Opinion: Time to treat retail crime like real crime

By Auror CEO and co-founder Phil Thomson

Phil is the CEO and co-founder of NZ-based global retail crime reporting software company, Auror. The platform allows retailers to record crime in minutes and better collaborate with law enforcement. It is used by more than 3000 law enforcement agencies and 45,000 retail stores across New Zealand, Australia, North America and the United Kingdom.

We have a serious, and often violent, retail crime issue in this country.

Almost 20 per cent of all retail crime events in New Zealand last year involved verbal or physical abuse, intimidation, threats, or violence, and even the use of weapons.

The data is also clear - 10 per cent of offenders are causing more than 60 per cent of the harm.

What’s worse is that those repeat offenders are four times more likely to be aggressive.

Some want us to think of this as a victimless crime, because it happens in a supermarket or a service station.

The reality is, these incidents can have immeasurable impacts on front line workers, the vibrancy of our community hubs and the social fabric of our nation.  

What’s more, we all take a financial hit in the cost of our goods, to make up for the more than $2 million a day that retail crime costs Kiwi businesses.

People are front line workers, not corporate entities; your teenager in their first job, your 65-year-old grandmother who has spent decades working retail, and everyone in between.

NZ has around 230,000 people working in retail, or about nine per cent of our workforce.

Now consider that almost one in five retail crime events result in some sort of threatening or violent interaction with a worker or customer. You can see why this issue matters.

Retail NZ says about 92 per cent of retailers experienced some form of retail crime in 2023 and that it can lead to staff attraction and retention issues.

We hear so much about the life skills young people learn working in retail or at fast food restaurants; well, who wants their kid working that sort of job on Queen St these days?

I’m baffled by the people overlooking the human toll of retail theft simply because it's a crime that happens in a shop.

Despite being the highest volume crime type, retail crime has notoriously been underreported and it’s virtually impossible to investigate every instance of it.

Let’s be clear: the majority of retail crime is organised crime or involves repeat offending - these stolen products sell on the black market to fund criminal networks.

Police keep us all safe by putting themselves at risk and there's no substitute for the work they do in our communities, but demand for policing will always outstrip supply.

We should all want police to be more effective at stopping crime - especially those high-volume crime types - because that efficiency frees them up to focus on other serious crimes.

Technology has been the key to unlocking that previously labour-intensive process of addressing retail crime.

It’s perfectly reasonable for our cops to receive secure information to support investigations to keep us all safe. That is policing 101.

Claims of a surveillance state are flippant and outright wrong.

It’s scaremongering and it ignores the realities of how retailers are actually using our tech, which is to retrospectively log specific events to allow themselves and police to better understand the crime impacting workers, businesses and communities.

Our software securely digitises the event reporting process for retail workers; we do not own or operate cameras or hardware.

Informing police about potential crimes that have occurred is a good thing for the community and there’s nothing sinister about police being more efficient in undertaking their duties.

If you steal, or attempt to do so, you should expect that a retailer will capture what happened, inform the police, and will not want you back in their stores again.  

We should not resign ourselves to how things used to be - retail workers brushing off casual abuse or pinning a photo of an alleged offender on a public ‘wall of shame’.

In the US, goods are increasingly displayed behind plexi-glass requiring either a shop attendant to unlock the cabinet to buy toothpaste for example, or for the customers to enter their mobile number and personal information to unlock the washing powder.

Some might like to think New Zealand is immune to such measures, but as the bollards go up outside their local, the window bars are bolted onto the corner shop and guards man the doors when they collect a prescription - Kiwis will start to realise that sadly, we are on the same path.

We cannot on the one hand lament the demise of the high street, the shuttering of our iconic department stores and the bashing of retail workers, while giving a free pass to those who steal from, vandalise and intimidate the workers in businesses that are at the heart of our communities.

Enough is enough.

This is not the society people should accept; the police's job is to keep us all safe and investigate crime; it's incumbent on us all to share that public safety responsibility with them.

A precondition for economic growth is feeling safe in your community so we can all work, shop and gather confidently.

Just because it happens in a shop, doesn’t make it any less of a crime.