SHOPS need to do more to catch thieves, the country’s most senior police officer has claimed.
Some retailers refuse to co-operate while others do not hand over CCTV or allow staff time off to give evidence, Met Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said.
He added: “If they’re not prepared to roll up their sleeves as corporate victims, it’s going to be tough for us to make progress.
“This is a team game. We’re stepping up. They now need to as well.”
He said some shops won’t hand over CCTV or allow staff time off to give evidence and some security staff are even in league with criminal gangs.
But Sir Mark admitted shop bosses were right to slam police for not doing enough to tackle rocketing shoplifting.
The Met highlighted one case in which private security staff had been texting shoplifters and street robbers telling them “when it was clear and basically helping them commit their criminality”.
Sir Mark told The Telegraph: “They were right to say to us, ‘please step up more’. And we have done. They need to step up more.
“If they’re not prepared to roll up their sleeves as corporate victims, it’s going to be tough for us to make progress.
“This is a team game. We’re stepping up. They now need to as well.”
Sir Mark said in London over the last year, the force have “really doubled down” on shoplifting.
“We’re making a lot of progress, but I need to challenge back now to the retail sector. They now need to do better,” he said.
The Met Commissioner told how facial recognition technology meant cops were able to identify shoplifters or robbers in at least 40% of cases with CCTV evidence.
The tech allows officers to compare the images with pictures that are already uploaded to a database of offenders.
Sir Mark said one UK chain operates a central control room in which they send pictures of suspects to the police, adding that “some of them are great at collecting the material”.
“They are identifying repeat shoplifters who are going from branch to branch of the same store,” he added.
Shoplifting cases are currently down 4.4% this year from April to December thanks to the Met’s efforts, Sir Mark said.
It comes as an extra 100 Met Police officers have been deployed to deal with offences like shoplifting and phone theft.
Operation Baselife has been kickstarted as Christmas approaches and more shoppers hit the highstreets.
Last month more than 140 people were arrested in just one week by the force across the West End as as a part of the operation.
We reported how a brazen thief stole a woman’s handbag in a shop as she waited to be served.
Shocking CCTV footage captured the thug swiping her victim’s possessions in Selfridges, on Oxford Street, central London.
Video clips, recorded on November 8, show the criminal scanning shoppers in both directions before moving in on the handbag.
In another incident two thieves were caught trying to steal phones from women at a Leicester Square ice rink.
The duo were detained on November 4 by plain-clothes officers who stop and searched them.
Elsewhere, we shared shocking footage of two women stealing £2,000 worth of clothing from a central London store in broad daylight.
The shoplifters entered boutique Jovonna London, in Marylebone, and made off with a haul – including two fur coats worth £700 each – on October 29.
CCTV shows two women wearing caps and carrying large shopping bags walking in to the store, as a man stands at the door as a lookout.
Meanwhile retailers and supermarkets across the UK have been introducing more elaborate measures to prevent shoplifting as cases soar.
Fashion giant Next has launched AI-driven scanners which see through clothes – and spot stolen goods stashed in bras and pants.
The technology spots pinched products inside undies by detecting changes in body heat.
And, Sainsbury’s could introduce facial recognition in its more than 1,400 UK shops.
The supermarket chain — Britain’s second largest — will begin trialling the controversial technology this week.
