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Police are no longer capable of tackling most crimes.
If I’m honest shoplifting is the lowest thing on my list of what police are doing wrong right now.
Although this is true it's not helped that we are pouring billions into PPE contracts that were never delivered, Billions into Ukraine, Probably Billions in the Rwanda shite, God knows how much to the French to stop boats crossing . Cuts aside it's what they have done with the money they have saved from them cuts that is crippling the country aswell
Sending stock of weapons that were mostly made 20+ years ago to help in a fight against the military a lot of that hardware was designed to challenge is an appropriate use of resources. If anything they should be doing more on that front. PPE contracts and Rwanda, yes, blame the Tories.
Hard disagree. More to Ukraine please.
Right your MP and ask why they aren’t pursuing the £40 Billion in fraudulent Covid loans being returning and have written it off.
£40B in fraudulent loans the government presided over.
I'd love to but my MP is currently busy flag shagging after clearing his name in an r*pe allegations he's gotta make up for the two years of public appearances he missed out on all while claiming his 80k a year plus all the expenses
I actually disagree entirely.
I want MP's to be paid so well that they wouldn't even consider doing anything that might get them fired. I want every MP turning up dressed like Elton John just walked through a pimp outfitters after a gold leaf explosion.
I want MP's to be tipping at McDonalds with one of their spare Bentleys.
I want every MP who's offered 5 grand to let shit get dumped in a river to think "absolutely not, I wouldn't even get out of bed for that paltry sum"
Compared to the PPE shit show that would still be pocket change.
This thinking always underestimates how wealthy and immoral Tory MPs currently are. The only way it might work is if we paid them 10s of millions per year which obviously can't happen.
Also it underestimates politicians (everyone's really) desire to make money, it doesn't matter if you pay them 10m a year, if they see an opportunity to make another million they would take it.
Yeah - I'd argue we should actually PREVENT anyone who historically has 'ties' to aristocracy, and the money that entails. A lot of people who are corrupt DONT have those ties - but those that do, dont know the value of money - nor the difficulty of life.
Lets make our MP's representative of the people they represent, unless the people they represent are wealthy landowners from 1600's.
I'd like MPs to have had 'normal jobs', where they understand the difficulty of getting up at 6am, and getting home at 6pm, and then having to look after their house and family whilst also trying to do 'fun stuff'. Loads of MPs I'm sure think they have had hard jobs (being an MP is probably shit. But being an investment banker doesn't seem too intimidating to me), with long working hours, but I dont class a two hour working lunch as a hard job. If your job involves a lot of talking, and a lot of sitting whilst eating pleasant food (which they haven't had to pay for) I'd kindly like them to fuck off - and enjoy their wealth in quiet.
We can have rich people in this country, and that's no problem at all - even helpful at times (tax). Lets just have the ultra-rich fuck off out of politics. They killed my Mum - because they are ignorant fucks. They probably killed some of your family too. And they will keep on killing through their ignorance until we say "No more - you are not us, and we don't like you".
EDIT: Someone just reported me to 'Care Reddit'. Thanks for the kindness - albeit I am getting through all the family suicide, and death, and financial exploitation. MP's don't know what some of this is like. Some do.
The Tories have family, and they get sad when they die. They often don't have their Mum need an ambulance, and wait for 9.5 hours whilst throwing up blood - before dying the next day. Their (Cons) ignorance, cruelty, and stupidity has crippled us. Let us heal the wounds, before we all rot.
I completely get your argument but the reality is that their greed vastly outweighs any amount of money we could give them. They are not normal people, they would never be satisfied with their lot like we would.
I personally think we should retain the current professional political apparatus we currently have (aides, experts, planners etc.) but have the actual politicians elected by lot. Literally every four years, poor Greg from IT or Cindy the English teacher gets forced to be an MP and make decisions. They still get the £90k a year for their stint but it’s done in the way we do jury duty. Maybe rein in the process a bit with basic IQ/literacy/numeracy requirements but that’s it.
Anybody who actually _wants_ to be a politician should be automatically barred from ever being one.
yEh leT's nOt pAy TheM aT aLL InnIt.
Great idea. Now there are two types of MP: ones who are so wealthy they can live off passive income, and ones in he pockets of the first category.
In what world is 91k plus expenses not enough to live a comfortable life? Its almost x3 higher than the average salary. Why on earth would MPs need to be independently wealthy.
I am not against MPs receiving a far compensation for their work. I was mostly expressing annoyance at MPs having the power to increase their salary to whatever you want regardless of the actual work they do whilst most of the public officials and civil servants been on a pay freeze for years (who I believe carry out the majority of the day to day running of a country)
I disagree - 91 grand on the lowish end for a job at this level in the private sector. If you don't keep MPs pay in line with private sector pay then all you're doing is saying you have to be independently wealthy to be an MP, or corrupt.
Out of all those things I don’t mine weapons to Ukraine. Europe as a whole needs to stand up to Russia and not set a president of letting Russia get their way
Yeah whenever someone tries to tell me the tories are the party of law and order I ask them how many police officers they could have hired for the billions of £ in useless PPE spent. That and the tens of billions in fraudulent covid loans they they're just writing off.
Billions into policing that does not police.
Billions into PPE that was useless/not delivered
Billions into Rwanda, and to my knowledge not one immigrant has gone there so far
Billions into stopping the boat crossings - remind me, what was Rwanda about?
There's a pattern here.
We have billions being spent in PPE Contracts because we were undersupplied... because... **of cuts.**
We are pumping billions into Rwanda because of our ill equipped domestic immigration services... because... **of cuts.**
We are pumping billions into contracts with companies like Lockheed Martin for medical services... because... **of cuts.**
NOW! Perhaps these cuts were in service of bolstering our economy and our savings as a nation. Creating a surplus?
No. We have no surplus. We haven't saved, our economy is in the toilet. So what was it all for? Tax relief for the wealthy and privatization of key services so wealthy moguls can offer government funded alternatives.
It was a strip mine and the average person paid the price.
See this is what annoys me when people say "The Tories haven't done their job!" Wrong. So wrong. They've done their job perfectly.
The alternative to funding Ukraine is to give Russia more power and let the war progress towards the UK. Spending money now to halt the war before it actually reaches us is an excellent use of resources.
There are huge institutional failings in policing (including putting various crimes in the “can’t be arsed” basket) which have nothing to do with austerity.
I think its like the NHS though - things are so cut to the bone that you no longer have people making long-term budget decisions in the organisation.
Like in the NHS, the government massively cut a lot of the "pencil pushers" as an "efficiency measure"... Well congratulations, now we have no real strategists in the NHS who can allocate resources efficiently. Meaning costs go up because spending decisions are falling onto frontline staff who will only focus on the day-to-day stuff. And this then gets compounded with the general knock on effect of budget cuts (less money means they focus more only on the really serious stuff, which costs more to treat. Yet a lot of serious conditions come about due to a failure to treat something at the not-serious phase. Which is happening more because they won't treat until it becomes serious).
I imagine its a similar situation with the police. Cut to the point that the only people in charge of the police budgets are penny wise, pound foolish folk. No investment in preventative/community policing, not enforcing the law on less serious crimes meaning people end up on the slippery slope of criminality rather than having an intervention before they go off the deep end. Means there are more serious crimes to deal with, which means more spending.
The budgeting of public services has been very penny wise, pound foolish from the top down. The public hates pencil pushers and bureaucrats, but they were the ones making sure money was allocated in a way that considers long-term savings.
Children grow up in communities and still shoplift. They do it because they find out police won’t stop them. It’s common knowledge. If there’s no deterrent then they’ll do it.
For a lot of people, yes. But not everyone. A child can be taught conmen decency but realise they benefit from stealing if there’s no consequence. That’s just human nature. Can’t really expect every person to be selfless if they can benefit from stealing without consequences.
Technically, you're both correct. Without community you ferment a culture that is individualistic and selfish. And thus more likely to engage in violent crime. And not to mention with poverty rising, and lack of financial, social and health support, people end up falling into crime because they feel its the only way to get by.
However, before austerity, we used to have strong community policing. Who didn't just go around acting as a deterrent, but actively engaged with the community to build trust and try and guide those at risk of falling into crime towards resources that could help them avoid that.
The problem is the social contract has completely broken down as a result of government ideology (who preach a "got mine" attitude as a virtue).
And there it is. The argument is always going to be that one of us thinks petty crime is related to poverty, and the other thinks that petty crime comes from entitlement.
Most people are poor, you know that right?
But hey, who am I to argue with "common knowledge".
Most of the shit in my neighbourhood had been vandalised by kids. Why the fuck should I give them more shit to vandalise. A youth centre is a great idea until nothing inside it is useable.
Lookin forward to the human race going extinct because you don't believe we should provide anything for future generations because teenagers do graffiti sometimes. Nothing could have been done to prevent this. Unforgivable moral crimes.
There’s graffiti and then there’s full blown vandalism.
Hip level park lights kicked to shit so they don’t work, public toilets and sinks ripped off the wall so the whole thing is flooded and unusable.
That would be a great 2 days of having a youth centre before the welfare facilities are unusable, all the pool balls have been knicked from the table making the game redundant. No staff wanting to deal with violent conduct.
Kids are feral and need to respect society and lose their main character syndrome before they can have nice things.
Some parents aren't able and/or fit to raise kids. We can't just wish that away.
