Crime within the Retail sector increases 21%.
The new ONS data for police recorded crime, sourced to the Home Office, shows that there were 274,999 incidents of shop theft in the year ending March 2022, a 21% increase on the year ending March 2021.
The figures only account for the number of incidents that ended up being recorded by the police, so is likely to be just a fraction of the number of crimes actually being committed. Figures from the 2022 ACS Crime Report show that there were almost a million incidents of theft committed against convenience stores over the last year, costing an average of over £1,000 per store. More than half of those committing offences were identified as repeated offenders, and the top motivations for repeat offending were reported as addiction (1st) and an organised group of criminals (2nd).
Monetary crime
• The overall monetary cost of crime, taking into account both actual losses
and crime prevention costs, stood at just over £1.5 billion.
» This included nearly £715 million for crime prevention and nearly £786
million losses to crime itself, including £663 million to customer theft.
Violence and abuse
• Incidents of violence and abuse soared to 1301 incidents a day in 2020-21
(up from 455 the previous year). With many shops closed in the lockdowns,
this huge number was concentrated in fewer shops.
• The rise was mainly accounted for by a rise in abuse. Even verbal abuse can
have a huge impact on the health and wellbeing of retail colleagues.
• There were 21 incidents a day of violence with injury; 104 a day of violence
without injury; and 1176 abusive incidents a day.
• For every 1000 employees there were 155 incidents. In other words, over
15% of the workforce suffered some form of harassment.
• 44 altercations per 1000 employees were specifically attributed to spitting,
coughing, social distancing and mask wearing.
Information from :
Association of Convenience Stores & British Retail Consortium
