Watchdog Reports on Criminal Gangs Trafficking Women and Children to UK for Shoplifting
Organized crime groups are bringing children as young as 12 to the UK to shoplift, with connections to firearms and drugs. Women and minors are being trafficked to the UK to steal from stores across the country, as reported by a retail crime watchdog. Girls as young as 12 and 14 have been found to work for organized crime groups with links to drugs, firearms, and human trafficking. Retailers Against Crime (RAC) has identified an Eastern European gang of over 150 shoplifters, with around 15 children currently working for the group.
The gang has been reported to move across the country, and to track their activities, RAC has partnered with police and numerous shops. Members of the gang have been arrested in several cities in the UK, but the cycle of shoplifting continues as offenders are not imprisoned for long.
According to official estimates, at least 59,000 people in the UK are involved in serious and organized crime, which costs the country at least £47 billion each year. In response to this, the government has announced a new strategy, including an investment of £5 million to help police fight organized immigration crime. This approach comes amid an epidemic of shoplifting in the UK, which has cost the economy £1.76 billion between 2021 and 2022. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has reported a significant increase in theft incidents, with retailers also spending millions on crime prevention.
The Scottish Grocers’ Federation (SGF) has called on the Scottish Government to put in place an emergency plan to address the shocking level of retail crime. The government has pledged to invest £1.45 billion in policing in the coming years, while the opposition has criticized the current approach to justice as being “soft” and “decriminalizing” shoplifting.
In response to the rise in retail crime, the Home Office has launched the Retail Crime Action Plan, which aims to crack down on shoplifters. Furthermore, police have been instructed to prioritize incidents of shoplifting that involve violence against shop workers. The government’s “zero-tolerance approach to tackling shoplifting” includes measures such as matching CCTV images of shoplifters against databases and dropping the £200 threshold rule in England and Wales, which Labour believes will help tackle shoplifting gangs.