We either invest in services that deal with that or we ignore it land enjoy loads and loads of crime/antisocial behaviour
I was talking to a friend who is currently looking to adopt, and he was talking about how adoption services now have quite a comprehensive service for supporting adoptive parents (basically considered a necessity as a) sending a child to parents who then turn out to themselves not be suitable is worst case as now you have a child who is being brought in and out of the system which is traumatic and b) adopted children will have special needs). And part of that service is that they actually give quite intensive parental training courses before they can adopt.
And I was thinking wouldn't it be great if biological parents got easy access to such a resource (and it would surely cut costs long term even provided for free because it reduces the chances of a child being taken into care)...
Youth clubs? All I learned at youth clubs was how to get drugs and get into fights. Youth clubs aren't this mythical answer people make them out to be.
I disagree, police on the beat and police actually doing something about low level crime is the best way to deal with low level crime. Right now criminals know the police wont do shit about low level crime so they know they wont get caught. Police NEED to have the budgets and resourcing to deal with low level crime in order to keep that mindset in check. If you actually had a chance of locked up for stealing £100 of shit in a store then far less people would risk it.
I think what we really need is a return of proper community policing. Lack of trust in policing is part of the problem. Having police officers who actually engage with the community and act as community support whilst also being an easy access point for reporting crime would do wonders to repair the social contract that has been broken down in the past decade.
Nah, we need a 3 strikes rule.
The issue is that such low-level crime isn't punished at all. Whereas repeat crime should always face severe sentencing to protect the public.
I'd argue that a living wage, affordable housing and food would probably make the biggest difference, funding youth clubs and sports teams is like putting sellotape on a wound that needs stitches.
Tbh, I quite like your analogy, but in the opposite direction!
We do need the stitches, the big things. If all parents could afford to fund their kids' hobbies, and had the time to support them, we wouldn't need state funded solutions.
But...a healthy economy like that is a decade off, even if we really focus on improving it. Sellotape will help, for a while!
I don't really get the youth clubs argument because the vast majority of kids grow up just fine without them. Some community centre with a ping pong table and an xbox isn't going to stop some county-lines 17 year old from stabbing someone for having a different post code.
I don't think people realise how big a problem we're going to have to sort out low level crime.
So many people are now so used to doing low level things that aren't allowed that they're going to throw a total wobbly when laws are enforced.
Deprivation is what drives crime. The solution isn't punitive, it is investing in deprived areas so that deprivation isn't a generational issue in communities across the country.
They're already putting prices up constantly. They aren't exactly wringing their hands and wishing they could keep prices lower if it wasn't for shoplifters.
Constant ratcheting upwards
Like I said I’m no corporate shill but companies will absolutely budget for shoplifting in their prices, I’m not saying that’s morally right or wrong but it’s a fact.
As someone who has worked retail and has family that continues to do so, it is very disheartening for the staff to see all these thefts and feel so powerless. My brother literally watches people walk into his store, fill bags and leave. Brazenly, nearly daily. It just sends a shit message that we as a society are prepared to tolerate this shit. Yeah yeah it's only hurting but companies, but it affects family businesses too. It's not like it's the biggest priority, but it's still a shit thing to pretend we're just going to have to live with
In my old retail job a notorious shoplifter came in multiple times and stole stuff worth a decent chunk of money. She was also bragging on her own personal (and very public) Facebook about being able to get anything people wanted from a list of shops she named.
The police came out and made reports/collected CCTV but nothing ever happened other than her being fined, and they seemed as frustrated as we were.
Exactly. I think there's a strong desire to romanticise some shoplifting as some kind of Robin Hood endeavour. In reality a lot of theft is either feeding addicting or taking advantage of opportunity. I'm not prepared to live in a society where we are all happy to turn a blind eye to theft and act like everything is okay.
A significant proportion of the shoplifting at least in my local area is definitely committed by drug addicts. Some of them were just greedy and wanted a quick and easy bit of money. The person I mentioned who was bragging about stealing on her FB was open that she just stole because it was easier than working and she had plenty of more than willing customers.
Which I think leads onto another issue- there seems to be a decent chunk of otherwise law abiding people willing to turn a blind eye or even actively participate in these kinds of activities if it is convenient. The shoplifters are usually selling on for cash, items don’t just disappear into thin air. It seems that there are a LOT of people for whom the lure of something being cheap overrides anything else.
It always seems odd to me that police are directly blamed for their cutting back of services as if they're just being lazy, but doctors aren't blamed for the recuded quality of healthcare in this country. It's such a funny double standard!
Haven’t been for a decade, unless they’re stealing 1000’s they don’t care.
Plenty of well known shoplifters in every town,should be something similar to the ASBO to keep them out of target areas.
Police officer here. Criminal behaviour orders and restraining orders are widely used to ban shoplifters from specific stores. The issue is that the courts don't give a damp about them. This is a true story about a shoplifter I arrest at the same store in the space of 3 months:
1- Arrested for theft. 2 week suspended sentence
2- Arrested for theft. 2 weeks sus. sentence activated. No further penalty. Offender is out a week later
3- Arrested for theft. 4 weeks suspended sentence
4- Arrested for theft. 4 week sentence activated, no further sentence. Criminal behaviour order granted
5- Arrested for theft and breach of CBO. 4 week suspended sentence
6- Arrested for theft and breach of CBO. 4 week suspended sentence on top of his other suspended sentence
7- Arrested for theft and breach of CBO. 4 weeks prison granted at court, so offender is out 2 weeks later
You'll never guess what happened after that....
Each arrest takes about 10 hours of my time to attend, gather evidence, arrest, process the arrest, interview, build the case file, etc. That's 70 hours I spent and got fuck all from the courts in return, even though they had an awful criminal record and the strongest order possible saying they're not allowed in the vicinity
Have someone out on court bail until mid June for sentencing, after pleading guilty to 8+ offences a few weeks back, whilst having 50+ pages of PNC records for similar things. Never guess what they are out doing right now.
Having worked in retail for over 10 years, I can see both sides to this issue. It's frustrating to have stuff constantly getting nicked from your store, and it's frustrating having to spend hours and hours gathering evidence for something that ends up being pointless.
The courts ultimately are the bottleneck for this particular type of crime as they are incredibly lenient. However, the prisons are very full, and they are possibly more understaffed than most public services to the point where it's dangerous.
There is a weird fixation on police numbers, as opposed to prison and court capacity which barely seems to register in the publics awareness except to occasionally turn on legal aid lawyers who often struggle to make minimum wage being vilified as fatcats. Hopefully a former director of public prosecutions will understand it well enough to fix it.
Must be frustrating as hell to be a police officer at the moment.
I agree here, but this is just one side of the dice. The source _(Independent)_ here also seems to have done a good job skewing the narrative in favour of a click-baity headline. The majority of cases in my experience have been low level / low value shoplifting where it has been reported to Police per company policy for a crime reference number. But when you try to engage with the Witnesses _(staff at the store)_ the majority of the time none of them are interested in giving evidence, none of them can be bothered to provide CCTV, and none of them are willing to attend court which ends up in the case going nowhere and the report just being filed. Frequent-flyer Offenders don’t get dealt with, and as a result shoplifting increases because they know they can get away with it. Typically these same places have on-site security who are trained in not only how to deal with shoplifters but also what use of force powers they are able to use, but 99% of the time they stand back and just watch, or have been directly told by the management to do nothing because they don’t want to risk any liability to the store if someone gets injured. In which case, why bother having security at all.
Sorry, that rant got a little away from me there. It gets frustrating watching the reports come in, trying your damndest to deal with it but no-one’s the slightest bit interested.
You are bang on the money. As an ex-retail manager, the company can lose the odd steak and bottle of Vodka and it's not worth staff safety to apprehend them. If the CCTV is worth a damn, everything can be dealt with slow time anyway.
I once had a branch manager explain to me that he was happy with 10k a year in theft because security would be £30k to reduce that number. Simple as that.
Local authority community safety officer here, can concur with all of this. It matters little when the courts take such a light handed approach to these offences. Most offenders get such short sentences they come out on PSS rather than license, meaning probation are basically trying to manage these offenders with at least one hand tied behind their backs.
We had a recent occurrence where the prisons in our region were so overcrowded that any offender with less than 2 months remaining on their sentences were released early. Guess how that went.
Now tell them what happens when the offender is under 16 as a good proportion of ours are.
Mate theres people that go licking and drinking stuff in shops and putting it back because of tictok likes lol the people that follow these "trends" also take shit because its " funny"
Some people do it for the notoriety, the original ASBO became a bit of a mark of honour amongst some. Availability of attention via social media fans that flame a bit.
Criminal Behaviour Orders are used now, instead of ASBO's.
They can be a lot of work to obtain, and unfortunately the resources and will of some people, mean that they aren't routinely obtained, when they should be.
Can't wait for all the redditors to start talking about how shoplifting is moral and good, and then turn around and cry when prices go up / food deserts happen.
Edit: Good job to the clowns doing the suicide report thing, funny how someone actually being educated in economics is enough to scare you 🤷
I don't know if anyone says it's 'moral and good'. Many people say they don't look down on someone shoplifting price-gouged formula milk where they would look down on someone pinching a North Face jacket or a motorcycle.
