When crime really does pay

Wherever we go, security guards stare threateningly at us. Their powers are still limited. Intimidation is their most effective weapon.

Now, though, High Street retailers are demanding the right to run their own little police forces to protect themselves from theft.

Maybe five million people a year shoplift – and almost all of them get away with it.

This criminal shopping spree costs stores almost £5 billion a year. The police aren’t interested. So the shops want to take the law into their own hands.

According to an expert in the subject, retailers think the best plan is to get their staff sworn in as special constables.

Then they can officially arrest shoplifters and fling them behind bars – in prisons which may even be installed inside some of the larger stores.

The shops are getting desperate. One chain of CD and DVD shops has been told not to call the police more than twice a week.

It means if you go shoplifting there early on a Monday morning you’ll get away with it even if you’re caught by security.

Another store has been told not to bother calling the police under any circumstances unless the crime involves violence.

Criminals with 38 previous convictions get nothing more than penalty notices – an official slap on the wrist.

Theft from shops is regarded as of such little importance these days that most police forces don’t bother with it at all.

It’s surprising there isn’t more uproar, really. After all, these thefts cost shops £4,965 million a year, according to Prof Joshua Bamfield, the Director of the Centre for Retail Research.

Birmingham-born Prof Bamfield says about 450,000 customers and 31,165 members of staff were caught nicking something from shops last year.

However, as there are between four million and ten million separate incidents of theft from shops, it’s likely that far more than half a million people are involved.

The professor says the value of each theft in the West Midlands was £69 – which makes our shoplifters more successful than the average because across the country as a whole they only get away with £66.72 a time.

But of the 450,000 offenders who get caught, only 289,000 make their way onto police crime reports. Of these, 65,000 end up in court and 5,000 get sent to prison.

It’s not surprising the police aren’t interested in these people. There is a general view, apparently shared by the police, that stealing from shops isn’t really proper stealing at all.

It’s all fair game – the retailers can afford this type of “shrinkage” and even make allowances for it in their financial forecasts.

There are those who argue that if the stores must display all their goods in such an enticing way, they’re asking to have them nicked.

Even the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, has described these thefts as “comparatively trivial offences”.

Prof Bamfield says things will only get worse now the new Ministry of Justice is responsible for prisons instead of the Home Office.

The Ministry’s main aim over the next few years will be to keep as many criminals as possible out of jail.

“It’s going to be rare for somebody to be sent to prison for being a frequent shoplifter,” says Prof Bamfield.

Yet, he says, the life of a shoplifter is “quite a nice, cushy little number – you don’t have to get up early in the morning, it’s quite remunerative and nothing happens to you unless you are a very bad person”.

Stores are losing so much money – and receiving so little support from the police – that “greater self-help is inevitable”.

That’s why stores want to swear in their staff as special constables, with the power to arrest and jail thieves.

It’s only one step from the existing system of store detectives “detaining” shoplifters. And it offers new job opportunities for retiring police offices.

But it’s worrying that the prospect of a privatised police force protecting our High Streets from crime is now under serious discussion.

The official crime figures show the number of offences is falling. The 2005-6 British Crime Survey claims the number of crimes has dropped by 8.4 million offences a year since 1995.

It alleges vehicle crime fell by 59 per cent, burglaries by 60 per cent and even violence by 43 per cent. So why should anyone get upset by a bit of modest shoplifting?

Of course, everybody knows the official statistics don’t show the true picture. We all know crime is rife and it’s a waste of time trying to interest the police.

If the police have better things to do than catch petty thieves and prisons haven’t got enough room to lock them up, then for hundreds of thousands of people a year, crime really does pay.

But if the only answer is privatised policing then we are only one step away from protection rackets and vigilantes.

It may all be inevitable but I’d be happier if law and order were available to everyone not subject to some a corporate means test.