Imagine this scenario: you host a dinner party in your home aglow with candlelight and conversation. On a polished oak shelf sits a delicate Cisk lager-branded ash tray, collected from a recent trip to Malta. Though not of great value, it holds sentimental charm, a quiet testament to travels past. As the evening draws to a close and guests depart, you notice its absence. A guest, clearly taken by the object’s charm, has admired it so much that they’ve pocketed it. You would rightly feel aggrieved and if you knew which individual had stolen it, you would likely not trust them again.
The same is true about all crime and its impact on wider society. Crimes, such as petty theft, do not allow a free and prosperous society to flourish. They leave an incredibly low-trust environment in their wake. Thousands of individuals and businesses suffer from theft on the streets of all towns and cities across the United Kingdom every year.
Shoplifting offences rose by over 400,000 in recent years, to an equivalent of one every 80 seconds. A factor in this rise is certainly the ‘shoplifter’s charter’, a change in categorisation to allow any thefts of items under £200 to be described as ‘low-value shoplifting’. This was altered in 2014 by the then Home Secretary Theresa May to speed up process, allow the police to deal with such offences by post and give courts more time to focus on the most serious crimes.
The problem of low-level crime cannot solely be blamed on May’s change of approach to shoplifting. Police have been abjectly failing to solve so-called minor crimes.
Analysis by Channel 4 Dispatches highlighted that 167 areas across England and Wales had not identified a single suspect for neighbourhood crimes between 2021 and 2023. Neighbourhood crimes include bike thefts, burglaries and vehicle crime.
However, it’s clear that London, in particular, has a serious problem with crime and lacks the means to solve it. In 2024, phones were stolen at a rate of one every seven and a half minutes or 192 a day in London. Metropolitan Police statistics highlight that this number was up by a third from 2023. Some 90% of all ‘theft from a person’ crimes go unsolved, with only 1% of reported offences leading to an individual being charged.
The Met is now half as likely as other forces to solve victim-based crimes, rated as ‘inadequate’ or ‘failing’ in areas like crime investigations and managing offenders. Most Londoners do not trust the Met’s ability to keep them safe.
So, what can be done about it? A look at New York under Rudy Giuliani may offer part of a solution.
Similarly to London in 2025, New York in the 1990s was in a state of decline. Labelled ‘The Rotting Apple’, crime levels meant that residents were resigned to the fact that this situation was the new norm. To repair the degrading city, Giuliani adopted a policing approach dubbed the ‘broken windows’ theory.
James Q Wilson and George L Kelling introduced the ‘broken windows’ theory in 1982. The theory suggests that visible signs of crime, like broken windows, can lead to a breakdown of order and an increase in more serious crimes. By stamping out small crimes, a signal is sent that no criminal behaviour of any kind will be tolerated, creating an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
In New York in the 1990s, there was a serious clampdown on subway-fare dodgers, graffiti and criminal damage among other crimes. The short-term results were impressive. Rates of petty crime and more serious crime plummeted and continued to decrease for the rest of the decade.
There is no apparent reason why this couldn’t be replicated in London for shoplifting and phone thefts – or maybe there is.
Such crimes today are not seen with the same level of social stigma as they once were. Justification for shoplifting, for example, is often financial hardship that prevents a person from being able to afford groceries. It’s also perceived as a ‘victimless’ crime, not recognising the impact on employees and small business owners. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has attributed the surge in London shoplifting to the high cost of living and, quite remarkably, to the capital having ‘too many shops’.
The level of sympathy that exists in some quarters for the perpetrators of petty crime means that it will be incredibly difficult to change the failed existing approach as it may be deemed too radical.
Yet there must be radical change for not just London, but the entire UK. Protecting individuals and businesses from crime is what the police are for. New York shows what can be achieved with more robust policy. All we need is a Mayor – and Met – with the guts to deliver.
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