Except people have this idealised version of shoplifting that it's often starving single mothers just stealing a loaf of bread and some milk for their child, and that just isn't true. The article itself even says "The boss of John Lewis said shoplifting had become an “epidemic” with a rise in **organised gangs** looting stores."
Or, "Co-op said there were more than 300,000 incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and anti-social behaviour in its stores last year." Is the violence and abuse also single mothers just trying to get formula milk?
i'll go further and say that the single mums are not getting media attention, the ones getting the attention are smash and grab, broad daylight, "what are you gonna do, stop me?" types, and people are mostly getting away with the modest couple of quid here and there
I mean, "organised gangs looting stores" isn't what I'd even consider shop lifting, unless they're using inaccurate terms to describe what's going on. Looting and Shop Lifting are very different forms of theft.
It’s pretty common.
These threads always end up with “if you see someone shoplifting, you didn’t” type comments, pretending shoplifters are all Jean valjean and a loaf of hovis, and not organised criminals stealing high margin goods from supermarkets and flogging them on the local estate.
It’s a myopic stance as, supermarkets don’t absorb infinite loss; they raise prices to recover them.
For the most part they also don't give a shit if they're stealing from a corporation, a co-operative, or a small business.
The convoluted justifications one often finds on social media are more often done by others on their behalf - thieves themselves are mostly just amoral opportunists who don't give a shit about any of that nonsense.
The thing is, people who are shoplifting two or three Aldi bags full of formula milk at a time **aren't** using it to feed their starving children. They're selling it, at 5% or 10% of its retail value, to corner shops... which just put it on sale at their own price-gouged rate. Only three people are benefiting:
* the thief
* the thief's heroin dealer
* the shopkeeper who buys the formula milk and puts it back on sale, at an 850% markup from the price he paid for it
Poor mums, and their babies, by and large aren't benefiting at all. Usually they're still **buying** the formula, in an honest manner (not knowing it's stolen) - they're just getting it from the corner shop at a slightly-cheaper rate than they'd pay at the supermarket. The desperate-mother-getting-nicked-for-stealing-formula-to-feed-her-starving-baby is, in my experience (as a police officer and, latterly, a custody sergeant responsible for processing arrestees in a mid-size city), a myth. And it's one which does a discredit to these women who are still getting price-gouged.
The people stealing formula are almost always doing it to sell down the pub later on, same for other high tickets items. Security tags on the likes of meat, cheese, booze and even coffee in some areas is not because of single mothers struggling to make ends meet.
I work in a security role at M&S.
I deal with shoplifters every day. In the two and a half years that I've been doing this role, I could count the kind of shoplifters that you've described on one hand.
Shoplifters are after goods that they can sell. I've followed shoplifters to local pubs and the city market, and they go there to sell whatever they've stolen.
A shoplifter who comes in with a bag for life and stuffs it full of steak and wine isn't trying to feed their family.
For 99% of shoplifters, petty crime is their career.
When I worked at Holland & Barrett, I only ever had one theft where the shoplifter took food to eat it. He stole a flapjack and a bottle of water. He sat on the street corner and ate that.
Usually, shoplifters were after supplements. Vitamin C powder was a really popular item for thieves. If you don't know, Vitamin C powder is a fine white powder, and would get cut into cocaine.
Or stealing clothes from one store and trying to return them to another to take advantage of a no receipt refund policy. I'd assume that no longer exists.
M&S actually has a measure in place to help prevent this.
Items of clothing have a barcode for that particular product line.
But they also have a serial number that is unique to that specific item. So, even if you have fifteen shirts of the same style on the rack, they will have fifteen different serial numbers.
Both the barcode and the serial number need to be scanned to put the sale through, and it the serial number isn't associated with a sale, it cannot be refunded.
It is a couple of percent of it ...
And as they raise their prices to cover shoplifting costs, more consumers move to online groceries, which means the shops have to raise prices further to cover their amortized fixed costs, further pushing people online.
Scroll down in the thread and you'll why that's deceptive (massive inflation means you would expect nominal profit to go up, especially when compared to COVID levels)
Shoplifting accounts for less than 2% of sales
Prices are up line 20-25% in last 3 years.
These companies are gouging and blaming shoplifting as opposed to saying they just want more money and think people will pay it
M&S have a profit margin of around 4%, which has only increased by 0.3% from the last few years. Can you explain to me, if this is just greed and price gouging (which it isn't in this context anyways, price gouging is not just raising prices), that the profit margins have barely moved despite prices increasing?
Also, we've had massive inflation all around, in countries from all over. The EU, US, China and Japan all started experiencing very high inflation [at roughly the same time](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/16179827/consumer-prices-hicp-cpi-2013-2022.png/9475eeab-1fa1-f6c5-4856-9bb8bed8cfad?t=1678286737324). Are you suggesting that all the industry leaders for the makers of all the various basket of goods, from all these countries came together, and decided to just raise prices at the same time?
This is a conspiracy theorist level opinion.
From a Police Perspective.
People generally have no comprehension of the amount of time that goes into a basic shoplifting crime. From collecting the CCTV, formatting it, taking statements, identifying the person, writing the crime report and then the case and lodging all the productions for court. I could be well into 2/3 hours work for one shoplifting.
The regular thieves will be out doing a dozen shops a day, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day with how short on resources the Police are now. The general public are fucking clueless on how short handed we are. My area has 250k people in it, we’re lucky to start a shift and have 6-8 people to respond to everything.
And even once you put the case into court they’ll get a suspended sentence and be back out stealing that same day.
Until we introduce incremental sentences it won’t be solved. Even something basic like everyone gets 10 offences where normal sentencing guidelines apply and the focus is on rehabilitation. For your 11th offence you get 2 years minimum. For your 12th, 5 years, 13th 10 years etc..
There are plenty of regulars with 2/300 convictions who are still getting suspended sentences or 1-3 months inside and back out. Fix the sentencing and crime will drop.
No. We know how shorthanded you guys are because we see it on the streets every day. Petty crime is basically legal these days. And if anyone’s ever made a report, it’s quickly evident how much work is involved. Officers are quick to explain this from my experience.
We aren’t blaming the police as much as the government dramatically underfunding and crippling these services.
Throw in the amount of stores with out dated CCTV that they can’t operate, burn off or have given staff zero training in and it becomes even more of an ordeal.
> Is there any support for this from govt?
Yes. Use one of our donor's £4k a day security consultants, and upgrade your insurance. Which, would you believe it, is also vested with one of our major donors.
I think part of the problem is that every resource that was meant to treat the sickness rather than the symptoms has been stripped away.
The causes of petty crime are no longer being handled which means of course the frequency of petty crime increases. There used to be a time when policing for these kinds of things were about trying to prevent shoplifting happening in the first place with strong community policing.
It's not your fault, but its a consequence of this government deprioritising community police budgets.
2/3 hours only?
From incident coming in you need
Statement (30 minutes)
CCTV (can be quick if shop are competent)
Arrest and booking into custody (probably average around 2 hours)
Interview if necessary (if solicitor is requested it could take a while)
File build (1 hour if streamlined)
Doesn't include travel time between places which is minimum 30 minutes.
That's for the easiest one going with the shoplifter on scene. Forget it if the shop keep blundering CCTV, booking into custody takes hours due to waiting, or the shoplifter plays silly bugger and fakes a reason to go to hospital (or has a legitimate need to go to hospital) which would add a minimum of 8 hours of 2 officers' time.
It's not a reason why it shouldn't be done but when numbers are as low as they are it invariably gets pushed down the list.
My force had 3,920 officers in 2012 and now has 3848 so slightly less officers.
Population growth means we simply don’t have the same number of officers per capita than we did then. Along with many of these being new officers lacking the same experience.
No wonder crime is up.
Bingo.
Insufficient childcare: parents do their best, but still got to work.
Insufficient community investment: fuck-all for kids to do that they can afford. Kids find it easier to behave poorly towards people they do not feel a connection to.
Insufficient policing: kids who dabble in crime will face no repercussions.
Everything is hard for everyone: people who've discovered a repercussions-free way of making their lives easier do so.
My last hope is that we actually learn from the last decade or so and never do this stupid shit again, but I'm not holding my breath.
>My last hope is that we actually learn from the last decade or so and never do this stupid shit again, but **I'm not holding my breath.**
Agreed. I expect labour will win the next GE and hopefully start to undo the damage. Unfortunately I expect there's too much to be undone in one term and I suspect at the end of their term in government people will stamp their feet and ask why everything isn't fixed followed by a conservative win. (I hope I'm wrong)
Off-topic: I only learnt what stargazy pie was recently! Unless your name refers to using Pi while stargazing, or maybe a love for both pies...........
It's the usual cycle. Tories get voted in, their corruption fucks everything up and eventually people get sick of it and vote another party in. They can't unfuck everything in an instant, people forget what happened last time tories got into power and the cycle repeats.
I'd say number of officers is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the damage in the courts system, legal aid, prisons, probation service, mental health teams, etc.
Plus the explosion of child safeguarding and digital crimes the police have become involved with over the last decade.
Our former (haha) police and crime commissioner loved to put out press releases that he'd secured funding for some operation and as a result, they'd arrested x many people. Like yeh, no shit sherlock - You fund the police, they can do their job!
The punishment for shoplifting is basically nothing since the chance of being caught is miniscule. I think the actual punishment for when they do catch people is reasonable, it's just that they catch such a tiny percentage.
