A futile exercise

The police spotlight has recently fallen on the issue of 'on-the-spot' penalty notices and the fact that they don't really work.






Before, if you were caught shop-lifting or smashing up a bus shelter, the police (if they could be bothered) would haul you into the back of a transit van, keep you in the cells overnight and then parade you before the magistrates the next morning.

The problem with such a policy is that firstly, it's an expensive procedure for what is commonly regarded as a 'minor' crime and secondly, it wasn't very effective. Shoplifting has for a long time held the dubious title of having the highest re-offending rate of any crime.

A common mis-conception is that shop-lifters are all "kids doing it for a dare" a surprisingly large amount of visitors to the store I work at are actually shocked when you tell them that 'professional' shoplifters work in Leeds, or any major town or city for that matter. Most are fuelling a drug habit, others actually do it as a lucrative career, where the chances of being caught are slim and the rewards are potentially very handsome.

So anyway, instead of dragging these scroates in court, the police now have the power to issue a fixed penalty of £80 to any offenders caught committing these misdemeanors. The problem is that these tickets aren't providing the 'deterrent' that our elected leaders thought they would. In 2004, just over 2,000 fiunes were handed out to shoplifters. In 2005, that figure rocketed to almost 22,000 and for the first six months of 2006, almost 17,000 tickets hand been issued - that figure doesn't yet factor in the "busy" shoplifting period of December.

Now you could say that those figures merely mean that more people are getting caught rather than the number of shoplifters actually rising. Either way though, it's hardly good reading if your bonuses are getting eaten into because of it.

For retailers, it's a thankless task. Security systems are limited, the effectiveness of CCTV is diminishing, cuts in staff budgets mean that the human presence is barely off-putting and human rights legislation mean that getting a known criminal 'banned' from a store is a futile exercise. All we as retailers can hope for is that legislation makes it more and more difficult for the thieves. With that unlikely to happen anytime soon, it's you and I that will end up paying for it.