The dissolution of Parliament last week means there are no members of Parliament (only candidates) and no parliamentary select committees, until the general election on July 4.
That PM Rishi Sunak called the election earlier than the autumn as many assumed does mean that some parliamentary business is unavoidably cut short, such as the House of Lords’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee inquiry into shoplifting. It had time for only one morning of evidence taking from three official figures – the Sussex police and crime commissioner (PCC) Katy Bourne, who leads nationally for PCCs on crime against business; and from the police, Det Supt Jim Taylor who heads the intelligence unit Opal, and his boss, North Wales Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman, the police’s national lead on ‘volume crime’.
Almost at once, what those three told the peers went to the heart of crime prevention and policing of crime against business. Shoplifting – or rather official lack of response to it – has arisen from the public sector austerity of the 2010s (‘it became quite apparent several years ago that there was an issue with shoplifting at a local level going unreported’, Katy Bourne said) and, more’s the point, it’s significant (‘happening in large volumes’).
Also relevant here is what service police give – not only visibly in response to thefts from stores, but how time-consuming it is to report crimes. Katy Bourne acknowledged that shops with only a handful of staff on duty cannot or will not give much time to reporting crime, let alone if they don’t see a return on that ‘investment’ (‘the last thing they have time for is an arduous report to the police which, when they are reporting online, can take them up to 30 minutes’).
The authorities and retailers between them know the crime against shops – of three sorts, as Bourne went on to explain: opportunists, ‘prolific offenders’ who steal ‘constantly’ for a living; and those ‘driven by drugs or alcohol’ to steal because of their addiction. And (as Amanda Blakeman acknowledged right away) such crime, including with violence, is on the rise; even though official crime surveys say that crime is falling (overall).
As she went on to mention, last autumn the UK Government unveiled a ‘retail crime action plan’. The catch, as with any kind of crime, is that police at the same time can’t say for sure how great the problem of crime against retail is (for who can say how much goes unreported) and yet the more that’s reported, the more police (with finite resources) have to do. This matters because (as Katy Bourne told the committee later) ‘you can only resource what you can measure, and the police are very evidence driven’. Hence (as Det Supt Taylor described) the importance of Pegasus (whereby the contractor Mitie Security has gathered a dozen or so high street names to pay for police intelligence analysts) feeding Opal (to help that unit ‘ultimately to target the high [level, organised] offenders’, as Mr Taylor said).
As Det Supt Taylor pointed out, the criminals are quick to adapt (for example in their use of social media) and efficient – such as, using TikTok, ‘where offenders have organised to go to a particular store and then rob it’. He mentioned ‘steaming offences’ (‘large groups of individuals going into high-tech shops en masse and just ripping high-tech property out of walls and from desks’). As he added, that’s a change in what we may term ‘traditional’ shop theft (someone alone, secreting something such as a bottle of alcohol under a coat).
A committee member, Baroness Molly Meacher (who readers may recall as the first, Labour, chair of the Security Industry Authority in the mid-2000s) asked about online shopping. Significantly, Amanda Blakeman responded with a physical world crime – ‘violence against delivery drivers in relation to bits of freight that are being moved between shops for deliveries’.
The committee got a glimpse from the senior police officers of the reality of police told already about far more crime than they can possibly handle (or as Amanda Blakeman put it, ‘prioritisation’ in the control rooms that receive calls from the public, in terms of ‘threat, harm and risk’, ‘and making sure that we have the ability to attend’). As for the much-trumpeted Boris Johnson-era ‘uplift’ in police officers, as she added, it means ‘we have a relatively young new workforce, many of whom are still in the first couple of years of their experience of being police officers’.
As for what ‘prioritising’ means in practice, Amanda Blakeman mentioned in passing that some forces are ‘hitting 100 per cent attendance in relation to the violence being perpetrated’ against retailers, which implies that some police forces are not attending a shop, even if they report an incident of violence. Not surprisingly, that has dented retail ‘confidence’ in the police.
Good practice is happening, but as ‘pilots’ and yet to be rolled out; for example on Katy Bourne’s patch in Sussex, with the Co-op, and the membership group the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS) called One Touch Reporting, ‘which we started a couple of years ago’. We are working with the Co-op stores because they were reporting more crime than our other stores were. In 22 Co-op stores (that is, perhaps one in 100 of Cooperative stores nationally), ‘we have reduced the reporting time from 30 minutes down to two minutes at the press of a button. Using an API, the information goes straight from that store into Sussex Police systems’, Katy Bourne said. (For more on Sussex, see the Sussex PCC website.)
Meanwhile, eBay, Facebook Marketplace are areas where people sell things online, whereas in pre-online times thieves sold their goods in pubs and cafes (and car boot sales). Here too police are ‘prioritising’, and it sounds like police have child sexual abuse online as more of a priority than online second-hand marketplaces.
Lord Bach (a former Leicestershire PCC) asked something practical; how are police going to persuade the retailers to contribute funding after the first two years? Katy Bourne replied with a history of how Pegasus came into being – significantly, business came to her (in other words, if businesses don’t play up and stump up, we can say, nothing will change). The story so far; a minimum of ten retailers are each paying £60,000 over two years. She did state that the police have operational direction; and those retailers that pay (and not all are Mitie customers), are paying for the benefit of all retailers (‘it was not going to be just about their problems and their issues’). The trouble there, we can add, is that while that avoids any impression that businesses are hiring police and getting treated as favourites, some businesses may be tempted – something that has bedevilled the business crime reduction partnership movement for decades – to not pay and yet get the same benefits.
The future for Opal going after organised retail criminals looks good – Katy Bourne spoke of other retailers besides the 14 signed up showing interest – and she aired the wish that this would become ‘business as usual for policing nationally’. Indeed the prospect is of other types of crime having this model – such as, vehicle crime and theft of plant machinery.
The evidence taking closed with a sense of how much more can be done, for the UK criminal justice sector and shoppers generally to take crime against retail seriously. Amanda Blakeman spoke about criminal justice (‘an officer works really hard and puts them into the court system; they get a non-custodial sentence—perhaps a fine, perhaps something else—and then they are back out the next day doing exactly the same thing’). Do shoppers know when they buy cheap goods online, they are stolen, and even if they do, do they care?
More in the July edition of Professional Security Magazine.
