How shop theft was decriminalised: Professor Emmeline Taylor provides evidence in the House of Lords
Professor of Criminology at City St George’s explains the causes behind the rise in retail crime, the impact on the UK economy, and how the government can tackle the rising crisis.
The Professor of Criminology at City St George’s, University of London, was invited to be an expert witness because of her extensive research into retail crime and new and emerging surveillance technologies.
The Committee meeting saw Professor Taylor provide evidence alongside Paul Gerrard, Public Affairs and Board Secretariat Director of the Co-op Group.
Explaining some of the causes behind the rise in shop theft, she explained:
The underlying causes of shoplifting are typically social factors: poverty, homelessness, mental health issues, drug addiction. We know that through the austerity measures for over a decade amplified these issues to create the perfect storm.
I would also like to draw attention to the introduction of new legislation in 2014 which essentially downgraded “shoplifting” offences if the value is less than £200.
She argued that the use of the word “shoplifting” negatively impacted on how theft from a shop is perceived and dealt with, often masking serious elements of an offence such as the threat or actual use of violence. She discussed Project Pegasus – which is a partnership between retailers and policing to tackle retail crime – and sits under Opal, the national intelligence unit focus on serious organised acquisitive crime. She said:
The word “shoplifting” is, I think, is unhelpful. I think it still holds connotations of it being trivial and somehow victimless, so I prefer the term “theft from a shop”.
Operation Pegasus, and by extension Opal, has a very clear definition of “serious organised acquisitive crime”. A key factor in that definition is that it is a network of individuals who operate across two or more police forces. So they are looking for networks, mobility and that cross-jurisdictional activity.
A large proportion of offenders operate within one police force area, and we could refer to them as local, prolific offenders, and these are the individuals that shop workers will probably know by sight. They might even know them by name or where they reside.
Many of these individuals have reached a scale of activity and established, prearranged networks of buyers or fences for the stolen goods that they steal, but can only be described as organised, yet they only operate within one police force area so do not fall into the Pegasus definition. There's a difficulty there in terms of giving adequate attention to these different stratums of organised criminals.
She discussed the effect of retail crime and violence against retail workers was having:
My report Stealing With Impunity, published earlier this year, outlines what I argue has effectively been the decriminalisation of shop theft in recent years.
The British Retail Consortium estimate 1,300 incidents a day against shop workers, which is clearly shocking. In terms of the effect, first and foremost, absolutely has to be the impact on staff welfare, their physical welfare, but also their mental health.
The second main impact on businesses is a difficulty in some locations to operate profitably. Nearly £2 billion was lost to customer theft last year, almost double the previous year. We're seeing some stores permanently close, and that is of concern because we know the High Street is already struggling.
Professor Emmeline Taylor gives evidence at the House of Lords.
She outlined her recommendations for overcoming this issue:
The Stealing With Impunity report laid out 10 key recommendations. I believe section 176 of the ASB Crime and Policing act 2014 [which determined shop theft of goods lower than £200 are treated as a summary only offence] needs to be repealed, and I was delighted to see that that has been committed to in the King's speech earlier this year.
Secondly, I recommended the introduction of a standalone offense for assaulting a shop worker who is performing their duty serving the community, which I believe that has been committed to by the current government.
We spend a huge amount of time focusing on the individual who commits the theft, and far less thinking about where those billions of pounds of goods are ending up. We need more regulation because in online marketplaces, people can operate fairly invisibly using fake names, fake addresses.
In addition to that, I think we need to look to the retail crime action plan. It's very difficult to actually measure police forces success.
If retailers did report all of those estimated 17 million incidents, that would quadruple police recorded crime overnight, which I don't believe that that is necessarily the right answer. We can look to another high-volume crime – fraud – and how that has been dealt with in the past. The Fraud Intelligence Bureau was established back in 2006, and I think similar structures could be put in place for the reporting and triaging of retail crimes by replicating that and creating a national retail crime intelligence view of it.
We have seen a disinvestment in the police. They have to do more with less. That's not going to change, and that's where I think technology will really begin to play a greater role.
There’s no question that AI-driven biometric surveillance can be intrusive to everyday members of the public and to customers, but similarly, there's no question that this could be a very effective tool in identifying prolific, repeat and organised criminals, but it must be done ethically and in a privacy first way.
There is also a change in the operational tactics of the policing: we've seen the removal, removal of neighbourhood policing, for example. I believe that business climate reduction partnerships and similar initiatives can fill that void by being the eyes and ears on the streets in the communities, intelligence gathering and really addressing issues before they blossom.