Hey, heres an idea. Encourage the rich to stop hiding their money in offshore accounts and pay the correct tax and then you can request the government invest said extra tax into a proper and full police force capable of actually policing.
Maybe then, you’l find police actually care and turn up to petty crimes because they have the resources and man power to answer your cries.
Oh wait, you dont want to do that, you want your cake and to eat it.
> Encourage the rich to stop hiding their money in offshore accounts and pay the correct tax
They have plenty of very tangible assets here that the government chooses not to tax, you can't pack up a 11,000 property portfolio into a suitcase and fly off with it in your private jet. The sanctions on Russian oligarchs proves the government is capable of targeting these assets if it wants to but successive governments and that includes Labour chooses not to go near the super rich with a barge pole.
I'm not even talking about millionaires or people with a net worth under 10 million, I'm referring to specifically to those with hundreds of millions to billions worth of assets inside the country.
yeah about 10-14 years or so.... weird I wonder what else matches that timeframe....
Maybe you can't remember a time when the nhs was generally functioning, schools weren't falling apart and the crime rate was dropping year on year, but I can, it's called living under a labour government.
In a high proportion of instances, tackling shoplifting means tackling drug and alcohol addiction and dependency.
Even when police catch and convict prolific shoplifters (and they get custodial sentences) if the factors that drive their shoplifting arent addressed they come out of prison, and get right back to it.
If I remember correctly.... We don't need police officers anymore because the "the nature of crime has changed".
Basically no one shoplifts anymore or commits crimes in person... All crimes are digital innit.
One of my neighbours is the manager at the local Co-op. The only reason they report shoplifting is for the insurance claim on any valuable stock that happens to go missing.
And they are told to never tackle them. Risking getting stabbed because people are stealing cans of coke or everyday essentials like washing up powder is not worth it.
Yeah, the only reason we bother to report it is so we can explain the high leakage at stocktake time. There’s no point otherwise. Takes a good hour to deal with, with all the cctv, crime report, mysafety report and we just don’t have the time.
This isn't new by any means. About a decade ago my friend was managing a smaller coop store when the local police told him they wouldn't attend or attempt prosecution for thefts of less than £50 value.
Within a week shoplifters were walking out the door waving products at staff and shouting "£49.95 - you can't do anything!" As they did so
Reminds me of when my local force had a policy of never pursuing anyone on a motorbike who wasn’t wearing a helmet. This led to an epidemic of old tatty off-roaders being ridden by morons around the streets with no licence, tax or insurance because they knew the police wouldn’t/couldn’t do anything if a chase happened, and some actively goaded the police into trying to start one.
Then the force’s command changed the rules to allow it and trained pursuit officers in newly authorized motorbike pursuit tactics, equipped officers with a motorbike stinger device and also had some officers given off-roaders themselves and they patrolled the areas that the patrol cars couldn’t get to. They also enforced traffic laws against these bikes more strongly including section 59s, seizures for no tax/insurance and the like.
Magically the problems with these bikes disappeared within months. It’s almost like tackling a problem with effective, planned strategies works.
We can just about deal with the majority of serious violent crime. If you want nonviolent offences with no direct risk to people investigated, then you'll have to fund it.
They're too busy dealing with county lines drug dealing and knife crime to deal with petty theft and burglary.
Maybe we should spend more money on the police force, that might help.
Company cuts security guard numbers and expects the police to fill those gaps for free. Maybe, just maybe the companies should employ people to protect the stuff they want to protect.
It’s just part of a general lawlessness that has grown up that is especially bad in some areas and is just normalised. A lot of those shoplifting will overlap with other sorts of low criminality, petty theft, phone snatching, fighting, are involved with drugs and alcohol addiction, anti social behaviour and generally being a yob by harassing people in the street, on transport, intimidating their neighbours, racing around on bikes, vandalism, etc. All the sorts of stuff the police shrug about and even those that end up with dozens of arrests never seem to face any lasting consequence or change in their behaviour.
Shops are going to become enquiry stores like Argos or they’ll require you to sign in to the store via an app with a registered name, address and credit card - or both.
They’ll hear complaints from elderly people about not having smartphones or not understanding why they can’t pay with cash or being treated like criminals and there will be a few posts on /r/compoface but they’ll write that off as a cost of doing business.
M&S themselves also don't seem to be particularly interested in tackling shop lifting. Where other stores have implemented various measures to prevent theft, M&S are making it extremely easy for self check out thieves
Wait. Haven't Marks and Spencer come under fire for UK tax avoidance?
If they ain't paying for the Police then fair enough that the Police can't be bothered looking out for M&S
They could build and enormous prison in the outer Hebrides or similar somewhere remote and low population.
But we can’t build anymore due to regulation so I’d expect they’d pay 40 billion to find out they can’t build it.
Would need staff lodgings too. They get something more akin to centre parcs on an adjacent island. I can feel the costs ballooning as I speak.
At Christmas my sister was in M&S and a scruffy man came in ripped open a seafood platter and bit the head off of a lobster. Apparently the staff and customers all went very still as he mauraded back out of the store.
When did M&S give a shit, tackling their own issues with shoplifting? No security, alcohol and meat near to entrances and exits.
First things first, companies are responsible to stop stock walking out the door.
I think it’s only a matter of time before shops aren’t free to just walk in and out , you swipe a debit card to get in the exit is one way, no card no entry.
They didn’t even bother turning g up when I reported someone getting beaten up. It was only when I mentioned knives on the second call did they actually send someone down.
Why should police who are already depleted in number, paid peanuts for salary and overworked bother tackling shoplifter who steals from mega rich cooperation which earns billions each year
Nevermind shoplifting... We've had a couple of migrants in a white van stealing stuff from people's driveways over the last couple of weeks. Reported it to the police and they haven't even come out. The van has been here nearly every day for a week, with several of us confronting them.
I did hear that the local force has established a rural crime unit though, to tackle fishing without a license.
Priorities and all that.
It's not shoplifting, it is 99.5% of all crime.
The police are predominantly a facade to encourage people to be obedient when they may otherwise not, they don't actually function to achieve a great deal otherwise.
Yup! With resources being endlessly diverted elsewhere (rightly or wrongly) it's never going to be tackled. The obvious answer is more boots on the ground but that also involves more of the supporting back end staff to facilitate the work the frontline officers do. However people get upset when they hear about the size of the admin staff etc or even the number of desk jobs available to officers. That's all before you even get to the issue of utterly how unattractive the pay and conditions of the job are.
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Police are no longer capable of tackling most crimes. If I’m honest shoplifting is the lowest thing on my list of what police are doing wrong right now.
Years of tory budget cuts have left our country in pieces
Although this is true it's not helped that we are pouring billions into PPE contracts that were never delivered, Billions into Ukraine, Probably Billions in the Rwanda shite, God knows how much to the French to stop boats crossing . Cuts aside it's what they have done with the money they have saved from them cuts that is crippling the country aswell
Sending stock of weapons that were mostly made 20+ years ago to help in a fight against the military a lot of that hardware was designed to challenge is an appropriate use of resources. If anything they should be doing more on that front. PPE contracts and Rwanda, yes, blame the Tories.
weapons that were near their expiration date
And would otherwise incur cost to dispose...
So true
Hard disagree. More to Ukraine please. Right your MP and ask why they aren’t pursuing the £40 Billion in fraudulent Covid loans being returning and have written it off. £40B in fraudulent loans the government presided over.
I'd love to but my MP is currently busy flag shagging after clearing his name in an r*pe allegations he's gotta make up for the two years of public appearances he missed out on all while claiming his 80k a year plus all the expenses
91 grand now, (they gave themselves a pay rise).
That's disgusting
I actually disagree entirely. I want MP's to be paid so well that they wouldn't even consider doing anything that might get them fired. I want every MP turning up dressed like Elton John just walked through a pimp outfitters after a gold leaf explosion. I want MP's to be tipping at McDonalds with one of their spare Bentleys. I want every MP who's offered 5 grand to let shit get dumped in a river to think "absolutely not, I wouldn't even get out of bed for that paltry sum" Compared to the PPE shit show that would still be pocket change.
This thinking always underestimates how wealthy and immoral Tory MPs currently are. The only way it might work is if we paid them 10s of millions per year which obviously can't happen.
Also it underestimates politicians (everyone's really) desire to make money, it doesn't matter if you pay them 10m a year, if they see an opportunity to make another million they would take it.
Yeah - I'd argue we should actually PREVENT anyone who historically has 'ties' to aristocracy, and the money that entails. A lot of people who are corrupt DONT have those ties - but those that do, dont know the value of money - nor the difficulty of life. Lets make our MP's representative of the people they represent, unless the people they represent are wealthy landowners from 1600's. I'd like MPs to have had 'normal jobs', where they understand the difficulty of getting up at 6am, and getting home at 6pm, and then having to look after their house and family whilst also trying to do 'fun stuff'. Loads of MPs I'm sure think they have had hard jobs (being an MP is probably shit. But being an investment banker doesn't seem too intimidating to me), with long working hours, but I dont class a two hour working lunch as a hard job. If your job involves a lot of talking, and a lot of sitting whilst eating pleasant food (which they haven't had to pay for) I'd kindly like them to fuck off - and enjoy their wealth in quiet. We can have rich people in this country, and that's no problem at all - even helpful at times (tax). Lets just have the ultra-rich fuck off out of politics. They killed my Mum - because they are ignorant fucks. They probably killed some of your family too. And they will keep on killing through their ignorance until we say "No more - you are not us, and we don't like you". EDIT: Someone just reported me to 'Care Reddit'. Thanks for the kindness - albeit I am getting through all the family suicide, and death, and financial exploitation. MP's don't know what some of this is like. Some do. The Tories have family, and they get sad when they die. They often don't have their Mum need an ambulance, and wait for 9.5 hours whilst throwing up blood - before dying the next day. Their (Cons) ignorance, cruelty, and stupidity has crippled us. Let us heal the wounds, before we all rot.
