During Safer Business Action Week last week, Northumbria’s Labour Police and Crime Commissioner, Susan Dungworth, raised what she called ‘this myth that thieves will get away with stealing lower value goods’. She described it as ‘simply untrue and it’s damaging to policing perceptions and retail crime reporting’. She said: “And so, I want to put these persistent rumours to bed. Officers have made it clear to me that there has never been an operational £200 policy – and there are absolutely no plans for there to be.
“Time and time again, we are seeing offenders who have committed shoplifting offences well below the £200 mark, rightly being put before the courts. Anyone thinking otherwise or that they will get away with it is wrong. Let’s be clear – Northumbria Police will take robust action against those who are committing shop theft at all levels – whether it’s a fiver or £500 – theft is theft. Shoplifting can also go hand in hand with violence, threats and abuse towards staff and these offences will also be treated with the seriousness they deserve.”
Also quoted was Chief Insp Ian Blakemore, Northumbria Police’s Retail Crime Lead, said: “We take every report of theft very seriously and we carefully assess the risk to determine the best course of action. We understand the detrimental impact theft can have on businesses, shop workers and the community.
“It’s also often the case that proceeds from shoplifting contribute towards funding more serious and organised criminality. That’s why it’s important we continue to work closely with businesses and organisations to create a hassle-free, safe environment for shoppers and retailers.”
Some questions arise. Quite how many offenders are going before the courts in Northumbria, below the £200 threshold? Without an actual number, there’s no way of judging how it compares with the (admittedly no more than an estimate) total of retail theft. Even if thieves are going before courts, is it deterring their offending? It appears not in a September case on the Northumbria Police website, of a prolific thief, with 171 convictions, arrested 400 times; police have resorted to a civil injunction banning her from almost every retail store (not quite all; even a thief has to shop somewhere!?).
For years, even before police and crime commissioners, let alone before Susan Dungworth became a PCC, crime against retail was ‘de-criminalised’, to quote from Prof Joshua Bamfield’s 2012 book Shopping and Crime. Retailers have long found that police, in effect, ration their attendance even when shops report a crime. Regardless of, as under the Boris Johnson regime, a Home Office minister writing to police forces in 2020, to tell them to prosecute retail theft. Ask a police officer about a theft from a shop (whatever the amount) and they will answer that unless an offender is detained, there’s little point in them going to the scene; they are busy as a blue-light service, responding to cases of violence, with a risk of harm to the public.
In the Channel 5 television documentary series, filmed largely in London and Coventry, shops routinely when they detain a thief check if the value of the goods stolen is below £200. If below, they do not involve the police but will ask the thief to pay for the goods.
As for the law, section 176 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 made theft from a shop, of goods worth £200 or less (retail value), a summary-only offence. That very threshold was set ‘because it captures the vast majority of the cases currently heard in the magistrates’ courts’, according to the Home Office’s accompanying guidance. Separate however and done under the last Labour government in the 2000s is the spread of on the spot fines (that may or not actually be paid, ever) beyond traffic offences, in the jargon ‘fixed penalty notices’ for theft from shops (with a threshold supposed to be of £100). In other words, the thrust of policing and criminal justice this century, no matter which main political party is in power, is to take retail thieves out of the courts and into cheaper ways of administering justice, whether because such crime is exploding or the state is contracting, or both.
Is Susan Dungworth saying that if I go into Waitrose in Ponteland and steal two packets of almond croissants (value £5) and the police ever get to hear about it, they ‘will take robust action’?
For Susan Dungworth or anyone to deny this reality and to at all give the impression that retailers and the public are the ones at fault – for disbelieving that police necessarily act in cases of retail theft – is wicked.
