A look ahead for shop cops team in Scotland
THE Retail Crime Taskforce has reported it has made over 1,300 arrests since it started its task of tackling retail crime across the country.
It has been a strong first year for the Police Scotland unit, but there is still plenty of work to come from the team now that it has received enough funds from the Scottish Government to continue its operations for another three years.
With this in mind, Police Inspector Emma Wright sat down with Scottish Grocer to discuss the Taskforce’s ambitions moving forward and how it looks to deal with the blight of retail crime in the sector.
What lengths has the Taskforce gone to in order to achieve its goals so far?
The Taskforce has worked collaboratively with retailers, partners and police colleagues to help us and all of the 1,300-plus arrests that have been made were directly linked to this support.
In some cases, these arrests also involved working with some Police forces outside of Scotland, including collaboration with operations that are tackling organised crime across England and Wales.
All of these arrests were made possible through this teamwork. It allowed us to join up the dots, link these investigations and identify offenders.
What are the next steps for the Taskforce?
Now that we have funding for the next three years, we plan to continue our four piece strategy going forward. We know this works from the results we have had in the first year, and it allows us to focus on catching the prolific, repeat offenders and also those involved in organised crime.
Can you go into more detail about your four-step strategy of ‘prevent, pursue, protect, prepare’?
‘Pursue’ is involving these intelligence leads in a co-ordinated approach to tackle repeat offenders and organised retail crime to help achieve the best criminal justice outcomes and disrupt activity.
It’s what the police do all the time and is out main focus, but with the Taskforce it’s done in a collaborative way.
For ‘prevent’, that involves preventing offenders from getting involved in retail crime or preventing re-offending.
This can be through an education programme to help change behaviour and deter people from retail crime and show them it is not a victimless crime and there are retailers who suffer from their actions.
There can be a perception that bigger retailers can soak up these lost costs in their profits and that there is no impact from the crime, but that isn’t always the case.
This affects retailers of all sizes, especially when it comes to the independent channel.
Then ‘Prepare’ focuses on minimising the impact of retail crime when it happens. Our main piece of work here is to improve our reporting process.
The first step in this was introducing our online reporting form in March this year. It allows retailers to report crimes more efficiently, they won’t need phone up 101 or wait days for a response.
They can go online, report the crime through the link and our an officer will be able to come out and investigate further.
That’s very much the first step in the process, but eventually we want to introduce a complete, direct crime reporting tool that would allow us to work with third-party suppliers, some of which retailers are already using, and we would like these tools to report directly to us so that the retail doesn’t need to worry themselves about it.
All the information we would need would get sent across automatically, it would reduce the impact on retailers’ time and speed up the investigation process.
Finally, our ‘Protect’ strand is where retailers have been a massive help for us and can continue to be so moving forward as well.
This involves strengthening the collective protection against retail crime where we work with retailers and other stakeholders to help stores become a more hostile environment for criminals.
This includes training staff in conflict resolution to improve safety and help increase overall store security measures.
We also have different forums where we share our findings and let retailers know what works and how it can better improve the protection of their stores.
One of the biggest concerns we often hear from retailers is a lack of confidence in the police, what lengths has the Taskforce gone to so it can improve this?
Working with retailers has been a critical part of our process with the Taskforce. Being able to engage directly with them to improve security has been an important part of this.
But this also has to be supported by action on our part and the fact that we’re able to show results in the arrests and charges of those prolific offenders has helped with this and we have seen retailer confidence improving here.
It was also encouraging for us to look at some stats, which came from the Scottish Grocers’ Federation. Comparing results from 2024-2025, the year before the Taskforce was formed, there was 48.2% of respondents reporting that they were unlikely to report crime to the police.
When we look to last year’s results, so 2025-2026, this has been reduced to 10.9%. This was a massive drop for us and really encouraging to see.
So now that confidence is increasing, we are now seeing a rise in reporting, as well, which makes it easier for everyone and means we can take action faster.
A major concern for retailers is with young offenders in their stores. What measures have you taken to tackle youth crime?
We have managed to do a significant amount of work around young people and their involvement in crime.
Our first piece of work was Operation DINOS. This was a small team, with dedicated resources, which looked to tackle an organised retail crime group that was exploiting these young people to commit crime.
That would involve often young, vulnerable people who were being coerced into stealing large volumes of high value alcohol and this was happening generally across Greater Glasgow and Lanarkshire.
We see this mentality often of young people being coerced to steal for rewards from the group such as money, alcohol or, in some cases, purely out of fear and the kids were made to believe there would be serious consequences if they didn’t do as they were told.
We’ve worked to tackle that problem with a two-strand approach. The first is to go after the adults co-ordinating the crime and we have arrested five adults in connection to this within our first year and charged them with offences. This has really disrupted that controlling structure within the group.
The second has been to engage with these young people directly and give them the appropriate support to divert them from criminal activity.
In a small number of cases, young people haven’t engaged with this repeatedly and we have seen their offending escalate.
In those cases, we will go to the criminal justice approach and, in the most serious occasions, we have had to seek remands in a secure accommodation.
We have also supported funding to a number of schemes across Scotland that support young people and divert them from retail offending. This can be through activities, learning or supporting them into employment.
Retailers can also share information on the young people with the police, if they believe it is relevant towards our investigation, as it can give us an insight into the reason behind the young person’s offending.
How has in-store technology helped to support the Taskforce?
Advances in technology can really protect stores and they can enhance the police response. Good quality CCTV provided by these third-party firms can really make a difference for store owners.
It can help to increase identifications and detection of crime, which then speeds up the process on our end and helps us to catch these criminals faster.
We work collaboratively with retailers to do this and it really does make a difference. This technology isn’t available for Police Scotland to benefit from, so working with retailers means we can still benefit from it and means we have greater access to more information as well.
And this tech will only continue to advance and get better. It will be critical for our operations to have access to this tech through retailers to better improve the reporting process.
Now that funding is allocated for the next three years, what are the next steps for the Retail Crime Taskforce?
A big focus for us is to further our education work with young people – to help support them in the longer term and cut down on youth crime, as this does need a more lengthy approach in order to tackle it.
The majority of our funding will also be allocated to the central Taskforce, which will then be given out to different divisional teams across Scotland that operate in areas that need the most support.
We look to where the highest demand is and, in those areas, we have a small team on the ground to be able to support retailers faster and more directly.
We’re also keen to develop our intelligence-led approach, particularly around finding out where these stolen goods and being resold.
We ran a Crimestoppers campaign last year, highlighting how retail crime impacts on everyone, but also focusing on where the stolen goods were going, who’s responsible and to share this information with the police if you did know.
We want to continue this and I would remind retailers that if you do know and you want report these crimes it can be done anonymously through Crimestoppers or you can report it directly to your local police.
Do you have any final messages for the retail sector and how they can continue to support the Taskforce?
Retailers have been massively supportive of our work so far, so we are incredibly grateful for that and I want to take the chance to thank them for this.
I want to encourage retailers to continue to work alongside us to help tackle retail crime as we move forward.
Share information with each other and increase that collective protection within your community. I believe it is incredibly important that retailers work together and it’s something I am always pleasantly surprised by.
You always assume retail can be a competitive environment but, what we have seen, is that retailers are willing to put that competition aside to work together on the issue.
This really pays off and helps create a community that looks out for each other. Information can be shared quickly and allows you to be more reactive in your approach to retail crime.