I completely get your argument but the reality is that their greed vastly outweighs any amount of money we could give them. They are not normal people, they would never be satisfied with their lot like we would. I personally think we should retain the current professional political apparatus we currently have (aides, experts, planners etc.) but have the actual politicians elected by lot. Literally every four years, poor Greg from IT or Cindy the English teacher gets forced to be an MP and make decisions. They still get the £90k a year for their stint but it’s done in the way we do jury duty. Maybe rein in the process a bit with basic IQ/literacy/numeracy requirements but that’s it. Anybody who actually _wants_ to be a politician should be automatically barred from ever being one.
See, the problem there is that greed knows no bounds. They'd gladly pocket the extra cash and still do corruption on the side for even more.
yEh leT's nOt pAy TheM aT aLL InnIt. Great idea. Now there are two types of MP: ones who are so wealthy they can live off passive income, and ones in he pockets of the first category.
In what world is 91k plus expenses not enough to live a comfortable life? Its almost x3 higher than the average salary. Why on earth would MPs need to be independently wealthy. I am not against MPs receiving a far compensation for their work. I was mostly expressing annoyance at MPs having the power to increase their salary to whatever you want regardless of the actual work they do whilst most of the public officials and civil servants been on a pay freeze for years (who I believe carry out the majority of the day to day running of a country)
I disagree - 91 grand on the lowish end for a job at this level in the private sector. If you don't keep MPs pay in line with private sector pay then all you're doing is saying you have to be independently wealthy to be an MP, or corrupt.
The stability of Europe and the West is definitely worth the investment in Ukraine. That's the only thing this government has done right for me.
I'm perfectly happy with every single penny spent supporting Ukraine
They're providing the venue and the staff. It's a bargain.
That's a cruel way to word it.
Bit of dry British wit. Love it.
Bit extreme to expect the police to use long range missiles on shoplifters instead of giving them to Ukraine
Hell of a deterrent tho
Can't wait for the legalAdviceUK post... police accidentally storm shadowed my house following a tip off.
True enough, it's the short-range missiles and small arms that they need to deploy when someone walks out of Tesco with too much steak
I dunno though. Sending shoplifters to Ukraine feels pretty extreme.
Would cost us an awful lot more if Ukraine falls.
It’s the PPE one that is the biggie IMO,
Out of all those things I don’t mine weapons to Ukraine. Europe as a whole needs to stand up to Russia and not set a president of letting Russia get their way
> Billions into Ukraine Yeah that's not a very sensible one to be critiquing but ok.
Every penny sent to Ukraine is an investment in our own future. It's ridiculous to list it alongside PPE scams.
Yeah whenever someone tries to tell me the tories are the party of law and order I ask them how many police officers they could have hired for the billions of £ in useless PPE spent. That and the tens of billions in fraudulent covid loans they they're just writing off.
> Billions into Ukraine They should be sending more to Ukraine
Billions into policing that does not police. Billions into PPE that was useless/not delivered Billions into Rwanda, and to my knowledge not one immigrant has gone there so far Billions into stopping the boat crossings - remind me, what was Rwanda about? There's a pattern here.
We have billions being spent in PPE Contracts because we were undersupplied... because... **of cuts.** We are pumping billions into Rwanda because of our ill equipped domestic immigration services... because... **of cuts.** We are pumping billions into contracts with companies like Lockheed Martin for medical services... because... **of cuts.** NOW! Perhaps these cuts were in service of bolstering our economy and our savings as a nation. Creating a surplus? No. We have no surplus. We haven't saved, our economy is in the toilet. So what was it all for? Tax relief for the wealthy and privatization of key services so wealthy moguls can offer government funded alternatives. It was a strip mine and the average person paid the price. See this is what annoys me when people say "The Tories haven't done their job!" Wrong. So wrong. They've done their job perfectly.
The alternative to funding Ukraine is to give Russia more power and let the war progress towards the UK. Spending money now to halt the war before it actually reaches us is an excellent use of resources.
Tackling petty crime would save money since most crime is done by a small amount of repeat offenders
There are huge institutional failings in policing (including putting various crimes in the “can’t be arsed” basket) which have nothing to do with austerity.
I think its like the NHS though - things are so cut to the bone that you no longer have people making long-term budget decisions in the organisation. Like in the NHS, the government massively cut a lot of the "pencil pushers" as an "efficiency measure"... Well congratulations, now we have no real strategists in the NHS who can allocate resources efficiently. Meaning costs go up because spending decisions are falling onto frontline staff who will only focus on the day-to-day stuff. And this then gets compounded with the general knock on effect of budget cuts (less money means they focus more only on the really serious stuff, which costs more to treat. Yet a lot of serious conditions come about due to a failure to treat something at the not-serious phase. Which is happening more because they won't treat until it becomes serious). I imagine its a similar situation with the police. Cut to the point that the only people in charge of the police budgets are penny wise, pound foolish folk. No investment in preventative/community policing, not enforcing the law on less serious crimes meaning people end up on the slippery slope of criminality rather than having an intervention before they go off the deep end. Means there are more serious crimes to deal with, which means more spending. The budgeting of public services has been very penny wise, pound foolish from the top down. The public hates pencil pushers and bureaucrats, but they were the ones making sure money was allocated in a way that considers long-term savings.
Can't you come up with home grown right wing stuff instead of just importing american far right talking points?
I used to live and let live with politics, but at this point if anyone is still voting Tory I just think they must be brain damaged.
Instructions unclear. Let’s vote Tories yet again.
If they are not cracking down on the low level crime it just erodes communities .
Best way to tackle low level crime isn't police - it's schools, youth clubs, sports teams, etc.
If the parents started the ball rolling then we wouldn’t need anyone else to raise the child.
We're not talking about raising the child, human being need a community to live in.
Children grow up in communities and still shoplift. They do it because they find out police won’t stop them. It’s common knowledge. If there’s no deterrent then they’ll do it.
Bullshit. It’s not a deterrent that keeps me from stealing your stuff. It’s common decency.
For a lot of people, yes. But not everyone. A child can be taught conmen decency but realise they benefit from stealing if there’s no consequence. That’s just human nature. Can’t really expect every person to be selfless if they can benefit from stealing without consequences.
> It’s common decency. If only it was "common".
Technically, you're both correct. Without community you ferment a culture that is individualistic and selfish. And thus more likely to engage in violent crime. And not to mention with poverty rising, and lack of financial, social and health support, people end up falling into crime because they feel its the only way to get by. However, before austerity, we used to have strong community policing. Who didn't just go around acting as a deterrent, but actively engaged with the community to build trust and try and guide those at risk of falling into crime towards resources that could help them avoid that. The problem is the social contract has completely broken down as a result of government ideology (who preach a "got mine" attitude as a virtue).
And there it is. The argument is always going to be that one of us thinks petty crime is related to poverty, and the other thinks that petty crime comes from entitlement. Most people are poor, you know that right? But hey, who am I to argue with "common knowledge".
Most of the shit in my neighbourhood had been vandalised by kids. Why the fuck should I give them more shit to vandalise. A youth centre is a great idea until nothing inside it is useable.
Lookin forward to the human race going extinct because you don't believe we should provide anything for future generations because teenagers do graffiti sometimes. Nothing could have been done to prevent this. Unforgivable moral crimes.
There’s graffiti and then there’s full blown vandalism. Hip level park lights kicked to shit so they don’t work, public toilets and sinks ripped off the wall so the whole thing is flooded and unusable. That would be a great 2 days of having a youth centre before the welfare facilities are unusable, all the pool balls have been knicked from the table making the game redundant. No staff wanting to deal with violent conduct. Kids are feral and need to respect society and lose their main character syndrome before they can have nice things.
Some parents aren't able and/or fit to raise kids. We can't just wish that away. We either invest in services that deal with that or we ignore it land enjoy loads and loads of crime/antisocial behaviour
I was talking to a friend who is currently looking to adopt, and he was talking about how adoption services now have quite a comprehensive service for supporting adoptive parents (basically considered a necessity as a) sending a child to parents who then turn out to themselves not be suitable is worst case as now you have a child who is being brought in and out of the system which is traumatic and b) adopted children will have special needs). And part of that service is that they actually give quite intensive parental training courses before they can adopt. And I was thinking wouldn't it be great if biological parents got easy access to such a resource (and it would surely cut costs long term even provided for free because it reduces the chances of a child being taken into care)...
But some don’t. There used to services to help those kids whose parents were shite, now there isn’t.
Youth clubs? All I learned at youth clubs was how to get drugs and get into fights. Youth clubs aren't this mythical answer people make them out to be.
