A top police chief has called for shoplifters to be given electronic tabs and banned from shops as she slammed the last government’s approach for being soft on retail crime.
Katy Bourne, the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for Sussex, accused the Tories of not taking organised crime gangs – who typically steal vast amounts of goods to order – seriously and called on Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet to take drastic action.
It comes after a new policing unit responsible for Operation Opal, targeting shoplifters, identified 152 people involved in the business in its first three months – including a Romanian national who stole £60,000 of Boots products in a year.
Ms Bourne said she had been approached by many shop owners in her role as PCC who claimed the last government wasn’t taking action to address the scale of the problem.
She told BBC Breakfast she is advocating for prolific shoplifters to be given electronic tags that track their location in a bid to clamp down on retail theft.
Katy Bourne, the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for Sussex, accused the Tories of not taking organised crime gangs – who typically steal vast amounts of goods to order – seriously
Ms Bourne said: ‘We have serious organised gangs who are operating stealing to order costing billions.
‘[They target] anything: high value goods, electrical, sunglasses, baby food, you name it, and they steal it on an industrial scale.’
She continued: ‘The harm shopkeepers and shop workers will get from abuse and assaults is much more long lasting and impactful but you can’t always see those.
‘The last government had a Retail Crime Action Plan. There’s a lot of talk from the new government about how important shoplifting is to them but I am yet to hear what is going to be done.
‘One thing I’d like to do and I called on the last government to do is to tag those prolific shoplifters with electronic tags because if they’re in a place they shouldn’t be you can see what’s happening.’
Ms Bourne pointed to the crisis of prison overcrowding as she claimed shoplifters are not going to be imprisoned ‘as easily’ after it was reported last week that just 100 spaces remained in male prisons.
Asked if she would like to see shoplifters banned from entering retail stores, Ms Bourne said: ‘Yes, absolutely – if they’ve been convicted of a crime.’
Footage filmed in July shows a group of men brazenly grabbing goods from a Boots store in north London before loading them into bags in front of shocked shoppers
Almost 444,000 shoplifting offences were recorded by forces in England and Wales in the year to March, up from 342,428 in the previous 12 months
‘Let’s face it, if they have less than three years’ prison sentence they’re probably not going to prison at the moment because our prisons are full and we need a way of managing them, so why can’t we manage them that way?
‘That is something I’d be calling on the new Home Secretary to do. That’s what electronic tagging does. It doesn’t let you in certain areas so if you’re in that area and you’re not meant to be there the probation service have got a reason to call you back in and you would go straight to prison.’
Ms Bourne highlighted one shoplifter identified by police who had received 16 months in prison after he was found to have stolen £33,000 of goods across 16 different police forces.
And Romanian national Alexandru-Iulian Dima, 25, was jailed for four years after pleading guilty to 32 shoplifting offences which saw him steal more than £60,000 of Boots products.
The Home Office is in the process of seeking a deportation order for Dima on his release from prison.
Last week three women who belonged to a professional shoplifting gang were jailed after targeting a string of make-up and beauty counters, swiping £40,000 of goods in a month.
Ancuta-Alexandra Ion, 28, Grama Zorila, 31, and Ana Iosif, 28, struck at supermarkets and high street stores across East Anglia, travelling from their homes in London.
In one outing, the three Romanian nationals escaped with a haul worth £12,000.
Alexandru-Iulian Dima, 25, was jailed for four years after pleading guilty to 32 shoplifting offences
Romanian women Ancuta-Alexandra Ion, 28, (left) Grama Zorila, 31, (centre) and Ana Iosif, 28, (right) who targeted make-up and beauty counters in a £40,000 month-long crime spree as part of a ‘professional’ shoplifting gang have been jailed
Phone footage from July shows young shoplifters battling past staff to steal trainers from a Nike shop in the shadows of Wembley Stadium
Zorila and Iosif both received 23-month jail terms and Ion was locked up for 20 months after they admitted conspiracy to steal between May 1 and June 1 last year.
Stephanie Coombes, head of intelligence at Opal added: ‘Opal has been carrying out this role for other crime types for a number of years and we have seen significant successes from having a national overview of what’s happening in the organised crime world.’
MailOnline revealed in July that a joint operation between the police and 15 of the biggest retailers had established that a quarter of all shoplifting in England and Wales is being carried out by criminal gangs.
A taskforce, known as Project Pegasus, has sifted through thousands of hours of CCTV and bodycam footage, as well as testimonies from staff to create a ‘shoplifting map’.
After two months of analysis, including use of facial recognition software, the taskforce discovered that the crime wave is being turbo-charged by as few as 12 gangs.
Britain is currently in the midst of a shoplifting crisis, as police figures recently showed offences have soared by 30 per cent in a year to the highest level in two decades.
Almost 444,000 crimes were recorded by forces in England and Wales in the year to March, up from 342,428 in the previous 12 months.
This is the highest figure since records began in 2003, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Separate data from the Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) estimates retailers have recorded more than 5.6million incidents of theft over the last year.
Just 17 percent of shoplifting offences recorded in 2023/24 resulted in a charge or summons.
Meanwhile 58 per cent of investigations closed with no suspect identified, up from 55 per cent the previous year, according to Home Office data.
