Last year, we were the victim of an over-night break-in, where thieves stole up to £5,000-worth of tobacco and caused £12,000-worth of damage. Over time, we’ve noticed shopli ing habits change. Usually, people would steal joints of meat, but now it’s more opportunistic. We have shoppers who buy a whole basket of goods, but will steal a sandwich, for example.

We work with Catch a Thief, which does all the following up with the police if we experience an incident. Once, it was able to ban someone who stole from us from coming back to the shop by enforcing an injunction. We also use a system called Stay Safe. We have a keypad that has options to either call the manager, tell shoppers they are being watched by CCTV or activate the alarm. Its team can then access the CCTV and speak out loud to the offender.

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I don’t have much faith in the police, either. I appreciate the government has recently announced that assaulting a shop-worker will be a separate offence, following the lead of the same legislation in Scotland, but it’s too little, too late. We’ve been campaigning for help for years and I don’t believe this change will have much impact. I’d much rather they focused on distributing funding to independent stores to help us invest in security measures to prevent crime.

There needs to be a better understanding that local shops don’t have the money to in-vest in things like facial recognition, it’s just too expensive. 

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