SUPERMARKET giant Tesco’s decision to fit staff with body cameras because of soaring assault rates should sound alarm bells.
Physical attacks on shop workers have risen by a third in just a year. Additional security measures for retail workers are essential, but such a staggering increase points to social problems that are worsening fast.
Retail union Usdaw wants British-level legislation like Scotland’s Protection of Workers Act, making attacks on shop workers a specific offence. Its campaigning has already ensured that violence against workers is considered an aggravating factor for sentencing.
But it recognises tougher sentences will not solve the problem on their own. Real solutions require joined-up thinking across the policing and justice sectors. Greater investment in a prison system that can actually rehabilitate offenders, and in a courts system that faces huge case backlogs.
The Tories will be willing enough to respond with “tough on crime” soundbites. Home Secretary Suella Braverman will insist that this is exactly what she seeks to address by ordering police to spend more time solving crimes.
It may not convince, since this crime crisis has erupted on their watch. Yet Labour’s solutions do not go much deeper. The opposition’s attacks on Tory policing policy all involve trying to appear the tougher of the two.
A Westminster competition over “law and order” turf featuring calls for longer sentences could appeal to victims of crime and anti-social behaviour: but it will do very little to address the underlying causes.
It also risks entrenching the authoritarian drive of recent legislation, with scandal-ridden police forces given greater power over citizens despite overwhelming evidence that they will abuse it. Labour has already suggested it will allow Tory attacks on protest rights to “bed in.” Ever more draconian policing of a fragmenting society will not stop the social rot.
Usdaw research in 2022 found the single most common trigger for violence and abuse in shops was a shoplifting incident.
And cases of shoplifting rose 75 per cent last year. The sorts of items being taken are clear from supermarket decisions to place security tags on products that were never considered to need them before: meat, milk, even baby formula.
Very few desperate individuals stealing to feed themselves or their families will assault shop workers, but rising poverty driving such behaviour means far more confrontations between shop workers and shoplifters, so the number of assaults will rise.
Relevant too is the collapse in social cohesion that sees offenders willing to inflict serious injury on shop workers while trying to get hold of age-restricted products, or simply to vent their anger at delays or understaffing.
The extraordinary rise in such behaviour during and since the pandemic — with the British Retail Consortium reporting this spring that violence and abuse of shop workers is at double the level it was before Covid — suggests the national lockdowns were a tipping point.
Casual abuse of shop workers reflects collapsing respect for the community itself. Its rise has social origins in the destruction of stable communities — bound together by secure jobs and homes, local services and a culture of mutual solidarity and respect — which has proceeded since the Thatcher years. The thug who punches a shop assistant will agree with the Tories’ icon that there is no such thing as society.
A pandemic which glaringly exposed the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and the utter social irresponsibility of our ruling class, has accelerated the process, particularly since it has become clear none of the collective sacrifices imposed on us were shared or respected by those at the top.
The bitter reality is that those on the sharp end of this social breakdown are the very “key workers” who carried our country through that period. They need protection, but tackling the causes of that breakdown requires a reckoning with four decades of neoliberalism.
