Can Rishi beat the brazen shoplifters?
WRITING in the Mail, the Prime Minister has announced ‘we’ll stop the shoplifters in their tracks’ and Home Secretary James Cleverly states that ‘assaulting retail staff will be made a specific criminal offence.’ What planet are these two on? The laws to deal with this have always been in place.
Having worked for nearly 55 years in the food supermarket industry, I can recall when such laws were put into action. Police would respond and courts would hand down appropriate sentences for those who shoplifted or assaulted shop staff.
Senior politicians should devote more time to ensuring that police and the judiciary do the jobs they have always been expected to do and are paid for. Stop taking us for fools.
PAUL MACKINTOSH, Darlington, Co Durham.
THE Prime Minister’s new proposal to stop shoplifting is complete nonsense. None of his measures will deter the criminals.
This problem all started when police decided they would take no action against shoplifting of items below a trivial sum. Gradually that sum has grown larger and now I believe it stands at about £200. The only way to stop shoplifting is for police to be called and to arrest any offender of whatever age. They should then be put before court the next morning.
MICHAEL HUGHES-NARBOROUGH (chief inspector, ret’d), Ashover, Derbys.
ASSAULT is a serious matter. That shop staff are regularly attacked while at work is reprehensible. However, creating a separate offence in law is simply wrong. In sentencing a person found guilty of assault, the magistrate or judge is invited to consider such factors as the victim being a shop worker. That is sufficient.
DES MORGAN, Swindon, Wilts.
THE problem with people breaking laws is not the absence of laws, it is the absence of willingness by the police to uphold those laws and willingness of the judiciary to punish miscreants. Until this changes, they can write new laws such as the latest one on shoplifting from now until Doomsday and it won’t make a blind bit of difference.