Plan to tag and track prolific shoplifters in Croydon

A shoplifter is caught on camera pulling bottles out of a fridge and stuffing them into his clothes on one of many CCTV videos that Ben Selvaratnam has in his collection.

The owner and managing director of Freshfields Market in Croydon said his family-run grocery has at least two or three incidents like that every day, which costs him hundreds of pounds a day.

He said the main targets are items like wine, coffee and chocolate and the impact on his business and staff has been damaging.

Selvaratnam has cautiously welcomed plans by Croydon Council to roll out electronic tagging for prolific shoplifters later this year.

Selvaratnam said: "We're a small family business.

"We don't have a big head office to offset the costs so we do try to retrieve stolen goods.

"We do challenge shoplifters and say look we need this back, and at that point it's 50-50 whether they give it back or not.

"If they do, it's fine and they leave, and if not then it can be abuse, it can be aggression, it can be violence and it can be very disheartening to be on the back end of that."

The shop owner, who is also co-founder of the Croydon Business Association, called the GPS tracking system "a great idea... identifying these repeat offenders, making sure that there's consequences".

But he added: "To make the GPS tracking work there really needs to be the enforcement.

"They just can't be an expensive ankle bracelet."

The Conservative elected mayor of Croydon, Jason Perry, said he planned to roll out a pilot scheme within the next couple of months.

That would make Croydon the first London borough to electronically tag prolific shoplifters.

He said he was talking to the Metropolitan Police about how it could work.

"It's a tagging system that essentially is put on the individual," said Perry.

"It's run through the police and the local court system so we're working with both of those at the moment.

"We're [looking at] doing it as a trial period to see how well it works, before we think about rolling that out any further."

The idea was first introduced in East Sussex last year by Sussex's Conservative police and crime commissioner Katy Bourne.

That scheme had a small number of prolific shoplifters fitted with lightweight GPS ankle tags that monitored when they entered shopping areas which they had been banned from by the courts.

Croydon council said shoplifting had come down in the borough in the past year. It said there were 4,796 reported shop thefts in the town centre over the last 12 months, compared with 5,043 the year before.

Croydon's elected mayor puts that down to a range of measures, including live facial recognition cameras that were rolled out in the borough earlier this year by the Metropolitan Police, with Croydon Council's support, to spot a range of offenders.

Perry said: "We've seen that bringing down crime.

"We've got a public space protection order that's reduced antisocial behaviour by 24% over the past three years.

"So all of these measures together mean that we're making Croydon a safer place to enjoy life, to shop and to live."

Councillor Janet Campbell said her Labour group on Croydon Council supported the idea of electronic tagging of prolific offenders, but she said the elected mayor needed to provide more information.

She explained: "We feel as though the people of Croydon deserve more than a proposal.

"What they deserve is some detail as to how this is going to happen, where the funding is going to come from, and will he have the power to fulfil this proposal."

Sussex Police told BBC London that the costs of the GPS tags ranged from £275 to £400 each, but individual forces may negotiate different discounts based on volume.

The force said that as a result of the tagging pilot scheme, "100 shop thefts have been prevented, saving an estimated £5,600 in police costs and £28,300 in wider criminal justice costs".

The Met recorded 90,071 shoplifting offences in 2025-26.

London accounted for almost one in every five (18%) of shoplifting crimes recorded across England and Wales last year, according to information gathered by the BBC Data Unit.

While 53% of shoplifting investigations nationally ended with no suspect identified, the figure in London was 70%, giving the Metropolitan Police the worst rate in England and Wales.

Nationally, shoplifting remains a widespread problem. In London, the key issue appears to be enforcement, with the capital recording the highest volume of offences. ​

The Met said just 104 prolific shoplifters across London were linked to 4,389 offences over the last two years - it took a minimum of 31 offences before offenders were given a custodial sentence.

In August the Met rolled out a new reporting platform to several London boroughs that lets retailers submit CCTV footage, witness statements and other evidence directly to the police moments after a crime is committed.

The force worked with major retailers in six London boroughs, including Tesco, Boots, Greggs and M&S, for the six-month pilot scheme.

The technology was first piloted in Bexley, Greenwich, Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Lewisham, and Westminster.

It was extended to subscribing retailers in Bromley, Croydon, Ealing, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Lambeth, Southwark and Sutton.

When shoplifting was reported in the six boroughs piloting the technology, 29.4% of cases resulted in a caution, charge or other criminal disposal, compared to 7.3% before the pilot was introduced.

The British Independent Retail Association welcomed the technology, but added it could be a challenge for smaller businesses that could not afford it.

In Croydon, local businesses say they have been doing their bit to tackle theft from shops.

Since 2022 the Croydon Business Improvement District has been employing uniformed street patrols, or so-called BID rangers, who are paid for by local businesses to keep up a visible presence in the town centre to deter shoplifters and anti-social behaviour.

The prospect of fitting prolific shoplifters with electronic tags has attracted mixed views from the shoppers we spoke to in Croydon town centre.

Derrick Edmunds said: "It would help cut down the shoplifting wouldn't it. I mean it's quite rampant really."

Leonard Wilson disagreed: "I don't think that idea would stop anything because they would do it with the tags on the same way."

While another local, Bunty Bunce, said the sight of people wearing electronic tags would frighten her: "I think, if I saw people walking around with a tag there, I would think they weren't just a shoplifter.

"I thought they would be threatening. I would be scared to go near them. I'd be very scared. So whether that would be good for them or for the public, I'm not quite sure. There might be another way."

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