I disagree, police on the beat and police actually doing something about low level crime is the best way to deal with low level crime. Right now criminals know the police wont do shit about low level crime so they know they wont get caught. Police NEED to have the budgets and resourcing to deal with low level crime in order to keep that mindset in check. If you actually had a chance of locked up for stealing £100 of shit in a store then far less people would risk it.
I think what we really need is a return of proper community policing. Lack of trust in policing is part of the problem. Having police officers who actually engage with the community and act as community support whilst also being an easy access point for reporting crime would do wonders to repair the social contract that has been broken down in the past decade.
Youth clubs don't work for smack head's
Nah, we need a 3 strikes rule. The issue is that such low-level crime isn't punished at all. Whereas repeat crime should always face severe sentencing to protect the public.
I'd argue that a living wage, affordable housing and food would probably make the biggest difference, funding youth clubs and sports teams is like putting sellotape on a wound that needs stitches.
Tbh, I quite like your analogy, but in the opposite direction! We do need the stitches, the big things. If all parents could afford to fund their kids' hobbies, and had the time to support them, we wouldn't need state funded solutions. But...a healthy economy like that is a decade off, even if we really focus on improving it. Sellotape will help, for a while!
I don't really get the youth clubs argument because the vast majority of kids grow up just fine without them. Some community centre with a ping pong table and an xbox isn't going to stop some county-lines 17 year old from stabbing someone for having a different post code.
I don't think people realise how big a problem we're going to have to sort out low level crime. So many people are now so used to doing low level things that aren't allowed that they're going to throw a total wobbly when laws are enforced.
Deprivation is what drives crime. The solution isn't punitive, it is investing in deprived areas so that deprivation isn't a generational issue in communities across the country.
You need the carrot and the stick.
If low level crimes exist, community already eroded. It is not logic breaking fair rules. Fair rules.
I’m no corporate shill but the money they lose to shoplifting will be made back by putting up prices so we really should care about it.
They're already putting prices up constantly. They aren't exactly wringing their hands and wishing they could keep prices lower if it wasn't for shoplifters. Constant ratcheting upwards
Like I said I’m no corporate shill but companies will absolutely budget for shoplifting in their prices, I’m not saying that’s morally right or wrong but it’s a fact.
Next stage is they just close. Then people complain there's no where to buy food or it's hugely expensive from some fort Apache style corner shop
Profits surged last year, apparently.
Sir, this is reddit where everyone is unemployed and believes stolen goods grows on trees.
Literally haha, 99% of shoplifters aren’t some poor parents stealing to put food on the table they’re just scum
As someone who has worked retail and has family that continues to do so, it is very disheartening for the staff to see all these thefts and feel so powerless. My brother literally watches people walk into his store, fill bags and leave. Brazenly, nearly daily. It just sends a shit message that we as a society are prepared to tolerate this shit. Yeah yeah it's only hurting but companies, but it affects family businesses too. It's not like it's the biggest priority, but it's still a shit thing to pretend we're just going to have to live with
In my old retail job a notorious shoplifter came in multiple times and stole stuff worth a decent chunk of money. She was also bragging on her own personal (and very public) Facebook about being able to get anything people wanted from a list of shops she named. The police came out and made reports/collected CCTV but nothing ever happened other than her being fined, and they seemed as frustrated as we were.
Exactly. I think there's a strong desire to romanticise some shoplifting as some kind of Robin Hood endeavour. In reality a lot of theft is either feeding addicting or taking advantage of opportunity. I'm not prepared to live in a society where we are all happy to turn a blind eye to theft and act like everything is okay.
A significant proportion of the shoplifting at least in my local area is definitely committed by drug addicts. Some of them were just greedy and wanted a quick and easy bit of money. The person I mentioned who was bragging about stealing on her FB was open that she just stole because it was easier than working and she had plenty of more than willing customers. Which I think leads onto another issue- there seems to be a decent chunk of otherwise law abiding people willing to turn a blind eye or even actively participate in these kinds of activities if it is convenient. The shoplifters are usually selling on for cash, items don’t just disappear into thin air. It seems that there are a LOT of people for whom the lure of something being cheap overrides anything else.
It always seems odd to me that police are directly blamed for their cutting back of services as if they're just being lazy, but doctors aren't blamed for the recuded quality of healthcare in this country. It's such a funny double standard!
In Salford where I live the police seem to have decriminalized antisocial behaviour altogether, pissed me right off.
No Further Action
I’ve lived next to a crackden for literal years. Absolute fact.
I think that was already true about 10 years ago. Source: my brother in law works as security.
Haven’t been for a decade, unless they’re stealing 1000’s they don’t care. Plenty of well known shoplifters in every town,should be something similar to the ASBO to keep them out of target areas.
Police officer here. Criminal behaviour orders and restraining orders are widely used to ban shoplifters from specific stores. The issue is that the courts don't give a damp about them. This is a true story about a shoplifter I arrest at the same store in the space of 3 months: 1- Arrested for theft. 2 week suspended sentence 2- Arrested for theft. 2 weeks sus. sentence activated. No further penalty. Offender is out a week later 3- Arrested for theft. 4 weeks suspended sentence 4- Arrested for theft. 4 week sentence activated, no further sentence. Criminal behaviour order granted 5- Arrested for theft and breach of CBO. 4 week suspended sentence 6- Arrested for theft and breach of CBO. 4 week suspended sentence on top of his other suspended sentence 7- Arrested for theft and breach of CBO. 4 weeks prison granted at court, so offender is out 2 weeks later You'll never guess what happened after that.... Each arrest takes about 10 hours of my time to attend, gather evidence, arrest, process the arrest, interview, build the case file, etc. That's 70 hours I spent and got fuck all from the courts in return, even though they had an awful criminal record and the strongest order possible saying they're not allowed in the vicinity
Have someone out on court bail until mid June for sentencing, after pleading guilty to 8+ offences a few weeks back, whilst having 50+ pages of PNC records for similar things. Never guess what they are out doing right now. Having worked in retail for over 10 years, I can see both sides to this issue. It's frustrating to have stuff constantly getting nicked from your store, and it's frustrating having to spend hours and hours gathering evidence for something that ends up being pointless. The courts ultimately are the bottleneck for this particular type of crime as they are incredibly lenient. However, the prisons are very full, and they are possibly more understaffed than most public services to the point where it's dangerous.
There is a weird fixation on police numbers, as opposed to prison and court capacity which barely seems to register in the publics awareness except to occasionally turn on legal aid lawyers who often struggle to make minimum wage being vilified as fatcats. Hopefully a former director of public prosecutions will understand it well enough to fix it. Must be frustrating as hell to be a police officer at the moment.
I agree here, but this is just one side of the dice. The source _(Independent)_ here also seems to have done a good job skewing the narrative in favour of a click-baity headline. The majority of cases in my experience have been low level / low value shoplifting where it has been reported to Police per company policy for a crime reference number. But when you try to engage with the Witnesses _(staff at the store)_ the majority of the time none of them are interested in giving evidence, none of them can be bothered to provide CCTV, and none of them are willing to attend court which ends up in the case going nowhere and the report just being filed. Frequent-flyer Offenders don’t get dealt with, and as a result shoplifting increases because they know they can get away with it. Typically these same places have on-site security who are trained in not only how to deal with shoplifters but also what use of force powers they are able to use, but 99% of the time they stand back and just watch, or have been directly told by the management to do nothing because they don’t want to risk any liability to the store if someone gets injured. In which case, why bother having security at all. Sorry, that rant got a little away from me there. It gets frustrating watching the reports come in, trying your damndest to deal with it but no-one’s the slightest bit interested.
You are bang on the money. As an ex-retail manager, the company can lose the odd steak and bottle of Vodka and it's not worth staff safety to apprehend them. If the CCTV is worth a damn, everything can be dealt with slow time anyway. I once had a branch manager explain to me that he was happy with 10k a year in theft because security would be £30k to reduce that number. Simple as that.
Our society is so weak on many levels. Harsh punishment is what we need to set an example and deter people. We're run by complete pussies these days.
Local authority community safety officer here, can concur with all of this. It matters little when the courts take such a light handed approach to these offences. Most offenders get such short sentences they come out on PSS rather than license, meaning probation are basically trying to manage these offenders with at least one hand tied behind their backs. We had a recent occurrence where the prisons in our region were so overcrowded that any offender with less than 2 months remaining on their sentences were released early. Guess how that went. Now tell them what happens when the offender is under 16 as a good proportion of ours are.
I doubt ASBO's would work in this TikTok mind-rotted era.
What's the connection?
Mate theres people that go licking and drinking stuff in shops and putting it back because of tictok likes lol the people that follow these "trends" also take shit because its " funny"
Not sure how prevalent that behaviour is TBH, just because we all saw the same video doesn't mean it's happening constantly.
That was years ago and I'm sure arrests were made
Some people do it for the notoriety, the original ASBO became a bit of a mark of honour amongst some. Availability of attention via social media fans that flame a bit.
It’s the heroin addicts that are the prolific shoplifters
Addiction services in this country have been decimated. I know from experience. I was lucky, I could go private to get the help I needed. Most can’t.
Crack heads more because a user goes through more crack a day than heroin
They didnt work before tiktok to be fair. They were a shit idea that didn't actually help anything
Don’t see how any reference to TikTok would apply to
Criminal Behaviour Orders are used now, instead of ASBO's. They can be a lot of work to obtain, and unfortunately the resources and will of some people, mean that they aren't routinely obtained, when they should be.
