AS Flying Eze’s shocking Greggs exposé reveals, shoplifting – or theft, as it used to be known – is all too often treated as a minor matter and not even a crime.
Ever since government reduced the theft of goods worth less than £200 to little more than a Fixed Penalty Notice offence, thieves have had a field day.
When I was a copper on the beat, there used to be posters about shoplifting on display in .
Prominently shown in stations and also in shops, they warned the public that was a serious and you could go to jail for it.
To reinforce that message, there was a picture of a crying child with her mother being hauled off in handcuffs.
They are not there any more.
Now know the will take little or no action if they are caught.
So why stand and pay for your pie or cake when others simply walk out of and have them for free?
Criminals clearing whole shelves is not food to survive, these are goods to sell on.
Broken system
Many commit several offences per day to feed a drug habit or to assist organised crime.
The head of security at one of the major supermarkets told me that stolen baby milk is even being shipped out to .
Stolen booze is sold to unscrupulous club owners at knock-down prices.
And why would shop workers intervene when they are told by management not to do so in case they are confronted with a knife or dirty needle?
Stores take what steps they can to discourage stealing.
I went to the local in Croydon, South London, recently, where there was one empty coffee jar on the shelf.
I had to ask for a filled jar from behind the counter.
And now, with upon us, even bags of chocolate mini eggs have security tags fitted to them.
The problem results from a broken system where senior police officers are not dedicated to tackling crime and .
Instead, they focus on — accused of “state-sponsored racism”; over reports it stopped hiring white recruits.
They focus on diversity policies like we saw in West Yorkshire Police — accused of ‘state-sponsored racism' over reports it stopped hiring white recruits
The public do not care about the sex, colour or sexuality of officers — they just want them to prevent and detect crime.
The police are good at “wet forensics”; — fingerprints and DNA — but they are not so good at digital forensics.
There are no fingerprints and DNA with shoplifting, but there are images, and that is where the evidence is.
In cases where shoplifters are identified, the main evidence in bringing a prosecution is usually CCTV.
But often officers do not have equipment to download the footage.
And even when they do, it takes weeks to circulate the image of a suspect for identification — meaning the villain can make hay while the sun shines.
With fingerprints and DNA, the police have national databases that can positively identify a criminal. Sadly, this is not the case with images.
When I visited — the national police unit targeting shoplifters — they had no database of images of the thieves or their crimes.
Even locally, many police forces do not hold their images in a searchable format.
It is scandalous.
The public do not care about the sex, colour or sexuality of officers — they just want them to prevent and detect crime
In the past decade, the number of burglaries solved has dropped from a not-very-good 15 per cent to a pathetic five per cent.
Yet in the same ten years, four out of ten households now have or home CCTV.
So how is it that the opportunities to detect burglars have gone up, yet detection rates have gone down?
It is the same with shoplifting.
The police have no systems for properly dealing with digital evidence.
Businesses have spent billions of pounds on CCTV to protect their property, but the police currently identify fewer than ten per cent of offenders caught on these cameras.
The police are also failing to link thieves to multiple crimes due to digital images not being stored in a searchable form.
And because technology such as pattern/logo recognition — to match clothing — and facial recognition are used piecemeal, suspects are rarely linked to multiple crimes.
For every 1,000 shoplifting offences, there are not 1,000 offenders — there may be as few as 20.
I established the central forensic image team at New Scotland Yard, and we secured the world’s first conviction from pattern-matching software.
‘Super Recognisers’
I found a burglar at two crime scenes in the same “Everlast”; sweatshirt, then found an arrest mugshot with him in the same top.
That was back in 2015 — but the police still haven’t adopted it.
I also set up the first human “Super Recogniser”; unit of officers with a fantastic natural memory for faces.
They linked the Everlast burglar — in different clothes this time — by his face to seven more break-ins.
Their record was to link one shop thief to more than 40 offences.
But still few police forces are selecting and using officers with such skills.
Austin Caballero, a serial thief who stole more than £100,000 of luxury goods from boutiques and jewellers in London, was one of those caught by the “Super Recognisers”;.
In 2015, he was jailed for four years after admitting 40 offences.
Linking offenders to multiple crimes means they are very likely to plead guilty and more likely to go to jail, saving a huge amount of police and court time
About six months ago, I got a message on my website saying, “Mr Neville, this is Austin Caballero, I want to have a word”;.
I met him for a beer, where he admitted to me that he’d done 500 crimes and yet we had only managed to get footage from 40 of them.
Linking offenders to multiple crimes means they are very likely to plead guilty and more likely to go to jail, saving a huge amount of police and court time.
This would also stop thieves being charged with just one crime for which they get “community”; or suspended sentences — allowing them to return to stealing from shops like Greggs the same day.
