter a day; on that reckoning, they were missing a lot (and, we can add, to hire enough detectives to catch more or most of the thieves would be prohibitively costly โ besides, an average theft took a detective two and a half hours). In 1984, the store arrested 1456 shoplifters; 80 per cent were referred to the police, who decided to prosecute some 26 per cent of those referrals. Those were all large numbers. Ekblom explained that cassettes in particular were light and pocketable. HMV, like some others in music retail, didnโt use a โmaster bag systemโ, in other words keeping the contents of the record sleeve or tape holder in a separate place. The delay in a member of staff finding the actual music and putting it in the sleeve when presented at a counter, meant lost sales. This spoke to a larger change in retail from historical over the counter sale to self-service which allowed โimpulse buyingโ โ and, we might add, made thieving (by customers) easier.
Clusters
The detectivesโ records as studied by Ekblom showed โclustersโ of theft โ mainly from rock and pop; the computer section (the early computer programmes were also on tape); and soul and disco (and not much from โeasy listeningโ). Almost none of those arrested were previously known to the detectives. What Ekblom termed โan inexhaustible flow of first time offendersโ were concealing goods and hoping to walk out. A few tried to peel off the label of a higher value cassette, and replace it with a lower value one (and pay for it). Ekblom suggested that the retailer raise the risk of being caught, for example by putting up warning notices; and a less crowded layout, and reducing queues to pay for items; or, supermarket-style, baskets to carry goods people wanted to buy. Uniformed guards on each floor, Ekblom suggested, might be a visible deterrent; and instead of taking thieves to the police, why not wran off customers behaving suspiciously? These ideas were already around, besides the traditional โspot-arrest-and refer to policeโ model. HMV indeed went on to replace some detectives with uniformed guards, and put sticky label alarms on audio cassettes; and closed the computer cassette section (and extended the compact discs instead).
Analysis
The implication, which was played out in the following decades, was that store detectives (and their loss prevention managers) could be more than thief-catchers, but could use situational crime analysis to guide store management on what and where in store was vulnerable to theft. HMV shared further numbers with Ekblom at a meeting at Oxford Street on February 28, 1985. Of its 40 stores, the bottom 25 in terms of turnover were on the โmaster bag systemโ. In other words, the lower the turnover, the more viable it was for staff to take the time to add the tape or record to an empty sleeve for a customer. HMV estimated that its ยฃ4m turnover on Oxford Street would be halved if it did not have self-service. Some tourists, it added, might buy 15 tapes at once (understandably, foreign youths caught stealing were only given a caution). How HMV did its paperwork about thieves was described by Ekblom as โvery crude; and ten years old. HMV was starting to computerise at head office and to do bar coding on stock.
Walk around
Ekblom walked around the store with the audit manager who was also in charge of security, Chris Green in September 1984. As an aside, a loss prevention name also on the file is Colin Culleton, then in charge of security for HMV in the West End, who went on to work there for 29 years before moving to Next and clothing. Managers were in Ekblomโs phrase โanti mirrorsโ (having security mirrors in store) which meant โmany blind spotsโ. A further risk was that youths might steal the empty cassette case, to use at home to hold a tape copied (illegally) of the music. HMV spoke to Ekblom of the high turnover in sales staff; one reason why non-security staff did little to detect thieves. HMV had about one โfalse alarm arrestโ per fortnight (that is, someone accused but innocent). If a child was cautioned, a detective tried to speak to a parent on the telephone while the child was still in store, โto ensure that their version of events gets undistorted to the parentsโ, given that some parents could not believe their child might steal. Ekblom found security staff were โvery much isolatedโ from the design and management of a store. He commented that โin this the store resembles in microcosm society as a whole โ where the police are expected to prevent crime in isolation from the rest of us.โ
