While police refuse to turn up and ignore CCTV evidence, brazen gangs of thieves are terrorising leafy Chiswick. In a dispatch that will make you despair, GUY ADAMS reveals how this genteel corner of London is now a...
THE clock had struck 5.35pm when seven young men barged their way into Riccado, a familyrun men’s fashion boutique in the wealthy West London neighbourhood of Chiswick. Each wore a black hoodie and had covered his face with a scarf or surgical mask. They swaggered to the back of the store and began pulling high-end puffer jackets off a clothing rack. An eighth member, acting as lookout, propped the glass front door open while keeping an eye on the terrified shop assistant.
It took 40 seconds for his accomplices to finish ransacking the shop. Then they sprinted into the darkness of Chiswick High Road, carrying clothing worth up to £30,000. The raid, on Tuesday, February 6, is part of a crime wave that began sweeping through this ultrafashionable corner of our capital city roughly six months ago.
Barely a day goes by without a report of a gang making off with thousands of pounds worth of stock. CCTV of their heists, including dozens of films obtained by the Daily Mail, show how they combine calculated menace with staggering impunity.
Just 48 hours before the raid on Riccado, three men strode into a branch of Boots 400 yards away and smashed a glass perfume cabinet. They threw thousands of pounds worth of scent into large holdalls before walking out.
‘They did not bother to even cover their faces completely,’ says a witness, who uploaded footage to Facebook. ‘The security guard was cut and bleeding.’
In January, the local branch of Vision Express lost £ 8,000 of designer spectacles in a single raid. The previous month, a photography store called Chiswick Camera Centre announced that it was henceforth keeping stock in metal cages, after equipment worth £70,000 was taken in two robberies six months apart.
Almost every local clothing shop, including chains such as Whistles and Jigsaw, now operates a ‘locked door’ policy, in which shoppers must ring a bell to gain entry.
Many also now employ full-time security guards and have installed panic buttons under the till to allow terrified staff to summon help. Many stores roll down their shutters and close for business the moment darkness falls, having decided that it’s too dangerous to offer evening shopping.
Inevitably, a small but growing number of retailers, in what was once one of Britain’s most vibrant shopping streets, are deciding to board up their front windows and shut for good. Only last week, menswear shop American Pie closed its doors for the final time.
All of which raises two interrelated questions.
Firstly, how did ultra-modish Chiswick, where terraced houses start at £2 million and an outpost of £2,750-a-year members’ club Soho House caters for celebrity residents from Colin Firth and David Tennant to Richard Osman and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, find itself on the frontline of Britain’s spiralling shoplifting epidemic? Secondly, where exactly, during this astonishing breakdown in law and order, have the police been?
One way to answer both conundrums is to visit the Riccado boutique, where this month’s heist took place. Here, the manager — whose late father-in-law opened the premises more than 30 years ago — agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. We shall call her Siobhan. In the chaotic moments after the raid, Siobhan was phoned by the traumatised shop assistant, one of seven people her business directly employs. She advised him to shut up shop and go home. The following morning, she reported the incident to the police.
‘I told them we had CCTV,’ she says. ‘You could clearly see the faces of some of the kids, so perhaps they could have found them. There would have been fingerprints all over the place as well, since none of them were wearing gloves. It was a big robbery and we’d lost tens of thousands of pounds of kit. So I expected someone to come round.’ But instead of a knock on the door from detectives, Siobhan received a return visit from the gang.
‘Five of them came back in the middle of the following day. We had locked the door and were only letting in customers who looked genuine, so they couldn’t get in. They stood outside, lurking around the trees.’ This might have offered police a second chance to apprehend suspects. But again, officers failed to visit.
The gang meanwhile began turning up on a regular basis, usually just as it was getting dark. Fearing they might follow a genuine customer into the store and once more steal huge quantities of stock, Siobhan began closing the premises each day at 4.30pm.
She eventually heard back from the police on February 14, eight days after the original raid. Their response was extraordinary. ‘They called and said, “Do you want to do this over the phone, take a witness report?”’ she recalls.
‘I replied, “No, you need to come in.” The person calling went, “Yeah, I suppose it was a value item,” and I was like, “Are you kidding? This was a gang robbery! They took £30,000 worth of kit.”’
WHEN the officers finally turned up, she was told that it was ‘ too late’ to take forensic evidence (‘You don’t say!’) but Siobhan passed over a USB stick containing CCTV footage, taken from a number of cameras.
The police promised to return the following morning to take a statement from the assistant who had witnessed the crime. But they never showed up. And although they had the man’s number, they failed to call him.
A day later, an email pinged into the store’s inbox. It came from the Metropolitan Police — and the contents were scandalous. ‘ An investigator… has looked carefully at your case and we are sorry to say that with the evidence and leads available it is unlikely that we will be able to identify those responsible. We have therefore closed this case.’ Given the Met’s evident lack of interest in doing the most basic detective work, the gang continued to loiter outside the boutique. Matters culminated last Thursday, when eight of them tried to gain entrance, in scenes also recorded on CCTV, by kicking the shop’s front door, damaging its frame and shattering glass.
‘We put the shutters down to stop them getting in and I rang 999 and said a gang, who might be armed, was right now trying to break into my shop.’
Again, the report was met with an extraordinary response. ‘The operator told me that someone would be in touch in the next 48 hours. Did any police officer bother to come out? No.’
