Confronting a Shoplifter – Who’s the Criminal?

The Telegraph has a sorry tale about a member of the public who challenged a shoplifter in a Tesco branch, only to be vilified by the staff and ignored by the police. The Government has admitted that shoplifting has got out of hand while the policing minister Dame Diana Johnson has said shopkeepers need to do more to deter the thieves and keep expensive items away from the shop entrances.

The Telegraph’s correspondent has wisely maintained anonymity and not mentioned the location, but it’s no less dispiriting for that:

I was shopping in the Tesco Express on my local high street in South East London at 1pm last Sunday afternoon when I saw a bald, white man in his 40s use his arm to sweep an entire shelf of medicines into a gym bag. He was completely brazen about it: he wasn’t wearing a mask or hoodie to hide his face, he was in a bright-red tracksuit.

What made it even more enraging was that the Tesco staff could see him and they didn’t do a thing about it. They just stood there and watched, looking totally unbothered.

I was passing the shoplifter as he started sweeping a second shelf of medicines into his bag and I couldn’t stop myself: I loudly exclaimed: “Really?” It was almost a reflex – I was so shocked and angry.

In fact, the thief left in a casual and indifferent way. Stunned by the brazen incident and sobered by the thought that a knife might have been pulled (it wasn’t), the anonymous shopper turned to the staff and was met with not just a flat wall of indifference, but annoyance:

I started questioning them, asking: “Are you seeing this? Why did you just stand there? Why didn’t you say anything?” One woman who works there was just as unbothered as the shoplifter. She shrugged and said: “Oh, we’re not paid to confront thieves.” She pointed out that they’ve got CCTV, and she did say they would call the police later.

That’s true of course. The shop staff aren’t paid to confront shoplifters and nor are they provided with Robocop outfits and pump-action shotguns to see them off. The Thames Valley police and crime commissioner Matthew Barber has already told the public they should be doing more to try and cut thefts from shops, with the useful advice: “If you’re in a store and you witness shoplifting happening I think at the very least you should report that to the police, report it to the staff, perhaps take some mobile phone footage, shout at someone ‘put that back’.”

As it happens, the shouting in the Tesco Express came from the staff, but they weren’t addressing the thief:

But when I asked “Is this the new normal – are you just going to smile and nod?”, the staff started shouting at me…

Even more shocking, another customer (a man in his 50s with a long ponytail) then started screaming at me: “Leave it, just leave it!” He went purple in the face. He was furious that I’d said anything to the staff – he was angrier about that than about the shoplifter. I was completely stunned.

I felt like I was going mad. That’s why I’d said: “Are you seeing this?” – I was half wondering if I needed to visit my GP and get my eyes tested! The staff made me feel as if I was the person in the wrong.

The point of course is that the Telegraph’s anonymous shopper was describing an episode that epitomises a society slowly disintegrating. Law and order rely on willing compliance. It has never been possible for a state police force, however oppressive, to prevent crime completely.

The police, of course – proud possessors of Klingon cloaking devices unless accosting ordinary individuals for daring to express unauthorised opinions – were completely uninterested when the Telegraph shopper reported another incident directly to them:

I called the police afterwards and they sounded totally unfazed, even bored. I offered to stay until they came and give a description of the man, or send them the photos I’d taken of the mess, but they didn’t take me seriously. The policeman said: “Nah mate, you get on home.”

Such responses, of course, make it difficult not to see the police as complicit in the whole state of deterioration. Perhaps they’re not paid to tackle thieves either, though most of us have been labouring under the belief that they are – mainly because lots of us are obliged to stump up for their salaries.

Little by little, it’s all unravelling, whether in a Tesco Express or elsewhere. It turns out that even Tesco isn’t bothered:

After the second incident, when I’d confronted the shoplifter, I called Tesco headquarters. I explained that this might be happening on Sundays because for some reason they don’t have a security person on the door on a Sunday – on the other days of the week, the person in that role wears a yellow vest and a body cam.

The woman at Tesco HQ said they would think about having a security person on Sundays, but she quickly added that they wouldn’t physically stop a thief either, they would just record it.

Why would Tesco be bothered? Presumably they have long since factored in shoplifting to the prices, meaning that honest shoppers just cover the loss for the company.

It seems not many other people are either. The Telegraph shopper took to social media:

I posted about my experience in my local Facebook group, and I was baffled by the responses. Lots of people were vehemently against confronting shoplifters. One woman told me to mind my own business. If you even mention the idea, you get labelled socially conservative and it becomes political. Just for saying you’re against crime, really?

It seems then that the shoplifting crisis isn’t just about shoplifters, but a tired, brow-beaten country and population where initiative and community spirit are slowly being crushed out of existence. We all know too well that to raise a finger, to do anything to try and reverse the decline, even just to protest verbally, is far more likely to result in vilification by others and a knock at the front door – to say nothing of the possibility of being slashed with a machete.

In that sense, are we all to blame? Are we all complicit in some way? If we are, we are getting the Britain we deserve. Or is it the fault of the police, the courts that barely raise an eyebrow on the rare occasions a shoplifter appears before them, and the state? One thing is certain: the more people that get away with shoplifting, the more that discover there is nothing to stop them, the more of them there will be.

Look at what happened to the Wrexham shopkeeper who put up a sign calling shoplifters “scumbags”. Naturally, a member of the constabulary came to the shop and told him to remove the “provocative and offensive” sign after a complaint from a member of the public – even though, as Rod Liddle has pointed out in the Spectator – “of course shoplifters are scumbags”. Luckily, the shopkeeper has stuck to his guns, but he seems to be a lone voice.

The Telegraph piece is worth reading in full.