By Gemma Fraser
Head of content
The trolley is filled to the brim with the most expensive items in the supermarket: bottles of spirits, toiletries, electronics, and meat.
It hasn’t taken long to get round the chosen aisles, the routes carefully planned beforehand.
The last part of the operation is the riskiest – the dash through the automatic doors straight to the safety of the waiting vehicle.
But as soon as the wheels attempt to pass through the exit, a magnetic sensor is triggered, and the brakes are slammed on. The so-called ‘trolley dash’ is thwarted.
“People are running out the door and they’re going over the top of the trolley because the breaks are that sharp,” says Kevin Chase, Police Scotland’s national architectural liaison officer, speaking from the Tayside divisional headquarters in Dundee (main picture).
“We’re talking about creating significant hurdles for someone to complete the act of shoplifting. That’s a classic example.”
Chase is part of the Retail Crime Taskforce, set up last year to tackle Scotland’s growing problem with shoplifting and violence against shopworkers.
Thefts from shops are at an all-time high, accounting for almost 45 per cent of all crimes of dishonesty in Scotland.
Recorded crime figures released in February by the Scottish Government revealed that shoplifting increased by 15 per cent compared to the previous year (from 43,556 to 50,300 crimes) and by 137 per cent from 2021.
The latest police figures show that crimes committed against retail workers have risen by 12.2 per cent to 5,297 compared with the same period in 2024/25, while serious assaults on retail workers have increased from six to 13.
Former police inspector Chase was brought out of retirement to take on his newly-created role, which is dedicated to tackling retail crime.
He now works with a small team of specialist officers to help shops come up with approaches to prevent the types of crimes which are causing devastation to businesses up and down the country.
He is a friendly face and sympathetic ear to those blighted by retail crime, and a fount of knowledge when it comes to offering advice on crime prevention, having spent the majority of his policing career working in that field.
“The psychological impact violence has on staff is horrendous”
Retired police inspector Kevin Chase
“I couldn’t believe the statistics,” Chase tells 1919. “The British Retail Consortium crime survey [published last year] says that £2.2 billion was lost to theft in the UK.
“The Retail Trust – a third sector organisation which supports retail workers – found that out of 1,000 workers surveyed, 80 per cent of them had experienced abuse within the past week, a quarter of which were assaulted.
“This is the one I couldn’t believe – 43 per cent of those working in that sector, out of 1,000 surveyed, wanted to leave as a result of the violence that they’re facing on a day-to-day basis.
“The psychological impact violence has on staff is horrendous.”
Chase says the statistics only scratch the surface, with many shopkeepers simply not bothering to report retail crime.
However, he believes that – in Scotland at least – this is changing, as tackling retail crime is now being prioritised not just by police, but also by the Scottish Government, which recently announced it would continue its annual £3 million investment in the Retail Crime Taskforce for the next three years.
The money has already been put to use. The first year of the taskforce resulted in 3,671 shoplifting charges and detections, while a further 508 charges were brought under the Protection of Workers (Scotland) Act 2021 for offences against retail workers.
“They didn’t think that police took shoplifting seriously, but now we’re all winning a battle,” says Chase.
“The Scottish Grocers’ Federation recently released a report to say they’re getting more and more confident now in the police.”
A major part of Chase’s work involves carrying out surveys of premises to advise ways to improve security and reduce the chance of shoplifting.
“We will not go into a store and say, ‘You need to redesign the whole store because it’s not good enough, you’re going to get hit all the time, you need to put your counters there, you need to put that there, you need to have lighting there,’ because we know stores aren’t going to pay for that.”
Instead, Chase has been researching what anti-theft products are available for shops to invest in.
He points to the work of leading criminologist and crime and security specialist Martin Gill, who delivered a presentation to the taskforce.
“He’s gone all over the world looking at retail crime and what works and what doesn’t work,” explains Chase.
“He’s got known shoplifters and he goes round – he calls it penetration testing – and targets stores and tells someone to steal a bottle of wine, and he gets to learn about the security of the store.
“His ‘gang’, as he calls them, said the biggest prevention that they have is a member of staff speaking to them.
“When they came out, they said a member of staff asked if they could help and they said, ‘I’m out the store, she’s clocked me’.
“The fact is it’s stopped them from doing what they wanted to do, and that’s what crime prevention is.”
Retired police inspector Kevin Chase
This simple yet effective method, known as the ‘meet and greet’, is something Chase promotes to all shopkeepers he advises during his site surveys.
“The next one is, what are your most vulnerable items? In supermarkets, as a rule, it’s alcohol. What kind of products, where are they? Do you have staff working there regularly?
“If you’ve got a £40 bottle of whisky on display, don’t put the bottle in it, just have the box. Or just put one item out so you’ve not got somebody coming in and swiping eight bottles at once.”
New technology is emerging all the time, says Chase.
Better security tags which evade the de-tagging devices bought online by shoplifters, sensor labels, and sliding plastic devices protecting higher value goods on shelves are all part of the armoury in the war against shoplifting.
One recent innovation is the Invisi-Shield, a product made up of plastic panels that can be added to shop shelves so they release only one product at a time.
“Instead of throwing everything in a bag and running out the store, you could be there for a minute and you’ve only got five products,” Chase explains.
“Some people will use a fire exit door to go out the store as a means of escape – there are products out there that delay the fire exit door in being open, so again you’re talking about increasing that time in terms of how long it will take somebody to complete that crime.
“There’s some incredible kit out there.”
As the nature of his job title suggests, getting involved at the very early architectural stages would be the preference.
“If I take my architectural liaison officer training back to that level, the best way for us to prevent crime is at the design stage,” Chase says.
“Whether that is having the plans for a housing estate put in front of me, or plans for a commercial estate put in front of me, that’s the best, as it’s designed out right from the start.
“So if you’ve got a shop that’s looking at opening, we give you that advice right from the start, then you can build that into your costs.”
Chase, who spent 27 years in the force, is also excited about a new training course focusing on retail crime which is set to train up to 200 officers in the next 12 months.
“I’m desperate to get the training course up and running so that we’ll be able to have a bigger impact across the country, because at the moment there’s only three of us in terms of retail crime,” he says.
“Once that’s rolled out then we’ll have more officers to give out retail crime advice.”
Chase is confident that this increase in training across Scotland, combined with new, easier methods for shops to report theft and violence, along with the continued efforts of the Retail Crime Taskforce, will all lead to a drop in retail crime in the near future.
“We will see an increase in shoplifting over the next six to 12 months in Scotland because the access to recording and reporting those crimes is going to be easier for shops if they can do it quickly online,” he says.
“Then I would anticipate it will plateau and then see a decline.”