Riccado now shuts its doors the moment dusk falls and has stopped selling the Moose Knuckles brand, whose £1,500 jackets were targeted in the original raid.
‘My door is now being kicked down by a gang and the police aren’t willing to send someone out,’ says Siobhan. ‘It’s terrible. Apart from being incredibly dangerous, it’s damaging to our business. We are a small company.
‘We don’t have any other shops. So when the stock gets stolen, we just aren’t covered for it and £30,000 is a lot. Of course, they also smashed our door in, which I’ve had to pay for as well.’
Siobhan isn’t alone. During our interview, she showed me a WhatsApp group called Shopwatch Chiswick, in which about 40 retailers share photos and CCTV footage of shoplifting incidents to warn other stores.
It showed that organised gangs
are now targeting local stores on a daily basis. Last Sunday, the group responsible for kicking down Siobhan’s door raided Halfords. ‘They were on e- scooters and nearly knocked over an old lady as they drove off,’ said one retailer.
Other posts warned that Hotel Chocolat had been targeted (‘Each box of chocolates is worth £20 to £40 and they can scoop up a load in one go, so these people come in, they have someone waiting outside, they give them a whole load and that person cycles off,’) along with Mountain Warehouse (‘people are just walking out with four jackets at a time’).
Then there were hair-raising discussions involving a £5,000 raid on Boots on January 24, in which photos of the perpetrators ended up on The Chiswick Calendar website. ‘Footage of the incident shows
one culprit, a white male dressed in a navy cap, black puffer jacket, black Adidas joggers and grey Nike trainers, crouching and scooping products into a Sainsbury’s bag while the shop’s alarm blares in the background,’ it reported.
‘Both men made no attempt to hide their face and one could be heard singing as he stole items. They ran out of the shop at about 3.22pm. Police were called but hadn’t arrived by 6pm.’
Other recent heists reported in local newspapers include an August account of an incident at Jigsaw in which a rail of jackets and silk shirts worth £2,000 was taken. The store manager, Natalie, pressed a panic button but police took 45 minutes to turn up. ‘They said they had to come from Feltham because there’s no police facility here any more. By the time they arrived I had resolved everything and the police were just basically... laughing.’
Then there was an incident in September in which a gang of four Romanian women walked into the upmarket yoga and leisure-wear store Sweaty Betty and swiped a suitcase from the window display.
A 17- second CCTV clip shows how her accomplices then formed a chain, taking stock from shelves and passing it out the door. Police were called, but didn’t bother to visit. So that afternoon, the gang returned and stole more gear.
A trader called Kambiz Hendessi, who owns fashion boutique Lizard Dresses, has complained about losing £500 gowns. ‘I have CCTV, I had security but, even if you employ security they are powerless and the police in England don’t come.’ Andy Sands, owner of the aforementioned Chiswick Camera Centre, has dubbed the Met ‘useless’ for failing to apprehend the gang who made off with £70,000 of his stock.
The crooks had used a stolen van and there was DNA evidence, Mr Sands said, but by the time there was enough to press charges the suspects had ‘fled the country’. He added: ‘I had to do most of the work tracking them down myself. The police are useless... these thieves are getting away with it.’
SOME of the recent rise in shoplifting can at least be blamed on a change in the law overseen by David Cameron, who at the behest of his Lib Dem coalition partners in 2014 redefined stealing goods worth less than £200 as a ‘ summary offence’ punishable by a fine of about £70. Those who decided to plead guilty could do so by post, avoiding the embarrassment of having to appear in court.
Also to blame are the policies of major retailers who, in a bid to avoid lawsuits from injured staff, forbid employees from intervening to prevent theft. These have been detailed in a series of viral social media films, giving thieves the impression that they can effectively operate with carte blanche.
Across the UK, shoplifting rose by 25 per cent last year to 365,000 cases, according to the ONS. Only 12 per cent led to court action, down from 19 per cent in 2020.
The British Retail Consortium says crime now costs its members almost £1 billion pounds a year,
Road from Acton, almost two miles away, where the nearest police station is based following Sadiq Khan’s decision to close the local station, directly opposite Riccado, before Covid.
Then there is Hounslow’s apparent unwillingness to introduce its own version of an anti-shoplifting scheme that was recently introduced in neighbouring Hammersmith (and may have displaced gangs from there to Chiswick). The scheme has seen 72 civil enforcement officers employed to patrol Hammersmith’s streets, with a particular emphasis on protecting retail areas.
There are, apparently, insufficient funds to do something similar in Chiswick, though Hounslow council did find an astonishing £50,000 last year to convert a zebra crossing on the High Road into a ‘rainbow crossing’ to celebrate gay and transgender rights.
As for the Met, it finally appear to be taking the £30,000 raid on Siobhan’s store seriously. On Wednesday, three detectives showed up at Riccado. (Doubtless their sudden interest had nothing to do the Mail having submitted several questions about the affair to Scotland Yard that morning.)
It has since issued a grovelling apology for its handling of the case, saying: ‘We are acutely aware of the distress shoplifting offences cause and recognise we have not provided a satisfactory initial response on this occasion.’
The problem, as Chiswick finds itself at the centre of Britain’s shoplifting epidemic, is that few retailers can expect a better response from their local police.