From photo albums to apps: How the fight against shoplifting changed

Before smartphones, secure apps and instant alerts, tackling shoplifting in Staffordshire relied on photo albums.

Packed with police custody images, they were passed between stores to help staff recognise banned shoplifters.

The annual task of updating all 300 often fell to Paul Greenhough.

Nearly 40 years on, the county's approach to retail crime has changed dramatically, but Greenhough says one thing has not.

"I think unfortunately it has become partly accepted that stores are going to lose things," he said.

"For us it's about saying 'no, that's not acceptable, we need to do something about it'."

Greenhough manages Partnerships Against Business Crime in Staffordshire (PABCIS), a scheme he claimed was the first of its kind in the country when it an early version began life in Stoke-on-Trent in 1988.

For retailers, the consequences of shoplifting are often personal.

Vicky Hoofe and her family have run a sweet shop in Hanley for about 20 years. While she said they had "done alright" recently, every theft still matters.

"I've been on the phone to my partner and my dad in the past like crying, because I take it personally, thinking why do these people hate me?" she said.

The shop has installed cameras and barriers to stop people taking sweet jars from the front window.

Even when staff see theft happening, intervening can be difficult.

"I've been in the shop before, and there's been other customers in, and we're literally watching somebody taking something," she said.

"But it's scary because you don't know what that person is capable of."

Helping businesses deal with situations like that has been at the heart of Greenhough's work for decades.

In the early years, retailers were given copies of police custody photographs showing shoplifters who had been excluded from stores for 12 months.

The images were kept in albums and shown to staff during meetings.

Every January they had to be replaced.

"You had to then go to every shop, and swap those albums, for the January of the year before, which when you've got 300 photo albums was a lot of work," he said.

The bulky albums have since been replaced by technology.

PABCIS was formed in 2007 after partnerships across Staffordshire were brought together under one umbrella organisation.

Today, as well as a radio link, members can access a secure app containing photographs of excluded offenders, details of their exclusions and any relevant warnings.

The aim is to raise awareness before an offender enters a store.

"If business A has somebody in, they pass that information over, if they're heading toward business C, they can be at the door stopping them, where it's far easier to deal with that person," Greenhough said.

The team also circulates alerts about incidents where offenders have not yet been identified.

"I might have been doing this a long time, but I don't know every shoplifter!" he joked.

Despite nearly 30 years dealing with business crime, some things still surprise him.

Among them is the number of thefts from charity shops.

"They are plagued by shoplifters, and you just think, they are trying to help people."

Assessing the scale of the problem is not always straightforward.

"There is a decline in the amount of shoplifting being reported, but that needs to be treated with caution," Greenhough said.

"If you look nationally, anyone will tell you that there's a lot that goes unreported. If stores reported every single incident, the police would be overrun by shoplifting."

Patterns also differ around the county.

In Stoke-on-Trent, many offenders tend to live and steal locally, he said. In Lichfield and Tamworth, a larger proportion come from outside the area, while some travelling shoplifting teams arrive from as far away as London and Scotland.

For Greenhough, the methods used to tackle shoplifting may have changed since the days of carrying photo albums from store to store.

For retailers such as Hoofe, however, the impact remains much the same.

"It's not coming out of some big corporate company, it is coming out of my pocket," she said.

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