Remember when you could walk into your local corner shop for 20 Weights and a Daltons Weekly and have a natter about the weather with Mr Patel behind the counter?
Not any more. These days the convenience store is likely to be as welcoming as Belmarsh prison and the shopkeeper will be stuck behind a bulletproof screen, guarding the till and high-value items such as those overpriced bottles of rot-gut vodka with made-up Russian names.
The Co-op is installing ‘fortified kiosks’ in hundreds of its community supermarkets to combat the epidemic of, often violent, robberies plaguing Britain’s retailers.
We’re not talking Ronnie Barker’s Open All Hours here, more Tom Cruise’s Minority Report
One of them, in Plaistow, East London, was featured in the Sunday Times. The manager, Imran Janoob, serves his customers through a lockable hatch from behind a wall of toughened clear screens, 8 ft high, reinforced by steel brackets.
His shop is monitored by 26 separate CCTV cameras. The fortified kiosk is equipped with an electronic keypad and staff wear bodycams to record attempted thefts. Images are relayed to the Co-op’s security headquarters so they can alert police, who almost certainly won’t turn up.
The Co-op is also trialling AI to identify potential thieves displaying suspicious behaviour. Elsewhere, Asda is installing facial recognition technology to compile a database of individuals who have previously stolen from stores or assaulted staff.
We’re not talking Ronnie Barker’s Open All Hours here, more Tom Cruise’s Minority Report.
If Plaistow Patricia wants to buy a tin of Cow & Gate baby formula, she’ll find it locked away in a Perspex safe on the shelves, along with everything from bars of Fruit & Nut to lamb chops.
Security tagged Cow & Gate baby formula on a supermarket shelf
(In the US, they’re even putting face wipes under lock and key, as my wife discovered in a drug store on a recent holiday in Boston, Massachusetts. Soon everything in shops here will be behind bars, too – except, of course, the thieves themselves.)
The big supermarkets and convenience stores have been forced to resort to these kind of drastic measures because of the explosion in what we used to call ‘shoplifting’. That’s now an inadequate word to describe the wholesale looting of shops by organised gangs.
On the latest available figures, in the year up until last September, there were almost 500,000 recorded thefts from shops – half of these cases closed by police without a suspect being identified.
Only 18 per cent resulted in a charge or summons. Even when these criminals were brought before a court, many including repeat offenders escaped a custodial sentence.
No wonder the likes of the Co-op and Asda are spending tens of millions of pounds on state-of-the-art security measures. They know the police can’t, or won’t, protect them.
But what of the small independent store owners, who simply can’t afford these expensive deterrents? The majority of these are run by hard-working immigrant families, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, already operating on tight profit margins.
They might run to a cheap CCTV system, but that won’t put off a thief in a hoodie and Covid-style face mask. Certainly, a fortified kiosk is way beyond their budget, even if it’s the only way they can protect themselves and their stock.
I first came across these bulletproof screens on a working visit to Baltimore in the late 1980s. Most corner shops had one, to combat robberies by druggies looking for cash and goods to sell to pay for their next fix.
Major supermarkets are spending tens of millions of pounds to deter shoplifters
Security tags on meat in Ashford, Kent
If you’ve seen the brilliant HBO series The Wire, set in Baltimore, you’ll be familiar with them, too. In the States, most of these shopkeepers also keep a gun to hand.
Obviously, in Britain, a Smith & Wesson is out of the question, but plenty of corner shop owners have a baseball bat tucked under the counter to defend themselves against violent robbers.
However, in the unlikely event of the police actually responding to an alarm call, they are more likely to arrest the shopkeeper for ‘taking the law into his own hands’ while the thief has it away on his toes, scot-free.
The Old Bill have surrendered the high streets and suburbs to criminals. Both police and prosecutors treat thefts from shops as ‘petty’ crime.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a copper patrolling our local shopping parade in North London. As I wrote here before Christmas, when I went for my flu jab, the lovely ladies who work at the pharmacy told me that youths regularly walked in off the streets and helped themselves to perfumes etc, with impunity. The cops weren’t interested. Some of the shops have installed locked doors with electronic entry systems and now will only admit known, trusted customers.
Yet perhaps some of these security measures would not be necessary if the police got back to pounding the beat and investigating robberies properly. These thieves would think twice if they thought they’d get their collar felt.
Deterrence works, as proven by an enterprising Surrey PC, Ben Marshall, who tracked down a notorious gang of crooks after linking supermarket raids in a number of counties. All it took was an ultimatum to give themselves up within two weeks or face arrest.
The ringleaders were sentenced to jail terms of up to three years, although they’ll probably be out in a few weeks to make way for someone who posted something hurty on the internet.
Plod has no problem rustling up half a dozen officers to nick innocent civilians for ‘non-crime’ hate incidents, but can’t be bothered to protect our nation of shopkeepers from real criminals.
When the bad guys know they are going to get away with it, they’re emboldened to commit even more crimes.
Instead of having to turn our convenience stores into mini-Belmarsh prisons, it’s time the police, politicians and prosecutors started taking thefts from shops seriously again.
Time to arrest a few of these brazen, opportunist robbers and bang them up in Belmarsh for real.
We could probably start by promoting the bold PC Marshall to Commissioner of the Met. The shopkeepers of Plaistow and elsewhere, currently cowering in their fortified kiosks, would certainly approve. Mind how you go.
