Police in the UK are cracking down on shoplifting after government ministers revealed a “zero tolerance” plan is being implemented to help fight the organised crime gangs which are driving the epidemic.
Incidents of shoplifting have rocketed by around 25% year-on-year and with upwards of 1,000 offences occurring every day, police chiefs intend to unveil plans to tackle the issue at a summit at Downing Street, reports from the Sunday Times revealed.
Only one in eight shoplifters are caught and charged, figures from the Home Office found, and with the number of solved cases falling, a dedicated national crime unit has been created.
Aiming to investigate the issue from a greater perspective than single offences, six new intelligence analysts will be employed into Operation Opal, a unit led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), focusing on tackling organised acquisitive crime.
John Lewis Partnership, Tesco PLC (LSE:TSCO), J Sainsbury PLC (LSE:SBRY), Waitrose, Coop and other retailers have helped fund the new division with a £600,000 investment through an agreement called Project Pegasus.
In return for the funding, the new unit will look through CCTV, dashcam and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) footage, as well as collate crime reports from different forces to help build a better picture of the criminal organisations behind the spike in thefts.
One policing source said: “They will analyse data from all forces from stores and crunch it into actionable packages to hand to police forces to make arrests in the New Year.”
Another added: “This is the first time we’ll be tackling shoplifting from a national perspective and will enable us to work across boundaries, which is crucial because that’s how organised crime groups are targeting retailers.”