The National Police Chiefs’ Council has outlined a new Retail Crime Action Plan to tackle rising levels of shoplifting and protect retail workers.
Today (23 October), retailers, police and ministers met at 10 Downing Street to put together the plan which has been prompted after police received 247,000 reports of retail theft in the financial year of 2022 to 2023.
Co-op Food managing director Matt Hood and John Lewis Partnership chair Dame Sharon White, who have been among the supermarket bosses urging for more to be done, have termed the surge in shoplifting “an epidemic”.
Under the plan, a new Organised Retail Crime (ORC) capability will be formed within the Operation Opal unit, funded by Project Pegasus – a partnership between 13 retailers including John Lewis, Co-op, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Next.
The team will be centrally governed but will be supporting police forces in identifying the organised crime groups operating in their area.
Key activities of this unit will be creating a new dedicated intelligence team, training retailers on information and intelligence to share with policing, and utilising facial recognition software across the public and private sectors.
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The unit will also develop a national strategic assessment on ORC utilising both industry, police and third party data, which for the first time, will give a detailed analysis of ORC, the offenders and opportunities to tackle it.
As part of the new plan, police attendance at the scene for retail crime will be prioritised where violence has been used, where an offender has been detained and where evidence needs to be promptly secured which can only be done in person by police personnel.
The NPCC has said that where CCTV is secured, viable images will now be checked against those in the Police National Database and other lawfully appropriate databases.
As most cases of retail theft are committed by prolific offenders, local policing teams are being told to work with retailers to identify those causing the most harm and to develop joint action plans to target the offending.
Analytics of the Police National Computer and Police National Database data, including crime scene facial recognition data will be used to identify prolific offenders and pursue them from a criminal justice perspective, which the plan has said will “ensure national consistency in driving forward the policing response.”
Association of Convenience Stores chief executive, James Lowman, said the plan “sets a clear marker that the torrent of thefts and other offences committed against businesses will be taken seriously by police forces and the government and will be strongly welcomed by both large and small retailers.
“Using artificial intelligence to identify prolific offenders can be an effective way of drastically reducing the amount of police time it takes to make links between crimes committed against different businesses locally, and we hope that this will encourage more retailers to submit CCTV evidence of theft when it occurs to help make the link between crimes that have previously been seen as separate offences.”
