Prolific shoplifters to be electronically tagged
Persistent shoplifters will be electronically tagged in the first such scheme by a British police force.
With theft from shops at record levels, police and shopkeepers will be able to track the movements of prolific thieves.
Shoplifters will be subject to GPS tagging and rehabilitation orders issued by courts and could be banned from the shops from which they have stolen or given curfews to stop their thieving.
Courts could also impose treatment orders to tackle any addiction to drugs or drink that might be contributing to their offending.
Sussex Police chiefs, who are to pilot the scheme from August, believe tags will act as a deterrent to shoplifters who will know their presence at any theft could be cross-referenced against movements recorded by the device.
Breaches of tagging orders could result in fines or prison, in the same way as with domestic violence protection orders, which carry penalties for every day an offender defaults of up to £5,000 or two months in jail. The potential sanctions are currently under discussion.
Sussex Police is also proposing to link the scheme to proposed live facial recognition cameras, which would enable officers to identify and apprehend wanted suspects by cross-referencing their images with the police national database.
The anti-shoplifting initiative is being championed by Katy Bourne, the national lead on retail crime for the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), who is police and crime commissioner for Sussex.
Retailers and police in East and West Sussex have already introduced an information sharing system, called Disc, under which shopkeepers can view galleries of suspected offenders, submit incident reports and report non-emergency crimes to police.
In an article for The Telegraph, Ms Bourne wrote: 'I've long been an advocate of electronic tagging of persistent offenders so that police and our retail security partners would know where they are.
'I've been criticised by some for the restrictions this would place on known criminals… 'It would mean they couldn't go shopping?' I say, tough, because I want to protect businesses and reassure customers that there will be consequences if you steal – even if you don't initially go to prison.'
'That's why I have set up a pilot for tagging shoplifters in Sussex that will use proven technology. A key step in making it happen is getting magistrates on board to make the appropriate, non-custodial positive requirement order that will come with wearing a tag.
'Combined with the successful DISC reporting app for retailers and the potential for live facial recognition technology, we are sending a clear signal that we do take shop theft seriously.'
The scheme comes as the latest official figures show more than 500,000 shoplifting offences reported to the police in one year for the first time.
Some 516,971 shoplifting offences were logged by forces last year, up 20 per cent on 2023, and equivalent to more than two a minute, based on average shop opening hours of 10 a day.
However, police chiefs revealed on Wednesday that a new intelligence unit to target organised retail crime gangs had enabled forces to arrest 148 criminals, with 33 sentenced to nearly 40 years in prison.
The unit, which is backed by 15 of the UK's biggest retailers, has collated some 4,710 offences by 456 prolific shoplifters responsible for losses of £8 million.
'These figures show what can be achieved when we think outside the box and act boldly,' said Ms Bourne.
An expansion of tagging as an alternative to prison is expected to be proposed in the Government's sentencing review, due later this month.
At present, the technology has largely been focused on criminals freed from jail, where the tags are part of their licence requirements.
Think outside the box and act boldly
By Katy Bourne
Shoplifting – or 'shop theft', as we should call it – appears to be a modern-day crime without consequences, especially for prolific and organised offenders, but police and retailers are fighting back in a unique collaboration.
Some 15 of the UK's biggest retailers have come together to work with police in the Pegasus partnership I convened two years ago, to share information on incidents and suspects and to fund a new, specialist national intelligence unit called Opal. Today marks the first anniversary of Opal's work to map and disrupt organised retail crime gangs and arrest offenders.
In just the first 12 months, the operational Opal unit that our unique Pegasus partnership funded, has collated 4,710 offences by 456 prolific offenders responsible for losses of £8 million. The team has successfully identified 313 offenders (many of whom were previously unknown to police) and a staggering 105 stolen vehicles.
The intelligence and analysis from Opal has led to police forces across the country making 148 arrests, leading to 33 sentences totalling nearly 40 years prison time. Notably, 10 of the identified offenders have been deported.
I want to congratulate the Opal team for exceeding the expectations of our Pegasus partnership. The retailers who have funded the specialist team have seen that their investment has returned valuable results against organised retail crime groups and persistent offenders.
I am delighted that the Government can see the value too and has allocated an additional £5 million to extend Opal's capacity. This is definitely a win in our fightback against shop theft.
These figures show what can be achieved when we think outside the box and act boldly.
The national Pegasus partnership arose from the frank discussions I was already having between retailers and police in my Safer Sussex Business Partnership five years ago and the Opal unit has proved so successful that the Government has now backed it with £5 million over the next three years.
Now, we need to go further to tackle the tsunami of shop theft, with measures that protect our high streets and deter offenders.
Too often, prolific offenders go through a revolving door of police custody and magistrates court appearances without any custodial sentence or meaningful intervention.
