North Yorkshire shop owners working together to tackle shoplifting
A new survey suggests a quarter of Brits witnessed shoplifting last year
Nearly a quarter of the UK population have witnessed shoplifting in the last 12 months, a survey suggests.
The figure is the equivalent of more than 16 million people seeing such an event, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC)-Opinium poll.
It also found 23% of customers have witnessed the physical or verbal abuse of shop staff, including racial or sexual abuse, physical assault or threats with weapons.
The survey follows a record level of retail crime across the UK last year, including 20 million incidents of theft and violence and abuse climbing to more than 2,000 reports per day.
In Harrogate shop staff are working together to try and tackle the issue.
Matthew Chapman is the Chief Executive of the Business Improvement District:
"When we did the consultation for our most recent business plan, a lot of our members told us that shoplifting and threats to staff was one of their biggest concerns. It is a national problem and Harrogate isn't immune to that. So in the retail sector, that's certainly something that we're working with our Members to to try and to try and improve upon.
"We've employed a colleague who is called the town Centre Support Officer. So he's out and about, he's encouraging people to report the crime because a lot of crime goes under reported and we need we need as many people as possible to get those crime figures up. Our colleague is also retrieving stolen goods is also acting as a uniform presence and is also information sharing. A lot of these challenges can be righted by just preventive measures, and so we have a radio scheme in Harrogate. We're hoping to introduce an app where images of people, descriptions of people, can be shared."
"At the moment we've had the national living wage going up, National Insurance going up and costs of running a business have gone up. So if you add in there the kind of wave of shoplifting that that we seeing, it really does squeeze businesses really, really tightly.