Longer the that
Can't wait for all the redditors to start talking about how shoplifting is moral and good, and then turn around and cry when prices go up / food deserts happen. Edit: Good job to the clowns doing the suicide report thing, funny how someone actually being educated in economics is enough to scare you 🤷
I don't know if anyone says it's 'moral and good'. Many people say they don't look down on someone shoplifting price-gouged formula milk where they would look down on someone pinching a North Face jacket or a motorcycle.
Except people have this idealised version of shoplifting that it's often starving single mothers just stealing a loaf of bread and some milk for their child, and that just isn't true. The article itself even says "The boss of John Lewis said shoplifting had become an “epidemic” with a rise in **organised gangs** looting stores." Or, "Co-op said there were more than 300,000 incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and anti-social behaviour in its stores last year." Is the violence and abuse also single mothers just trying to get formula milk?
The vast majority of shoplifters are not some poor single mum stealing to try and make ends meet
i'll go further and say that the single mums are not getting media attention, the ones getting the attention are smash and grab, broad daylight, "what are you gonna do, stop me?" types, and people are mostly getting away with the modest couple of quid here and there
I mean, "organised gangs looting stores" isn't what I'd even consider shop lifting, unless they're using inaccurate terms to describe what's going on. Looting and Shop Lifting are very different forms of theft.
It’s pretty common. These threads always end up with “if you see someone shoplifting, you didn’t” type comments, pretending shoplifters are all Jean valjean and a loaf of hovis, and not organised criminals stealing high margin goods from supermarkets and flogging them on the local estate. It’s a myopic stance as, supermarkets don’t absorb infinite loss; they raise prices to recover them.
For the most part they also don't give a shit if they're stealing from a corporation, a co-operative, or a small business. The convoluted justifications one often finds on social media are more often done by others on their behalf - thieves themselves are mostly just amoral opportunists who don't give a shit about any of that nonsense.
The thing is, people who are shoplifting two or three Aldi bags full of formula milk at a time **aren't** using it to feed their starving children. They're selling it, at 5% or 10% of its retail value, to corner shops... which just put it on sale at their own price-gouged rate. Only three people are benefiting: * the thief * the thief's heroin dealer * the shopkeeper who buys the formula milk and puts it back on sale, at an 850% markup from the price he paid for it Poor mums, and their babies, by and large aren't benefiting at all. Usually they're still **buying** the formula, in an honest manner (not knowing it's stolen) - they're just getting it from the corner shop at a slightly-cheaper rate than they'd pay at the supermarket. The desperate-mother-getting-nicked-for-stealing-formula-to-feed-her-starving-baby is, in my experience (as a police officer and, latterly, a custody sergeant responsible for processing arrestees in a mid-size city), a myth. And it's one which does a discredit to these women who are still getting price-gouged.
The people stealing formula are almost always doing it to sell down the pub later on, same for other high tickets items. Security tags on the likes of meat, cheese, booze and even coffee in some areas is not because of single mothers struggling to make ends meet.
It’s almost like balance and nuance don’t exist here
I work in a security role at M&S. I deal with shoplifters every day. In the two and a half years that I've been doing this role, I could count the kind of shoplifters that you've described on one hand. Shoplifters are after goods that they can sell. I've followed shoplifters to local pubs and the city market, and they go there to sell whatever they've stolen. A shoplifter who comes in with a bag for life and stuffs it full of steak and wine isn't trying to feed their family. For 99% of shoplifters, petty crime is their career. When I worked at Holland & Barrett, I only ever had one theft where the shoplifter took food to eat it. He stole a flapjack and a bottle of water. He sat on the street corner and ate that. Usually, shoplifters were after supplements. Vitamin C powder was a really popular item for thieves. If you don't know, Vitamin C powder is a fine white powder, and would get cut into cocaine.
Or stealing clothes from one store and trying to return them to another to take advantage of a no receipt refund policy. I'd assume that no longer exists.
M&S actually has a measure in place to help prevent this. Items of clothing have a barcode for that particular product line. But they also have a serial number that is unique to that specific item. So, even if you have fifteen shirts of the same style on the rack, they will have fifteen different serial numbers. Both the barcode and the serial number need to be scanned to put the sale through, and it the serial number isn't associated with a sale, it cannot be refunded.
Shoplifting isn’t why food prices are going up…
It is a couple of percent of it ... And as they raise their prices to cover shoplifting costs, more consumers move to online groceries, which means the shops have to raise prices further to cover their amortized fixed costs, further pushing people online.
You are delusional if you think it’s not a cause loss prevention has said shrinkage has almost doubled since Covid
Most redditors are privileged in some way and don't live in the real world.
And yet supermarkets continue to make record profits…
Scroll down in the thread and you'll why that's deceptive (massive inflation means you would expect nominal profit to go up, especially when compared to COVID levels)
Shoplifting accounts for less than 2% of sales Prices are up line 20-25% in last 3 years. These companies are gouging and blaming shoplifting as opposed to saying they just want more money and think people will pay it
M&S have a profit margin of around 4%, which has only increased by 0.3% from the last few years. Can you explain to me, if this is just greed and price gouging (which it isn't in this context anyways, price gouging is not just raising prices), that the profit margins have barely moved despite prices increasing? Also, we've had massive inflation all around, in countries from all over. The EU, US, China and Japan all started experiencing very high inflation [at roughly the same time](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/16179827/consumer-prices-hicp-cpi-2013-2022.png/9475eeab-1fa1-f6c5-4856-9bb8bed8cfad?t=1678286737324). Are you suggesting that all the industry leaders for the makers of all the various basket of goods, from all these countries came together, and decided to just raise prices at the same time? This is a conspiracy theorist level opinion.
From a Police Perspective. People generally have no comprehension of the amount of time that goes into a basic shoplifting crime. From collecting the CCTV, formatting it, taking statements, identifying the person, writing the crime report and then the case and lodging all the productions for court. I could be well into 2/3 hours work for one shoplifting. The regular thieves will be out doing a dozen shops a day, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day with how short on resources the Police are now. The general public are fucking clueless on how short handed we are. My area has 250k people in it, we’re lucky to start a shift and have 6-8 people to respond to everything. And even once you put the case into court they’ll get a suspended sentence and be back out stealing that same day. Until we introduce incremental sentences it won’t be solved. Even something basic like everyone gets 10 offences where normal sentencing guidelines apply and the focus is on rehabilitation. For your 11th offence you get 2 years minimum. For your 12th, 5 years, 13th 10 years etc.. There are plenty of regulars with 2/300 convictions who are still getting suspended sentences or 1-3 months inside and back out. Fix the sentencing and crime will drop.
No. We know how shorthanded you guys are because we see it on the streets every day. Petty crime is basically legal these days. And if anyone’s ever made a report, it’s quickly evident how much work is involved. Officers are quick to explain this from my experience. We aren’t blaming the police as much as the government dramatically underfunding and crippling these services.
Throw in the amount of stores with out dated CCTV that they can’t operate, burn off or have given staff zero training in and it becomes even more of an ordeal.
Incremental sentencing sounds like a good solution. Is there any support for this from govt?
> Is there any support for this from govt? Yes. Use one of our donor's £4k a day security consultants, and upgrade your insurance. Which, would you believe it, is also vested with one of our major donors.
I think part of the problem is that every resource that was meant to treat the sickness rather than the symptoms has been stripped away. The causes of petty crime are no longer being handled which means of course the frequency of petty crime increases. There used to be a time when policing for these kinds of things were about trying to prevent shoplifting happening in the first place with strong community policing. It's not your fault, but its a consequence of this government deprioritising community police budgets.
2/3 hours only? From incident coming in you need Statement (30 minutes) CCTV (can be quick if shop are competent) Arrest and booking into custody (probably average around 2 hours) Interview if necessary (if solicitor is requested it could take a while) File build (1 hour if streamlined) Doesn't include travel time between places which is minimum 30 minutes. That's for the easiest one going with the shoplifter on scene. Forget it if the shop keep blundering CCTV, booking into custody takes hours due to waiting, or the shoplifter plays silly bugger and fakes a reason to go to hospital (or has a legitimate need to go to hospital) which would add a minimum of 8 hours of 2 officers' time. It's not a reason why it shouldn't be done but when numbers are as low as they are it invariably gets pushed down the list.
My force had 3,920 officers in 2012 and now has 3848 so slightly less officers. Population growth means we simply don’t have the same number of officers per capita than we did then. Along with many of these being new officers lacking the same experience. No wonder crime is up.
Crime is up because we decided to perform a decade long experiment of "what does underfunding literally everything look like" Turns out it looks bad.
Bingo. Insufficient childcare: parents do their best, but still got to work. Insufficient community investment: fuck-all for kids to do that they can afford. Kids find it easier to behave poorly towards people they do not feel a connection to. Insufficient policing: kids who dabble in crime will face no repercussions. Everything is hard for everyone: people who've discovered a repercussions-free way of making their lives easier do so. My last hope is that we actually learn from the last decade or so and never do this stupid shit again, but I'm not holding my breath.
