In the comments, Nikw211 steers us to the pages of the Observer, where Ms Martha Gill has some thoughts on shoplifting.
First, some setting of the scene:
Within corner-shops and supermarkets and department stores, a new mood of lawlessness circulates. Owners of small shops have long complained that they are being treated as larders; now the owners of large ones have joined them.
Co-op despairs that shoplifting is “out of control”; along with antisocial behaviour incidents, the crime has increased by a third in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, John Lewis has taken to offering free coffees to passing [police] officers. “Just having a police car parked outside can make people think twice about shoplifting from our branches,” the head of security for the John Lewis Partnership has said, with more than a hint of desperation.
And,
Earlier this month, there was the “TikTok looting” of Oxford Street, where teens ran amok around stores after a thread urging people to “rob JD Sports” went viral. The trend has a longer sweep: in the past six years, shop thefts in Britain have more than doubled.
All rather grim. If not entirely surprising to readers familiar with this blog’s Progressive Retail Experience series. The collection to date, some 495 entries, can be found here.
Ah, that mood of lawlessness.
Ms Gill links to an article including figures by the British Retail Consortium showing a steep increase in predation. Unmentioned by Ms Gill, however, is the equally marked rise in retail staff experiencing physical abuse, sexual assault, and threats with weapons. Thieves, it turns out, are “becoming bolder and more aggressive” as shoplifting has blurred into mob robbery and open, gleeful looting. Though, again, this detail is not explored in the Observer.
Ms Gill, you see, is in search of less obvious, more exotic victims:
What to do about shoplifting? It’s a delicate subject. Shoplifting is not quite like other crimes. Pilfering, purloining, filching, snaffling – it is by nature relatively trivial
Retailers who’ve been sexually assaulted or threatened with machetes may, I suspect, take a different view. And whether the person wielding the machete could be construed as “vulnerable,” a feat accomplished in the Observer article, may not, at the time, have been foremost in their minds.
[M]ost of all, shoplifting is a crime that seems to reflect social need: it rises when the economy dips. The current spate seems partly fuelled by the cost of living crisis. Starving your population and then “cracking down” on it for nicking baby formula or a can of soup can start to make a government look rather unreasonable.
Except, of course, that studies on the subject repeatedly point out that the majority of shoplifting is not done out of some noble desperation, but rather for kicks, or status, or for black market resale, including the aforementioned baby formula. In reports on the phenomenon and its common causes – say, by the same British Retail Consortium – the words alcohol abuse and drugs crop up frequently, as do the words gang activity and organised crime.
By most estimates, shoplifters are on average caught around 2% of the time, usually after dozens, even hundreds, of thefts; and of those apprehended, roughly half are turned over to the police for prosecution. The National Association for Shoplifting Prevention adds, “While the romanticised face of shoplifting is the starving parent stealing bread to provide for a child, the reality is this is rarely the case.”
Apparently, Ms Gill could not find space in her article for such insights. Instead, Observer readers are treated with a detour into the world of Dickens and literary solidarity with shoplifters – “quite often we are on the side of the light-fingered lifter.” Indeed, we’re told that shoplifting can be construed, by those so inclined, as an act of “social defiance.” We are, however, reminded that small businesses should, perhaps, where possible, be spared such predation – and that, “stealing is not always the best way… to address inequality.”
Eventually, we arrive at the offering of solutions. Naturally, this being the Observer, rumblings of punitive consequences are frowned upon. Jail time for repeat offenders is, we’re assured, “exactly the wrong approach.”
Says Ms Gill,
Not only does “cracking down” on shoplifters through the criminal justice system raise difficult moral problems, it doesn’t even work.
What those difficult moral problems might be is not made entirely clear. Nor is it obvious why imprisoning habitual thieves, thereby interrupting their criminal adventures, should be considered a total failure and unworthy of the effort.
Instead, with some contrivance, responsibility for thievery is laid elsewhere:
Once, goods were kept behind counters, but since the birth of large supermarkets they have been laid out near the door, ready for the taking. Automated self-check-out means the customer in effect monitors their own behaviour.
Retailers, it seems, are asking for it. What with those short skirts. Sorry, accessible goods.
Ms Gill then cites academic Gloria Laycock, whose solution to the swell in shoplifting and mob robbery is suitably unobvious and therefore statusful:
“A radical policy might be to decriminalise shop theft,” says Laycock, tongue only half in cheek. “This would put the onus directly on the shops, which could employ the measures that actually work, like putting goods back behind counters.”
Quite how a supermarket might function with all of its goods rendered inaccessible, hidden away under lock and key, is, sadly, left to the imagination.
The general idea, presumably, is that the rest of us, the law-abiding, should resign ourselves to ever more inconvenience and social degradation, and being increasingly alienated from our own neighbourhoods, because punishing habitual criminals, even those armed with machetes, is terribly unfashionable. At least in certain circles. Those inhabited by academics and Observer columnists, for instance.
And so, the preferred, progressive trajectory, as implied above, entails a more demoralised, more dangerous, low-trust society. In which pretty much anything one might wish to buy will be out of reach or shuttered away, and in which every customer will by default be treated as suspicious. Because apparently, we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are.
We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.
Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.
At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.
Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?
Update, via the comments:
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