A Met officer explains how his team worked with retailers to achieve a long-term reduction in shop theft.
Retailers in the London Borough of Bromley in England have seen theft plummet, thanks to the work of Superintendent Luke Baldock and his team.
As the lead on neighbourhood policing, Baldock was frustrated to see retail crime increases of up to 40% across the borough and determined to act. He spoke to Business Improvement Districts, Business Crime Reduction partnerships, heads of security for shopping centres and national representatives, such as Risk and Loss Prevention at the big multiples, to get an idea of where things were going wrong and what could be done to help.
“There was a collective cycle of apathy where the security in the stores was saying the police don’t help, and the police were saying every time we do come you never give us a statement, you never give us CCTV,” he explains. “It was all people-based stuff.”
It quickly became obvious that the process for reporting crime was a big part of the problem. “We realised that our standard reporting systems for retail crime weren’t up to scratch,” says Baldock. “For instance, we had one offender who had committed 20 offences at the same store and it had been screened to 18 different officers in the case on different teams who didn’t know each other and didn’t know that there was a linked series.”
So taking a new tack, the police honed in on one town, Orpington, and ran a data dive on a group of shops. They found that three stores in particular were driving a huge amount of the crime report volume for the whole area. “Why that was we didn’t know – was it because they were good at reporting? Was it because there was loads of crime? Was it because some stores weren’t reporting at all?” questions Baldock. “We put forward a hypothesis – it’s probably a prolific group of offenders who are offending at a good amount of the stores so if we look at the offenders in those three stores that are already reporting, we thought that’s a good start.” Officers approached the stores and made it clear that they wanted to work with them to help tackle retail crime and struck up a relationship with teams in-store, as well as more senior management.
“What we’d find is that retailers actually have really good internal systems tracking who’s done the crime and the CCTV linking it all together,” he says. The police compared their own data to that of the retailers’ and identified 13 offenders that were committing about 80% of all the crime in those stores.
“I put a team of six on it, so they had roughly two offenders each, and I said: ‘Go to the [store] managers, get all the statements for the last 20 times they’ve offended there’,” he says.
With all the paperwork in place, the police then carried out an operational phase where the criminals were arrested in the act. “It’s quite persuasive to a judge to show that there is a committed thief, but what we’ve already done is we’ve gone back in time and got 20 offences ready for them,” explains Baldock.
Remarkable results
With multiple offences recorded for each shoplifter, alongside CCTV footage, the police were able to push for stronger charges, resulting in prison sentences for several of the offenders. “It wasn’t just a case of he’s nicked £50 worth of stock and the judge kicks him out with another conviction and a £50 fine that he can’t pay,” says Baldock. “We could say: ‘This guy’s done 20 offences of stealing £50 to £100 a time – that amounts to thousands of pounds.’
“[The criminals] thought they were going to go in and out of the system as usual, but they were actually hit with a really well researched, well evidenced catalogue of offences.”
With so many of the highest offending shoplifters being held to account, the retailers involved in the operation have seen extraordinary results. Reported retail crime in the focus stores dropped by 70% for the four weeks following the operation, while there was an average reduction in stock shrinkage of 80%. In fact, within a fortnight of the operation, one store went from losing £7,000 worth of stock a week to just £400 as a result of the interventions – that’s a 94% reduction!
The project has also had a positive impact on police morale. “It’s been really invigorating for the police officers involved to be getting stuck into local crime,” says Baldock. “They feel like they’re doing really good coppering again.”
To ensure that the action taken had lasting results, when the shoplifters went to court, an officer went with them with a Criminal Behaviour Order application (similar to an Anti-social Behaviour Order (ASBO) in Scotland). This meant that because the offender was so prolific, they would have court-ordered restrictions on their behaviour. This could result in being banned from certain shops or chains, meaning that even stepping foot in the stores afterwards would be an arrestable offence. In some instances, offenders could even be banned from an entire geographic area.
Baldock states that shoplifting is the tip of the iceberg for many of these prolific offenders. “They’re not homogeneous offenders, they don’t only steal from a shop in Orpington, they are often violent people because they live chaotic lives centred around drug use,” he says. “These are dangerous, harmful people.” He believes that the same people committing these types of crimes are also involved with domestic abuse to a much greater degree, as well as car break-ins and house thefts.
He thinks it is no coincidence that motor vehicle crime across the whole borough went down by 30% in the four weeks after the operation.
In a bid to curb the problem, the police also strive to help offenders with their addictions. “We worked with the local authority and with our own in-house teams to make sure that when these people were entering the prison systems that we were working with them on their drug and alcohol addictions really intensively, realising that in one of our operations 100% [of criminals] tested positive for Class A drugs in custody,” says Baldock.
“We then monitor when people are missing their mandatory drug and alcohol appointments, so they feel our presence all the time.”
Roll out potential
The model has since been rolled out to other areas in the borough, including Penge and Beckenham, and Baldock claims that a few other boroughs have started taking a similar approach.
So, could such an operation be replicated in Scotland? Baldock seems to think so, claiming that it doesn’t require much resource, just a bit of data digging. “The beauty of it really is the simplicity … It was elbow grease, but it’s not genius police work, it’s not Sherlock Holmes stuff,” he says. “This is just smart, precise policing.”
While essentially the handling of crime lies in the hands of Police Scotland, retailers can certainly make the process as straightforward as possible. “Learn who your local team is and report crime,” says Baldock. “If you report it regularly, your store will start glowing up. Having CCTV and getting your staff to willingly give statements is important.”
Retailers could even go as far as to build up files on their most prolific shoplifters, with CCTV and statements for multiple incidents, he suggests. “How can the police say no to that when you’ve given them all the evidence they could ever need?” he says.
Baldock claims that there is a tendency for some police to feel they are too busy, under-resourced or time poor to deal with shoplifting. “But the reason we don’t have time is because we let the demand get out of control by not dealing with it in the first place,” he says. “All you have to do is take a conscious decision to step ahead of it.”
