I held a very lively roundtable about the spate of shoplifting centred on the Lancing and Shoreham COOP branches involving store managers, police, councillors, Crimewatch and others, as mentioned last week. Clearly there are several local prolific young offenders who have been responsible for hundreds of incidents over the last year and the problem has been getting worse. The COOP nationally reports over 1000 shoplifting incidents a day across their stores nationwide.
The ’one touch’ initiative pioneered by Sussex Police Commissioner Katy Bourne has led to more crimes responded to when reported but the weight of numbers and bureaucracy involved mean that not nearly enough are being translated into convictions. It also doesn’t help that there appears to be confusion over exactly what action can be taken against minors caught in the act and it certainly doesn’t help that COOP says it employs security guards as a ‘visual deterrent’ who appear to be restricted from intervening physically. What does help is that the Government has announced legislation to treat shoplifting as the serious crime that it is, especially when retail staff and customers are threatened.
As a direct result of that roundtable Councillor Kevin Boram is organising a workshop for local traders to make them aware of exactly what they can do within the law to tackle shoplifters. It will also feed into the constituency wide crime survey which I have launched on my website and thank you to all those who have responded so far - www.timloughton.com/crime-east-worthing-and-shoreham-survey
On a completely different front I am very pleased to see that Worthing Lions and the Prostate cancer support organisation PCaSO are again holding a free PSA testing session at Care for Veterans in Boundary Road on September 2nd. I went along last year and got the all-clear and given it was just after the death of BBC presenter Bill Turnbull from the deadly disease unsurprisingly there was a big queue. No excuses, get checked out.