For those offenders driven by drugs or alcohol addiction, the best path to stop reoffending is rehabilitation not incarceration. There are successful programmes doing this but they need sustained, multi-agency support.
I've long been an advocate of electronic tagging of persistent offenders so that police and our retail security partners would know where they are.
I've been criticised by some for the restrictions this would place on known criminals… 'It would mean they couldn't go shopping?' I say, tough, because I want to protect businesses and reassure customers that there will be consequences if you steal – even if you don't initially go to prison.
That's why I have set up a pilot for tagging shoplifters in Sussex that will use proven technology.
A key step in making it happen is getting magistrates on board to make the appropriate, non-custodial positive requirement order that will come with wearing a tag.
Combined with the successful Disc reporting app for retailers and the potential for live facial recognition technology, we are sending a clear signal that we do take shop theft seriously.
If, however, we want to see big reductions in shoplifting and anti-social behaviour, we need the Government to make good on its promise of more neighbourhood police officers.
Labour's election manifesto promised 13,000 extra police but, in reality, police forces will only be getting a handful and for Sussex this means just 43 more officers.
Only 3,000 of the 13,000 will be police officers. The other 10,000 'extra police' will be a mix of PCSOs (with no warranted powers) Special Constables (volunteers who work 16 hours per month) and staff who have been re-designated from other duties.
Police forces are struggling to balance their books because of the Chancellor's increase in National Insurance costs, despite manifesto pledges not to raise taxes. Sussex-based victims' services are also facing these additional NI costs which is why I have stepped in to cover their increase for the coming year.
The Government's funding settlement for policing leaves forces nationally with a £118 million gap this year.
Here in Sussex, despite stringent efficiency programmes, we still have £5 million of savings to find because we receive the fifth-lowest funding per head of population with local taxpayers also paying the seventh-lowest police precept in their council tax bills.
The Government stopped the funding to our successful Immediate Justice programme that saw first-time offenders clear rubbish, clean graffiti and pick weeds, despite the huge public support for this community-based reparative activity.
The funding for the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee comes with direction to chief constables from the Home Secretary on the deployment of police officers, in a disturbing encroachment on our much-cherished separation of powers between politicians and police.
It's now clear that this Government sweet-talked voters with exaggerations about police and community safety that will leave a bitter aftertaste when the uplift in visible policing turns out to be double-counting and smoke and mirrors.
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The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The misogyny of the metaverse: is Mark Zuckerberg's dream world a no-go area for women?
Everybody knows that young women are not safe. They are not safe in the street, where 86% of those aged 18 to 24 have experienced sexual harassment. They are not safe at school, where 79% of young people told Ofsted that sexual assault was common in their friendship groups and almost a third of 16- to 18-year-old girls report experiencing 'unwanted sexual touching'. They are not safe in swimming pools or parks, or at the beach. They are not even safe online, with the children's safety charity the NSPCC reporting that social media sites are 'failing to protect girls from harm at every stage'. This will come as no surprise to any woman who has ever used social media. But it is particularly relevant as Meta, the operator of some of the biggest social platforms on the internet, is busily engaged in constructing a whole new world. The company is pumping billions of dollars a year into building its metaverse, a virtual world that it hopes will become the future not just of socialising, but of education, business, shopping and live events. This raises a simple question: if Meta has utterly failed to keep women and girls safe in its existing online spaces, why should we trust it with the future? Mark Zuckerberg has grandly promised: 'In the metaverse, you'll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.' It's the sort of promise that might sound intensely appealing to some men and terrifying to most women. Indeed, the deeply immersive nature of the metaverse will make the harassment and abuse so many of us endure daily in text-based form on social media feel 100 times more real and will simultaneously make moderation 100 times more difficult. The result is a perfect storm. And I am speaking from experience, not idly speculating: I spent days in the metaverse researching my book, The New Age of Sexism. There is no single definition of the metaverse, but most people use the term to describe a shared world in which virtual and augmented technologies allow users (represented by avatars) to interact with people, objects and environments. Most of Meta's virtual world is accessible only to those who pay for the company's Quest headsets, but a limited number of metaverse spaces can be accessed by any device connected to the internet. Advanced technology such as 3D positional audio, hand tracking and haptic feedback (when controllers use various vibrations to coincide with actions you take) combine to make virtual worlds feel real. Your avatar moves, speaks and gestures when you do, allowing users to interact verbally and physically. Less than two hours after I first entered the metaverse, I saw a woman's avatar being sexually assaulted. When I approached her to ask her about the experience, she confirmed: 'He came up to me and grabbed my ass.' 'Does that happen a lot?' I asked. 'All the time,' she replied, wearily. I used my haptic controller to 'pick up' a bright-yellow marker and moved towards a giant blackboard. 'HAVE YOU BEEN ASSAULTED IN THE METAVERSE?' I wrote. The response was near instantaneous. 'Yeah, many times,' someone shouted. 