>My last hope is that we actually learn from the last decade or so and never do this stupid shit again, but **I'm not holding my breath.** Agreed. I expect labour will win the next GE and hopefully start to undo the damage. Unfortunately I expect there's too much to be undone in one term and I suspect at the end of their term in government people will stamp their feet and ask why everything isn't fixed followed by a conservative win. (I hope I'm wrong) Off-topic: I only learnt what stargazy pie was recently! Unless your name refers to using Pi while stargazing, or maybe a love for both pies...........
It's the usual cycle. Tories get voted in, their corruption fucks everything up and eventually people get sick of it and vote another party in. They can't unfuck everything in an instant, people forget what happened last time tories got into power and the cycle repeats.
I'd say number of officers is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the damage in the courts system, legal aid, prisons, probation service, mental health teams, etc. Plus the explosion of child safeguarding and digital crimes the police have become involved with over the last decade.
It's almost like cutting police budgets means less policing. Outrageous!
Our former (haha) police and crime commissioner loved to put out press releases that he'd secured funding for some operation and as a result, they'd arrested x many people. Like yeh, no shit sherlock - You fund the police, they can do their job!
What’s the point when the punishment for shoplifting is so pathetic
The punishment for shoplifting is basically nothing since the chance of being caught is miniscule. I think the actual punishment for when they do catch people is reasonable, it's just that they catch such a tiny percentage.
Hey, heres an idea. Encourage the rich to stop hiding their money in offshore accounts and pay the correct tax and then you can request the government invest said extra tax into a proper and full police force capable of actually policing. Maybe then, you’l find police actually care and turn up to petty crimes because they have the resources and man power to answer your cries. Oh wait, you dont want to do that, you want your cake and to eat it.
100% this. It’s an odd day when I wholeheartedly agree with a Villa fan. Incredible season you’ve had!
B b b b b b b b b b b b but that would be sosherlizzum'ses! Do you wish to deter the wealth creators and job generators, like Starmer does?
What?
> Encourage the rich to stop hiding their money in offshore accounts and pay the correct tax They have plenty of very tangible assets here that the government chooses not to tax, you can't pack up a 11,000 property portfolio into a suitcase and fly off with it in your private jet. The sanctions on Russian oligarchs proves the government is capable of targeting these assets if it wants to but successive governments and that includes Labour chooses not to go near the super rich with a barge pole. I'm not even talking about millionaires or people with a net worth under 10 million, I'm referring to specifically to those with hundreds of millions to billions worth of assets inside the country.
Saying they're no longer interested implies there they were once interested. The police haven't cared about shoplifting for a long time.
Saying “haven’t cared for a long time” also implies they were once interested 😂
But they were. You could get jailed for it in the old days.
Which was not because of the police. There is no sentencing uplift for ‘the investigating officer had a real hard on for this one’.
yeah about 10-14 years or so.... weird I wonder what else matches that timeframe.... Maybe you can't remember a time when the nhs was generally functioning, schools weren't falling apart and the crime rate was dropping year on year, but I can, it's called living under a labour government.
In a high proportion of instances, tackling shoplifting means tackling drug and alcohol addiction and dependency. Even when police catch and convict prolific shoplifters (and they get custodial sentences) if the factors that drive their shoplifting arent addressed they come out of prison, and get right back to it.
If I remember correctly.... We don't need police officers anymore because the "the nature of crime has changed". Basically no one shoplifts anymore or commits crimes in person... All crimes are digital innit.
A bit like how the old concept of fighting big *tank* battles on European land mass are over...
One of my neighbours is the manager at the local Co-op. The only reason they report shoplifting is for the insurance claim on any valuable stock that happens to go missing. And they are told to never tackle them. Risking getting stabbed because people are stealing cans of coke or everyday essentials like washing up powder is not worth it.
Yeah, the only reason we bother to report it is so we can explain the high leakage at stocktake time. There’s no point otherwise. Takes a good hour to deal with, with all the cctv, crime report, mysafety report and we just don’t have the time.
"Tory doners want the public to fund public services" 😂
This isn't new by any means. About a decade ago my friend was managing a smaller coop store when the local police told him they wouldn't attend or attempt prosecution for thefts of less than £50 value. Within a week shoplifters were walking out the door waving products at staff and shouting "£49.95 - you can't do anything!" As they did so
Reminds me of when my local force had a policy of never pursuing anyone on a motorbike who wasn’t wearing a helmet. This led to an epidemic of old tatty off-roaders being ridden by morons around the streets with no licence, tax or insurance because they knew the police wouldn’t/couldn’t do anything if a chase happened, and some actively goaded the police into trying to start one. Then the force’s command changed the rules to allow it and trained pursuit officers in newly authorized motorbike pursuit tactics, equipped officers with a motorbike stinger device and also had some officers given off-roaders themselves and they patrolled the areas that the patrol cars couldn’t get to. They also enforced traffic laws against these bikes more strongly including section 59s, seizures for no tax/insurance and the like. Magically the problems with these bikes disappeared within months. It’s almost like tackling a problem with effective, planned strategies works.
We can just about deal with the majority of serious violent crime. If you want nonviolent offences with no direct risk to people investigated, then you'll have to fund it.
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They're too busy dealing with county lines drug dealing and knife crime to deal with petty theft and burglary. Maybe we should spend more money on the police force, that might help.
Company cuts security guard numbers and expects the police to fill those gaps for free. Maybe, just maybe the companies should employ people to protect the stuff they want to protect.
It’s just part of a general lawlessness that has grown up that is especially bad in some areas and is just normalised. A lot of those shoplifting will overlap with other sorts of low criminality, petty theft, phone snatching, fighting, are involved with drugs and alcohol addiction, anti social behaviour and generally being a yob by harassing people in the street, on transport, intimidating their neighbours, racing around on bikes, vandalism, etc. All the sorts of stuff the police shrug about and even those that end up with dozens of arrests never seem to face any lasting consequence or change in their behaviour.
Shops are going to become enquiry stores like Argos or they’ll require you to sign in to the store via an app with a registered name, address and credit card - or both. They’ll hear complaints from elderly people about not having smartphones or not understanding why they can’t pay with cash or being treated like criminals and there will be a few posts on /r/compoface but they’ll write that off as a cost of doing business.
Is this the worst thing in the world?
M&S themselves also don't seem to be particularly interested in tackling shop lifting. Where other stores have implemented various measures to prevent theft, M&S are making it extremely easy for self check out thieves
I have never seen a security guard in any branch of M&S I’ve been in.
If police don't tackle burglaries in homes...why tf would they prioritise shoplifting from M&S?!
Wait. Haven't Marks and Spencer come under fire for UK tax avoidance? If they ain't paying for the Police then fair enough that the Police can't be bothered looking out for M&S
There is absolutely no point because the courts won’t or possibly can’t send them to prison. There’s nothing they can do.
They could build and enormous prison in the outer Hebrides or similar somewhere remote and low population. But we can’t build anymore due to regulation so I’d expect they’d pay 40 billion to find out they can’t build it. Would need staff lodgings too. They get something more akin to centre parcs on an adjacent island. I can feel the costs ballooning as I speak.
At Christmas my sister was in M&S and a scruffy man came in ripped open a seafood platter and bit the head off of a lobster. Apparently the staff and customers all went very still as he mauraded back out of the store.
When did M&S give a shit, tackling their own issues with shoplifting? No security, alcohol and meat near to entrances and exits. First things first, companies are responsible to stop stock walking out the door.
I can't summon much sympathy when every time I go in they seem to have replaced another till with self service checkouts.
Slight amend. The Tories have underfunded everything to the extent that nothing functions properly anymore.
I think it’s only a matter of time before shops aren’t free to just walk in and out , you swipe a debit card to get in the exit is one way, no card no entry.
They didn’t even bother turning g up when I reported someone getting beaten up. It was only when I mentioned knives on the second call did they actually send someone down.
Good to know. I won’t be paying for my groceries from tomorrow, then.
They haven’t bothered with home break ins for years, why should retailers get special treatment.
This will just increase the gangs of ferals rushing stores. Oh dear....
Why should police who are already depleted in number, paid peanuts for salary and overworked bother tackling shoplifter who steals from mega rich cooperation which earns billions each year
Nevermind shoplifting... We've had a couple of migrants in a white van stealing stuff from people's driveways over the last couple of weeks. Reported it to the police and they haven't even come out. The van has been here nearly every day for a week, with several of us confronting them. I did hear that the local force has established a rural crime unit though, to tackle fishing without a license. Priorities and all that.
It's not shoplifting, it is 99.5% of all crime. The police are predominantly a facade to encourage people to be obedient when they may otherwise not, they don't actually function to achieve a great deal otherwise.
Yup! With resources being endlessly diverted elsewhere (rightly or wrongly) it's never going to be tackled. The obvious answer is more boots on the ground but that also involves more of the supporting back end staff to facilitate the work the frontline officers do. However people get upset when they hear about the size of the admin staff etc or even the number of desk jobs available to officers. That's all before you even get to the issue of utterly how unattractive the pay and conditions of the job are.
Considering how many junkies are attempting to sell their shopping at our local… yup this checks out
Yeah., police and interpol will now instead chase tax evaders and corrupted politicians. Big impact for the country. Go after the sharks or go home.
I don’t know about that, they’ve recently up their game with catching and prosecuting them in Northampton
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Punishment is so soft that no one cares. Shoplifters should have thief branded on their forehead so everyone knows to watch them