Opinion: Five ways to fight retail crime, for good

By Auror CEO and co-founder Phil Thomson

Phil is the CEO and co-founder of Kiwi-founded global retail crime reporting software company, Auror. Retailers have always recorded instances of crime in stores and Auror digitises this process to ensure secure, quick, and consistent reporting, and better collaboration with law enforcement. It is used in more than 3000 law enforcement agencies and 45,000 retail stores across New Zealand, Australia, North America and the United Kingdom.

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Clear priorities make for effective outcomes, so the Government’s Quarterly Action Plans have been a helpful innovation - if your issue isn’t on the plan, then you most likely won’t get a look in. 

Thankfully addressing retail crime is now on the ticket, and it couldn’t have come sooner. 

Retail crime in New Zealand remains persistently high and everyone is feeling its effects.

What’s more, it’s become more violent, more brazen, and more organised.

Almost one in five retail crime events last year involved some form of violence, intimidation, threats, abuse and even weapons.

Meanwhile, our data shows repeat offenders are four times more likely to be violent, putting frontline staff and customers at risk.

We have a problem on our hands and while we have the Government’s attention on this issue, and its Retail Crime Ministerial Advisory Group is starting to release recommendations, here’s my take on how we make a sizable dent in retail crime, for good. 

1. Focus on repeat offenders: Every business owner, sports coach, or even tax analyst knows that a small percentage of people are responsible for a large percentage of outcomes - the same is true for retail crime.

We can actually measure it; 10 per cent of offenders are responsible for more than 60 per cent of crime in stores.

These repeat offenders are often organised, they brazenly steal-to-order and are part of criminal networks that can connect to gangs, guns and drugs. 

The fastest path to making the biggest difference is to focus on these repeat offenders. Follow the money and you’ll find organised crime.

This means tougher sentences for repeat offenders, taking them out of circulation.

Californians just voted in favour of Proposition 36, which will increase penalties for repeat offenders.

The US has also been considering making repeat retail crime a federal offence given the transnational nature of it, and it’s within reason that we should consider this as well. 

2. Establish a retail crime court:  If police are the frontline heroes of public safety, then the District Court is the frontline hero of justice.

It’s the workhorse of the judiciary but the system is already overwhelmed, and high-volume retail crime is swamping it further. 

Even the most prosecutable retail crime case can languish on District Court lists. 

Unfortunately, justice is not swift. 

The answer here could be to create a specific retail crime court for offences below a certain threshold. 

This can look like a sort of Magistrates-type set up, where District Court judges may not be needed. 

This would allow for quicker resolution of cases and ultimately free up the District Court to focus on other crime types, including more serious ones. 

3. Focus on technology:  Retailers and police need certainty around using technology to actually improve worker safety and crime prevention.

The Government wants New Zealand to become the “best small, advanced economy on earth”, so let’s pair that ambition with having the most technologically advanced police force and public safety in the world. 

We know that by modernising regular interactions like crime reporting and evidence collection using Auror’s software over 12 months, police achieved significant productivity gains, equal to adding 450 extra officers to the force. Technology saves time and money while also increasing our understanding of the issues and our ability to effectively respond.  

Retailers are not passive in all this, and they spend millions on the safety of their people and property. But like any business, they need certainty to continue that investment, especially when it comes to innovative tech.

This includes areas such as biometric technologies, which have the promise to make significant improvements in community safety, provided it's done responsibly.

We should be promoting the responsible implementation of technology in stores to detect risk, prevent repeat offenders and ultimately keep people safe.  

Law enforcement and retailers are part of the same community - that is a 200-year-old policing principle - and effective policing relies on that community sharing information to keep each other safe. 

The way to do this at scale in 2025 is through technology combined with hands-on police work. 

4. Rehabilitate: Retail crime is a gateway to all types of offending, and organised retail crime is connected to gangs, guns and drugs. 

Far from seeing police intervention and custodial time for repeat offenders as a negative, we should treat it as an opportunity for circuit breakers, especially for young offenders. 

There's a lot of thought and time dedicated to how you rehabilitate people, but the starting point surely can’t be to leave offenders in the community with little consequence. 

5. Change our language: This is perhaps the simplest change, but it requires collective effort. 

We need to stop downplaying retail crime because it happens in a ‘big supermarket’ or giving repeat offenders a pass because they targeted a big box retailer.

Offenders aren’t physically abusing a supermarket, holding a weapon up to a fuel station, or intimidating an electronics outlet - there are real people on the receiving end of this abhorrent behaviour.

We need to call this what it is - crime in retail - not shoplifting. 

Because bashing a shop worker is not retail crime; it's assault. Threatening a security guard with a screwdriver while you push out a trolley of stolen booze is not shoplifting; it's aggravated robbery. 

I’m looking forward to the Government making real and lasting change in this space because, fundamentally, it's about what kind of country we want to live in.