I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan but I’m shocked by lawlessness and violence of the UK shoplifting epidemic
I SPECIALISED in personal protection in the Military Police for more than seven years and did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I know what it is like to patrol in a hostile land where trepidation runs through your veins as you are surrounded by threats.
But entering civvy street, I would have never thought I would witness the brazen violence and lawlessness that has unfolded amid Britain’s shoplifting epidemic.
Not a day goes by where a new bizarre item will be locked away as the thieves continue to stoop to new lows.
We have gone from cased baby formula behind the counter to photocopied images of Champagne bottles and meat and blocks of cheese being plugged with security tags.
It is really sad to see Britain go this way — and it is only going to get worse.
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After serving in the Forces, I ran Asda’s security operations across the UK for ten years and regularly consulted with our counterparts.
What I witnessed was sometimes beyond belief.
I have watched criminal gangs march down aisles, with a shopping trolley in hand, flanked by men packing firearms, prepared to use extreme violence.
Machetes and syringes
Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg; the shoplifting crisis has been boiling away for the past eight years.
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Our team was experiencing more than 30 incidents a day — and that was just what was reported. The real figures are likely to be much higher.
But the increase in frequency of incidents was not the problem, it was the surge in the severity of the violence.
In the first eight months of this year, a Co-op study showed that retailers have experienced a 25 per cent uptick in the number of shoplifting cases with violence being used against staff.
These assaults can range anywhere from the use of machetes and syringes to thugs just brandishing weapons for intimidation.
Most commonly though, workers will be physically assaulted — kicked or punched — often by people who are drunk or high on drugs.
Staff encounter these frightening scenes when they attempt to prevent items being stolen or simply just doing their job.
And anecdotally it is clear there is little being put in place to stop this.
Police numbers have played a big role in this issue.
This epidemic comes at a time where forces are so thinly spread that, according to the Co-op study, they are ignoring 80 per cent of shoplifting cases.
The most frightening thing about the lack of police response is the risk workers are faced with.
When you detain a perpetrator and take them into a holding room and are hearing radio silence from the police, all of a sudden you are incredibly exposed to a person who is potentially violent.
Some workers were waiting up to three hours for officers to arrive.
In Asda, we used to have a bench that was screwed to the floor so it couldn’t be used as a weapon.
Because of the dire situation when I was at Asda two years ago the advice to security staff was that if you hadn’t had a police response after 60 minutes then you had to let the perpetrator go.
There is a simple solution, though. And that is to hire better-trained security staff and more of them.
If you look across the UK, the violence and number of incidents keeps increasing but the level of guarding stays the same.
In the Army, you don’t go into a war zone without months of training.
In the retail industry, shopfront security guards are typically given a week-long course.
Of course, the situations are different but what unites them is that the better trained you are, the better you will be.
In Asda’s high-risk stores we installed better-trained security guards and this saw a decrease in both the number of incidents and the severity of violence used.
Yes, it will cost more, but if these guards manage to stop just one trolley of goods being stolen a day you have saved the equivalent of their daily wage.
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A safe store is better for your workers, your customers — and your profits. It’s win-win.
- Tom Richmond is the managing director of
