industry focus
Five billion and counting - are existing retail LP strategies working?
This second in a series of articles on the efficacy of LP strategies investigates why the £5 billion spent on security technology over the last five years* has so far failed to stem the tide of retail crime.
Fujitsu, one of the world’s leading software and technology providers probes the status quo through the prism of the ‘risk to reward ratio’ and the lack of meaningful consequences for prolific and persistent organised criminals.
The issue was one of the themes explored in a ground-breaking webinar held in conjunction with ORIS Media, publishers of Loss Prevention Magazine Europe.
The premise and hypothesis of the webinar - The Security Investment Return on Investment Paradox - was to challenge retail organisations on whether their investment in security systems was working hard enough for them and whether the security systems are effective – and if so, why is retail crime still increasing?
While exploring the wider eco-system of the potency of existing LP technology and law enforcement responses, there was a strong focus on the consequences of crime – or, rhetorically, the lack of them.
Both organised and opportunistic thieves have become immune to risk and consequences as a result of a lack of joined-up thinking, allowing traditional security to operate in silos where only a tiny fraction of recorded incidents are ever being reported to enforcement teams because of the well-documented over-stretched store teams and poor police response rates.
Criminologist Professor Emmeline Taylor of City St George’s, University of London, a panellist on the webinar said: “People will not be surprised to hear that the police-recorded incidents of shop theft reached their highest level since comparable recording practices began over twenty years ago, reaching 530,000 incidents of shop theft last year.”
“And whilst that should be shocking in its own right, most retailers say this is a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually experiencing, with some industry estimates putting shoplifting incidents as high as between seventeen and twenty million a year.”
“This would suggest that less than 3 per cent are actually being reported to the police - it’s clear we've got a real issue around reporting there."
“There's been a perfect storm of factors coalescing post-pandemic that have contributed to the current high levels of retail crime - a cost-of-living crisis, over a decade of austerity measures that have reduced much needed spending on welfare provision such as drug and alcohol services, youth provision, and of course the disinvestment in law enforcement."
“Now that will not have escaped the attention of criminals and in simple of terms, offenders weigh up the risk of committing an offence compared to the potential reward.”
Currently, it’s possible that less than one per cent of shoplifting incidents result in a formal criminal justice consequence, so that risk-reward calculation is really quite compelling.”
Responding to Fujitsu’s Dynamic Threat Detection and Response (DTDR) solution which bridges legacy security systems with AI-driven automation, enabling end-to-end incident detection, real-time orchestration, and automated intervention and reporting, Professor Taylor noted:
“To improve reporting, we need to streamline the process to make it easier for retailers, and we need to improve evidence sharing so that the most important intelligence reaches the people who can action it.”
“Importantly, we should also focus on increasing the certainty of consequences for offenders so that the risk to reward tips the balance towards retail crime being considered too risky an activity to undertake.”
Professor Taylor said that such joined-up thinking and technology could change the game as there would suddenly be consequences to an offender’s actions.
“If retailers can create a real-time approach that provides alerts, enables swift intervention, and empowers staff, that would be game changing. Over time you can envisage how this would lead to deterrence because the offender can see that the gaps are being filled, the dots joined and robust evidence captured that will lead to them facing consequences for their actions.”
*BRC Crime Report 2026
