Retailers help catch and deport Romanian criminal gangs

Richard Evans, local democracy reporter

The Chief Constable of North Wales Police said shops are helping combat foreign organised crime gangs travelling up and down Wales to shoplift, leading to several Romanian criminals being deported.

During a question-and-answer session at a North Wales Crime Panel at Conwy’s Bodlondeb HQ today (Monday), Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman was questioned by councillors.

Among them, Flintshire councillor Chris Bithell said he was pleased the number of shoplifting incidents had dropped in North Wales after figures were revealed, describing the UK problem as ‘a nationwide plague’.

But despite a reported national increase in shoplifting, stats presented at the meeting showed that recorded shoplifting offences in North Wales over a 12-month period (until August 2024) were similar to the previous year.

In terms of numbers, this equated to 4,707 offences for 2022/23 compared to 4,700 for 2023/24.

The report also said the number of shoplifters charged had increased.

Improved

The report reads: “The positive outcome rate for shoplifting offences has improved by 7.1 percentage points compared with the year to August 2023: 27.2% for 2022/23 compared to 34.3% for 2023/24. Of the outcomes applied for 2023/24, a quarter or 25.1% are charge outcomes.”

Cllr Bithell said: “There has also been insinuations too that there has been foreign organised crime involved. I’m just wondering if there’s any evidence of that occurring in North Wales, where foreign organised crime units are involved in shoplifting incidents in North Wales.”

Speaking on the matter, Chief Constable Blakeman said retailers were working with police to help catch crime gangs, resulting in criminals being deported.

‘Bucking the trend’

“We are bucking the trend, and I’m really pleased with that. Part of the reason is that I lead nationally for retail crime, so we set ourselves up really early in terms of our response to retail crime, and we’ve really concentrated patrols in our retail crime areas,” she said.

“We’ve really concentrated on working with the stores, particularly Co-op, who find themselves particularly in a challenging position, given the amount of convenience stores we’ve got.

“We’ve concentrated mainly on our problematic and prolific offenders, and generally we find that those individuals operate because of drug or alcohol addictions, so we’ve looked at all sorts of powers that are available to us.

“We not only arrest and put them before the courts but also (give out) community behaviour orders, which prevent them going back to areas and (they) are arrestable straight away when they do. So we’ve worked really hard to try and drive those figures down.

“I’ve got the national team that concentrate on retail crime, having worked with major retailers across the country now, Tescos, Sainsbury’s, to name but a few, Boots, so nationally we’ve worked at Operation Pegasus, which is bringing those retailers together and then putting a developed intelligence team into that so we can use not only the retail community’s intelligence but our own intelligence to track these organised crime groups.

“Nationally we’ve had success and deported five people from Romania, who are involved in organised crime, and we’ve identified a number of organised crime groups. I think it was about 27 organised crime groups, so it is around the top twenties, and we’ve arrested a number of those now and dismantled them.”

CCTV

She added: “We haven’t got an organised crime unit that lives on and operates from us (within North Wales), but we have had members of those organised crime groups because they travel up and down the country and have operated in our area.

We use all available evidence to us, from CCTV to supporting our shop workers to give evidence in order to identify them and linking in with the national teams so we can identify those working across the country.

But I’m pleased with the figures, hope we can continue to see that downward trend, but it is a concerted effort on our behalf to try and tackle this.”