When did we become a nation of shoplifters?

When I joined the Metropolitan Police in the early 1990s, arresting shoplifters was my bread and butter. It was how I learned to do my job. In fact, in those early years, I probably made more arrests for shoplifting than I did for any other crime.

But, back then, there were usually enough of us to take the calls. At the start of my response shift at Brixton, there would be as many as 20 of us on duty, with similar numbers at nearby stations in Streatham and Kennington. These days, you’d be lucky to get that number for the entire borough of Lambeth. And, as in Lambeth, so in every other part of the country.

Between 2010 and 2018, successive governments cut 44,000 officers and staff from policing in England and Wales, and we have barely begun to recover from the harm done to local communities as a consequence. The latest shoplifting figures are proof of this fact.

According to the British Retail Consortium, the number of shoplifting offences rose by 3.7 million last year, to 20.4 million. More concerning still, the BRC report that violence and abuse targeted at shop workers rose by 50 per cent – with an average of 2,000 incidents now recorded every day.

Inevitably, then, police forces are facing demands that they should be doing more. I suspect that most police officers would readily agree.

But policing in this country is already at breaking point and, on a daily basis, officers are being presented with a series of ever more impossible choices. Every crime matters to every victim – understandably so – but not all crimes are equal. Domestic violence has to matter more than the theft of a joint of meat. Knife crime has to matter more than the theft of a bottle of whisky. And any crime that has a child or vulnerable adult as a victim has to matter more than one that doesn’t.

This might explain why shoplifting offences have fallen some way down the pecking order. Not because they aren’t important, and not because police officers no longer care, but because everything can’t be a priority. I am not talking here about offences where violence is involved – police officers must always respond to those – but to the thousands of non-violent thefts committed on a weekly basis, many of which are not even reported to the police.

And this raises a question, not just for policing, but for society as a whole. Because, if we are going to ask and expect officers to do more about shoplifting, we will also need to be clear about what we want them to do less of. Long gone are the days of having our policing cake and eating it.

Perhaps part of the answer lies in a more joined-up, intelligent targeting of the root causes of the shoplifting epidemic: not only of the organised crime networks (OCNs) driving some of the higher-profile offending – but of the poverty that is surely driving much of the rest. Dismantling OCNs is very much the business of the police – rightly high on the list of operational priorities – but, when people are stealing to feed their families, something very different is required. Something far beyond the capacity of the only two PCs on duty for the late shift.

As ever, part of the response from the government has been to suggest the need for new legislation – in this case, the introduction of a specific offence targeting those who assault retail workers. But I’m afraid that won’t solve anything. We don’t need more laws. We need more police officers.