A week into my role as editor of Independent Retail News and one thing, above all, has shocked me. The level of violence against independent retailers.
Every day I get a flood of emails alerting me to violent robberies that have taken place.
A woman shop assistant in Ribbleton, Lancashire, threatened by robbers armed with a hammer and a knife. A Bargain Booze in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, held up at knifepoint. A man wielding a machete stealing cigarettes and cash from a store in Belfast.
All culminating, of course, in the shooting last Friday of subpostmaster’s son Craig Hodson-Walker at the Fairfield General Stores in Worcestershire.
Far too many incidents to report; not to mention too depressing.
Yet the crimes that make the headlines are just the tip of the iceberg. Retailers and their staff are subject to a constant, lower-level threat of physical, more frequently verbal abuse.
Indeed, they appear to be considered ‘fair game’ by many of the perpetrators.
And then there’s shoplifting. So widespread that many retailers don’t even bother to report incidents to a police establishment that often appears to view it as a victimless crime.
The current use of fixed penalty notices (FPNs) is demonstrably ineffective and shambolic – many police forces don’t even know if they’re handing FPNs to the same offenders more than once. Most damning of all, only 42% of penalties are actually paid.
But has this got anything to do with violent incidents such as the shooting of Craig Hodson-Walker? I believe it has.
In one case we do report, a gang stole lager from a store in Cheshire before returning later to rob it at knifepoint. It’s time the police started taking all retail crime seriously.
These are not victimless crimes. They damage livelihoods and leave psychological scars.
A zero-tolerance approach to lower-level crimes might go some way to preventing further incidents such as the senseless murder we witnessed last week.
