Criminals have been given a “licence to shoplift” in the UK as police resources are spent elsewhere, warned the head of a major retailer.
Dame Sharon White, the chairwoman of John Lewis & Partners, which operates department stores and the upmarket supermarket chain Waitrose in the UK has warned of increased criminality, including shoplifting and assaults on retail workers amid the cost of living crisis. She stated that assaults on employees at Waitrose had doubled since 2020.
Citing research from the British Retail Consortium, Dame Sharon noted that there are 850 incidents of abuse or violence at retail stores in Britain every day. In the year leading up to April, retailers throughout the country lost a record high £950 million to shoplifting and theft, up from £663 million during the previous year.
“Gangs and shoplifters have become much bolder given some of the cost of living pressures,” White said in comments reported by The Times.
“I have lost count of the number of times I have visited John Lewis or Waitrose branches in England and been told that the police simply don’t have the time or resource to respond to a shoplifting incident,” she continued. “[It’s] a licence to shoplift, which is not a victimless crime.”
Recounting an incident she witnessed personally last week, the John Lewis chief said: “I saw a group of teenage boys hovering around our tech department, clearly looking to pocket some items. I followed them around the store keeping a safe distance until our security team came and the boys were led out empty-handed.
“The group then made the hour-long journey to our Edinburgh store where they attempted to make off with a large volume of expensive fragrance. They were asked to leave by a member of the security team whom they then aggressively pushed out of the way. A customer stepped in to help and was unfortunately hurt in the process.”
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White has argued that the UK government should follow the lead of the devolved government in Scotland, which in 2021 introduced specific legal protections for shop workers, making it illegal to abuse, assault, or threaten shop workers. She said that a lack of legal framework allows police to overlook the daily offences in England.
“It should go without saying that no one should be harmed simply for doing their job or for going out shopping,” White said.
Conservative MP James Sunderland concurred that the issue is a growing problem, saying: “Targeted shoplifting through organised retail crime is clearly on the rise. Gangs appear to be operating with impunity across the southeast and there have been instances of violence to staff when they attempt to intervene.”
The issue of the allocation of police resources has become an increasingly hot topic in the UK, with many police forces spending valuable man-hours on woke workshops and policing so-called hate speech on the internet rather than devoting the time to solve actual crimes.
The situation in England is reminiscent of the retail theft crisis befalling many cities in the United States, notably in Democrat-run California. Retail stores in the city of San Francisco have been particularly hard hit by shoplifting, with retail outlet Walgreens closing dozens of stores in the Bay Area due to the rise in theft making the locations unprofitable.
The issue has been exacerbated by left-wing voters in California voting in 2014 to pass Proposition 47, which made the stealing of items under $950 merely a misdemeanour
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