With 19 high street gift and lifestyle stores in South and West London, as well as Surrey, co-owners Priya and Dom Aurora-Crowe are sadly no strangers to shoplifting, with their shops targeted virtually every day. Yesterday (19 October), saw Dom interviewed by reporter Catherine Simm in a three minute slot on ITV1 London news, where he revealed that the stores had had more items stolen in the last six months than in the past 20 years.
The news item showed a shoplifter in a Lark store who had stolen a pair of jeans which he hid under his coat. Spotted by Dom who tried to intervene, things got violent. “My wife grabbed him, he fell onto a table and smashed a load of things. We both chased him but he ran out of the shop dropping the jeans on the way,” Dom explained. “Shoplifters are very brazen, they’ll take goods in front of you and walk out of the door. We had a shoplifter say ‘see you later babes’ to one of our staff members as he was walking out with stolen goods.”
He added that the police never attend. “They ask you to fill in a report, send them some CCTV images and then two weeks later the case gets closed automatically.”
Catherine Sim pointed out that this will be changing, with the police introducing facial recognition technology to catch the worst offenders, with officers asking 12 London retailers to send them CCTV footage of shoplifters. Of the 302 images sent in, 149 were precisely matched using the police database who are now tracking the offenders down.
However, while Lindsey Chiswick, director of intelligence at the Metropolitan Police told the programme that it would save the police having to manually go through image after image that could take weeks or months, Silkie Carlo from Big Brother Watch expressed her concerns, telling the interviewer that it would be “papering over the cracks of really serious law enforcement in this country while also putting innocent people at risk of misidentifications.”
Questioning why these crimes are rising, Catherine Simm said it was still unclear, suggesting that the cost-of-living could be to blame, or possibly that people are getting away with it. “It’s very stressful and it hurts ever single time,” said Dom. “Someone steals from you and it really does affect you.” He added that he would welcome any kind of progress in tackling the crime which is running out of control.
Top: Dom Aurora-Crowe, co-owner of gift multiple Lark, was interviewed on ITV1 London news yesterday about the escalation of shoplifting in his stores.
