A removal of the £200 limit – below that, retail theft is a summary-only offence – would be a ‘step forward’, David McKelvey of TM Eye and My Local Bobby told Professional Security Magazine this morning, speaking ahead of the King’s Speech and the opening of Parliament, that would set out Labour’s planned law-making.
However a suggested law for England and Wales as in Scotland, of a specific offence of an assault on a retail worker, would be a waste of time, McKelvey felt. Enough laws around assault already exist, he added: “We don’t need new law, we just nee law to be enforced.”
On new Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood’s recent announcement, of a temporary reduction in how much of some custodial sentences are served in prison from half to 40 per cent, citing full prisons and ‘we face the collapse of the criminal justice system’, McKelvey commented that it was ‘a real own goal’. He doubted that releasing people from prisons due to overcrowding is going to help in the short term, if those people are thieves and are going to go back to stealing; which will need police resources to catch them again. He suggested ‘Nightingale prisons’ as an emergency response, harking back to the Nightingale hospitals and courts during the covid pandemic of 2020.
The occasion for interviewing McKelvey was that My Local Bobby is expanding outside London – to Milton Keynes, and Ipswich; and others are in talks with his firm about his service. Typical takers of My Local Bobby are business improvement districts that levy all the business owners in their district, typically a town or city centre, and with that regular income – six figures a year for smaller BIDs, seven in larger – procure services besides what local government provides, whether marketing and events to bring in custom, or street cleaning or on-street protection.
On that £200 limit and shop crime, as seen on the Channel 5 documentary series At War with the Law (that McKelvey and his plain-clothes detectives features in) if a shoplifter is caught with goods worth less than £200, a shop will routinely ask the thief to pay for what was taken, and let them go, rather than seek to bring in the police. McKelvey said that across his business ‘beats’ – in numerous BID areas in central London such as Fitzrovia (pictured), Ipswich and now Milton Keynes – officers stop and detain between 20 and 40 shoplifters a day. The majority of cases are under £200, and McKelvey’s firm – which otherwise does take thieves to court – cannot recover its costs. If shop theft were again made an ‘either way’ offence (that depending on seriousness can be dealt with by magistrates, or in the crown court), ‘it is possible for both the police and ourselves to prosecute these matters again’.
More in the September edition of Professional Security Magazine.
