Number of shoplifters caught by Sussex Police rises by more than 50 per cent in the past year

The news was shared during a Performance & Accountability meeting chaired by Katy Bourne on Friday (September 15). Deputy chief constable Dave McLaren told the meeting that 1,039 shoplifters were detected in the year up to August 2022, and 1,630 in the year up to August 2023.

There was a 46 per cent increase in incidents of shoplifting in Sussex over the same year but DCC McLaren told Mrs Bourne that only 28 per cent of the 999 or 101 calls relating to shoplifting were attended.

He described the attendance level as ‘proportionate given everything else we have to deal with’.

More than 61 per cent of the offences were graded at priority level 4 – which, as Mrs Bourne said, essentially means ‘we’ll get this resolved but we won’t deploy – a much slower type of investigation’.

She described comments from shopkeepers who felt the police ‘aren’t always responding in the way that the retailer would want them to’ when it came to shoplifters.

But DCC McLaren said: “Quite often, when we’re unable to progress an investigation, it’s because there is a lack of evidence or there’s a lack of quality CCTV of the incident.”

He added: “I’m not surprised there’s frustration [from] anyone who’s a victim of crime and there’s not an outcome. “But I think the processes we have in place, the response that we have in place, gives us our best opportunity – given everything else that we have going on in terms of priority crime – to get positive outcomes for those businesses.”

One of the success stories has been the One Touch crime reporting scheme which is being run by 24 Sussex Co-ops and accounts for nearly 20 per cent of all reported business crimes.

The aim of the scheme is to develop new ways to simplify the reporting of crime while delivering greater intelligence, identifying trends and reducing the impact of repeat offenders in communities.

Mrs Bourne said the scheme had seen the time taken to report a crime drop from 30 minutes to two minutes. She praised Sussex Police as being ‘very courageous’ for taking on the scheme and wondered what the crime figures would be like if all 80 stores took part. She added: “It’s not an easy thing to do when there is a lot of expectation that you will see crime going down.

“So when you’re seeing reports of crime going up, sometimes it’s not always understood in the media and you’ll get adverse reactions.”

A recent declaration from home secretary Suella Braverman said that police must investigate every theft – not just shoplifting – and follow all reasonable leads to catch offenders.

DCC McLaren said: “Our policy is we investigate reasonable lines of inquiry when they exist so [there’s] no real need for us to change our policy per se.”

He acknowledged that cases of shoplifting were investigated by the most inexperienced staff, with others ‘doing all we can to support them’.

And he assured Mrs Bourne that any cases which involved violence were given top priority. A new law brought in last year doubled the maximum penalty from 12 months to two years for those who assault retail staff, among others.

DCC McLaren said he would interested to see how many people received such a sentence ‘given the cases we put forward to the CPS’.