'I think everybody's been assaulted in the damn metaverse,' one woman replied immediately, in a US accent. 'Unfortunately, it is too common,' a British woman added, nodding. Both women told me they had been assaulted multiple times. During my time in the metaverse, sexual harassment and unwanted sexual comments were almost constant. I heard one player shout: 'I'm dragging my balls all over your mother's face,' to another and witnessed male players making claims about 'beating off', as well as comments about 'gang bangs'. My virtual breasts were commented on repeatedly. I did not witness any action taken in response – whether by a moderator or by another player. A damning TechCrunch report from 2022 found that human moderators were available only in the main plaza of Meta's metaverse game Horizon Worlds – and that they seemed more engaged in giving information on how to take a selfie than moderating user behaviour. More worryingly still, I visited worlds where I saw what appeared to be young children frequently experiencing attention from adult men they did not know. In one virtual karaoke-style club, the bodies of the singers on stage were those of young women in their early 20s. But based on their voices, I would estimate that many of the girls behind the avatars were perhaps nine or 10 years old. Conversely, the voices of the men commenting on them from the audience, shouting out to them and following them offstage were often unmistakably those of adults. It is particularly incumbent on Meta to solve this problem. Of course, there are other companies, from Roblox to Microsoft, building user-generated virtual-reality gaming platforms and virtual co-working spaces. But, according to NSPCC research, while 150 apps, games and websites were used to groom children online between 2017 and 2023, where the means of communication was known, 47% of online grooming offences took place on products owned by Meta. These are not isolated incidents or cherry-picked horror stories. Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that users were exposed to abusive behaviour every seven minutes in the metaverse. During 11 and a half hours recording user behaviour, the report identified 100 potential violations of Meta's policies. This included graphic sexual content, bullying, abuse, grooming and threats of violence. In a separate report, the CCDH found repeated instances of children being subjected to sexually explicit abuse and harassment, including an adult asking a young user: 'Do you have a cock in your mouth?' and another adult shouting: 'I don't want to cum on you,' to a group of underage girls who explicitly told him they were minors. Since its inception, Meta's virtual world has been plagued with reports of abuse. Users have reported being virtually groped, assaulted and raped. Researchers have also described being virtually stalked in the metaverse by other players, who tail them insistently, refuse to leave them alone and even follow them into different rooms or worlds. In December 2021, a beta tester of the metaverse wrote in the official Facebook group of the Horizon platform: 'Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behaviour.' What was even more revealing than the virtual assault itself was Meta's response. Vivek Sharma, then vice-president of Horizon at Meta, responded to the incident by telling the Verge it was 'absolutely unfortunate'. After Meta reviewed the incident, he claimed, it determined that the beta tester didn't use the safety features built into Horizon Worlds, including the ability to block someone from interacting with you. 'That's good feedback still for us because I want to make [the blocking feature] trivially easy and findable,' he continued. This response was revealing. First, the euphemistic description of the event as 'unfortunate', which made it sound on a par with poor sound quality. Second, the immediate shifting of the blame and responsibility on to the person who experienced the abuse – 'she should have been using certain tools to prevent it' – rather than an acknowledgment that it should have been prevented from happening in the first place. And, finally, most importantly, the description of a woman being abused online as 'good feedback'. Much subsequent discourse has focused on the question of whether or not a sexual assault or rape carried out in virtual reality should be described as such; whether it might have an impact on the victims similar to a real‑life assault. But this misses the point. First, it is worth noting that the experience of being sexually harassed, assaulted or raped in the metaverse has had a profound and distressing impact on many victims. When it was revealed in 2024 that British police were investigating the virtual gang-rape of a girl below the age of 16 in the metaverse, a senior officer familiar with the case told the media: 'This child experienced psychological trauma similar to that of someone who has been physically raped'. Second, technology to make the metaverse feel physically real is developing at pace. You can already buy full-body suits that promise to 'enhance your VR experience with elaborate haptic sensations'. They have sleeves, gloves and vests with dozens of different feedback points. Wearable haptic technology will bring the experience of being virtually assaulted much closer to the physical sensation of real-life victimisation. All the more reason to tackle it now, regardless of how 'realistic' it is or isn't, rather than waiting for things to get worse. But most importantly, regardless of how similar to or different from physical offline harms these forms of abuse are, what matters is that they are abusive, distressing, intimidating, degrading and offensive and that they negatively affect victims. And, as we have already seen with social media, the proliferation of such abuse will prevent women and girls from being able to fully use and benefit from new forms of technology. If Zuckerberg's vision comes to fruition and the boardrooms, classrooms, operating theatres, lecture halls and meeting spaces of tomorrow exist in virtual reality, then closing those spaces off from women, girls and other marginalised groups, because of the tolerance of various forms of prejudice and abuse in the metaverse, will be devastating. If we allow this now, when the metaverse is (relatively speaking) in its infancy, we are baking inequality into the