High street stores to ban serial shoplifters
Stores including M&S, Morrisons, Boots, Tesco, Primark, and Greggs are submitting CCTV, photos and personal data on all their repeat shoplifters to the database, which is shared with police.
Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has announced that extra officers will be deployed on the streets of 500 towns in a summer blitz to crack down on shoplifting and anti-social behaviour by 'thugs and thieves'.
Just 5 per cent of shoplifting is reported to police, meaning thousands of prolific thieves are currently dropping below the radar and escaping prosecution amid record levels of store theft.
Investigators believe that targeting the top 10 per cent of shoplifters could cut store thefts by as much as 70 per cent – the amount of offences for which they are responsible.
The shared data enables all the stores and police to 'join the dots' to identify prolific offenders, gather evidence for prosecutions and provide security staff on the shop doors with photo watchlists to bar entry.
The intelligence-sharing system, known as Auror, was pioneered in New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister.
Now deployed by 98 per cent of New Zealand stores, the system is credited with slashing rates of shoplifting and saving so much police investigation time that they could employ the equivalent of an extra 450 officers. One senior UK supermarket executive described it as a potential 'game-changer'.
More than 500 towns across England and Wales have signed up to the Home Office's Safer Streets summer initiative, which will run to Sept 30, with more visible policing and stronger enforcement to 'restore confidence in policing'.
Ms Cooper, who was briefed on the Auror shoplifting system by Boots on Thursday, said: 'We want more retailers, more organisations, working together on schemes like this so that we can have that partnership, so that you're tackling the crime but also getting the neighbourhood police and the reassurance in local communities.
'This hasn't happened for too long, too often. People have just been working separately, in silos, and also this sort of crime has been treated as low-level. It's not. It has a huge impact on local economies and on that sense of safety at the heart of communities.'
Paul Fagg, Auror's director of law enforcement, said the crime intelligence platform enabled retailers to record everything that happens in their stores to tackle the 'huge under-reporting issue.'
'Police have access to Auror so that incidents they did not see before are now visible for them,' he said, adding that this enabled police and retailers to identify prolific offenders with CCTV and photographic evidence.
He cited one recent case in which a repeat offender who had targeted 18 stores, all of them operated by different retailers, was caught as a result. He was jailed for a year and handed a criminal behaviour order that banned him from stores across the UK, with a potential jail term of five years for any breach.
Ben McDonald, the head of the Morrisons corporate protection team, said Auror was a 'game-changer' as security staff could now identify prolific offenders and turn them away.
Bans will avoid confrontation with thieves
'If you can stop them before they come into the store, they will leave but once they steal something, they think it is theirs and it becomes confrontational,' said the former police officer.
Stores use face recognition technology to cross reference faces with thefts and at least one supermarket is considering live facial recognition cameras which could identify offenders from the database automatically and instantly.
Ms Cooper urged police to make greater use of facial recognition technology, saying: 'It is a really important tool for policing to be able to use, and particularly on trying to identify criminals, looking at the CCTV.
'We do think there is more scope for using facial recognition more widely, and we're going to set out more ways in which that can be done as part of a proper framework.'
A record 516,971 shoplifting offences were logged by forces last year – up 20 per cent from 429,873 in 2023. Stores logged 20 million faces of suspects in the same period.
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