The London Evening Standard recently featured the phenomenon of middle-class shoplifters. As always, there’s nothing new under the sun, writes Mark Rowe, continuing an occasional series of articles about security in the past.
The Standard quoted a couple of (anonymous) PR people who told stories of how and why they began thieving, and kept doing it – or in the case of the male, how he stopped and realised it was ‘madness’ after he was stopped and confronted with his crime by a store guard. Which rather underlines a point by the criminologist Prof Martin Gill, who from study of and with (reformed) thieves, makes the point that criminals get away with it often – otherwise, why do they keep doing it? The Standard quoted another criminologist, Prof Emmeline Taylor, of City, University of London, featured in the December print edition of Professional Security Magazine as a speaker in the autumn conference of the National Association of Business Crime Partnerships.
For the Standard, that the ‘middle-class’ was resorting to stealing was quaint, or (we can say) evidence even of a condescending attitude; left unsaid was an assumption that poor people understandably can’t resist breaking the law, whether because they’re lacking morally or financially or both. The assumption is: shouldn’t the middle classes know better?! Except that theft from shops, like workplace fraud, has never been necessarily about need; but greed, or other rationalisations.
Court cases in numerous past newspapers show that theft from department stores was well-known enough and taken seriously enough (not necessarily the same things) to make it worthwhile to employ store detectives.
Besides the thieves’ stories, we learn that store detection was one of the rare openings in private security and indeed any work for women. At the risk of stating the obvious, a female in plain-clothes walking the shop floor while watching for suspicious behaviour would blend in far better than a male. The May 15, 1940 edition of the weekly Surrey Comet featured one of many court reports including a Mrs Digby, a ‘woman detective’ at Bentalls, the department store in quite posh Kingston upon Thames.
When asked about her experience by magistrates, she said she had had 3000 cases in nine years, in Kingston and elsewhere; which by the simplest arithmetic boils down to just over 300 a year; or roughly one each shopping day (bearing in mind that 1940 was long before the days that Sunday trading was thought of). In the case before magistrates that week, a married, 56-year-old Surbiton woman screwed up a dress and put it into a paper bag. Mrs Digby stopped her outside the store (then as now, the crucial thing to do in store loss prevention; if the customer is confronted before they’re out the door, they can reasonably claim that they intended to pay). The woman got two years’ probation.
A 30-year-old New Malden woman pleaded not guilty to stealing two coats. Mrs Digby gave evidence that she saw the woman take a coat off a hangar; fold it; and put it in a basket, covering it over with a bag. She went into a toilet; and when she came out, she was carrying a full bag. The solicitor defending produced a doctor’s certificate that the woman had neuritis and insomnia; then the solicitor changed the plea to guilty, and the woman was remanded in custody for medical reports.
The following week, the court heard two more shoplifting cases. A 43-year-old unemployed woman pleaded not guilty to stealing a hat. Mrs Digby said the accused put her own hat in her gas mask carrier (at that stage of the Second World War, fears of poison gas dropped from the sky by Nazi Germany were genuine and citizens were supposed to carry their masks around). The woman (a former Bentalls employee, it turned out), claimed she was going to ask a friend for the extra money to buy the hat. She was found guilty and fined £1; the chairman of magistrates accused the woman of telling ‘a tissue of lies’.
A 65-year-old newly unemployed widow on a Navy pension pleaded guilty to stealing various items from Bentalls; and a local branch of Marks & Spencer. The court gave her a day in prison because she was too old for probation; in other words, the woman was released when the court rose for the day. The neurotic woman of the week before had been on remand for ten days (‘a terrible punishment’ according to her defence solicitor) and was put on probation for two years.
Those are cases from a randomly chosen month.
Like any newspaper report of court proceedings, we don’t know the full testimony, let alone back stories. Were women truly stealing because they were suffering from ‘nerves’ or were they more calculating; taking things they desired rather than needed, or because they were bored? The magistrates seemed routinely to think in terms of probation; that preferring of a non-prison sentence, that some might condemn as ‘soft’, was evidently such a modern development.