building blocks of this new world. At the time of the aforementioned virtual-reality rape of an underage girl, Meta said in a statement: 'The kind of behaviour described has no place on our platform, which is why for all users we have an automatic protection called personal boundary, which keeps people you don't know a few feet away from you.' In another incident, when a researcher experienced a virtual assault, Meta's comment to the press was: 'We want everyone using our services to have a good experience and easily find the tools that can help prevent situations like these and so we can investigate and take action.' The focus always seems to be on users finding and switching on tools to prevent harassment or reporting abuse when it does happen. It is not on preventing abuse and taking serious action against abusers. But in the CCDH research that identified 100 potential violations of Meta's VR policies, just 51 of the incidents could be reported to Meta using a web form created by the platform for this purpose, because the platform refuses to examine policy violations if it cannot match them to a predefined category or username in its database. Worse, not one of those 51 reports of policy violation (including sexual harassment and grooming of minors) was acknowledged by Meta and as a result no action was taken. It's not much good pointing to your complaints system as the solution to abuse if you don't respond to complaints. Meta's safety features will no doubt continue to evolve and adapt – but, once again, in a repeat of what we have already seen happen on social media, women and girls will be the canaries in the coalmines, their abuse and suffering providing companies with useful data points with which to tweak their products and increase their profits. Teenage girls' trauma: a convenient building material. There is something incredibly depressing about all this. If we are really talking about reinventing the world here, couldn't we push the boat out a little? Couldn't we dare to dream of a virtual world in which those who so often face abuse are safe by design – with the prevention and eradication of abuse built in – instead of being tasked with the responsibility of protecting themselves when the abuse inevitably arises? None of this is whining or asking too much. Don't be fooled into thinking that we are all lucky to be using Meta's tools for nothing. We are paying for them in the tracking and harvesting of our data, our content, our photographs, our ideas and, as the metaverse develops, our hand and even eye movements. All of it can be scraped and used to train enormously powerful AI tools and predictive behavioural algorithms, access to which can then be sold to companies at gargantuan prices to help them forecast how we as consumers behave. It is not an exaggeration to say that we already pay Meta a very high price for using its platforms. And if the metaverse really does become as widely adopted and as ubiquitous in the fundamental operation of our day-to-day lives as Zuckerberg hopes, there won't be an easy way to opt out. We can't let tech companies off the hook because they claim the problem is too big or too unwieldy to tackle. We wouldn't accept similar excuses for dodging regulation from international food companies, or real-life venues. And the government should be prepared to act in similar ways here, introducing regulation to require proved safety standards at the design stage, before products are rolled out to the public. 'Hold on, just building the future here,' Horizon Worlds tells me as I wait to access the metaverse. As we battle to eradicate the endemic harassment and abuse that women and girls face in real-world settings, the metaverse presents a risk of slipping backwards. We are sleepwalking into virtual spaces where men's entitlement to women's bodies is once again widespread and normalised with near total impunity. The Guardian invited Meta to reply to this article, but the company did not respond. The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Independent
2 hours ago
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Legal aid lawyers face chaos following cyber attack, says representative body
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Telegraph
3 hours ago
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Missiles thrown at police as violence breaks out in NI
Missiles were hurled at police officers and houses set on fire following a protest over an alleged sexual assault case in Northern Ireland. The streets of Ballymena town centre, located about 30 miles from Belfast, turned into chaos on Monday night as masked youths attacked police vehicles and threw projectiles at officers, some setting buildings alight and smashing in windows. Footage of the violent scenes captured houses up in flames. In one video, a masked man was seen throwing an object at police vans as a crowd looked on. PSNI riot officers swarmed the streets near Clonavon Terrace to bring the disorder under control, blocking off the area. Local media reported that paint and masonry had been thrown at PSNI Land Rovers. 'A number of missiles have been thrown towards police with damage reported to a number of properties,' a PSNI spokesman said. 'Officers are in attendance to ensure the safety of everyone involved. They will remain in the area tonight to continue to monitor the situation.' The disorder comes after hundreds of protesters gathered in the town centre, following a case involving two teenage boys who appeared before Coleraine Magistrates' Court earlier in the day, accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the County Antrim town. Irish media outlet RTE News reported that the teenagers, who are Romanian and spoke through an interpreter, cannot be identified because of their ages. A separate police statement from Sunday said two teenage boys had been charged with attempted rape in connection with a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in Ballymena on Saturday evening. People have been told to avoid the Clonavon Road area until further notice. In a statement, Chief Superintendent Sue Steen urged for locals to 'remain calm and to act responsibly'. 'Violence and disorder will only place people at greater risk,' she said. 'Our priority is to keep the community safe, and I would appeal to everyone to work with us to bring calm to the area as quickly as possible.'
