A Lamentation: Retail violence reflects the descent into incivility of criminals and consumers alike

Is violent retail crime trending up in Aotearoa? Yes it is. But so is retail customer-initiated violence. We’re shopping more violently – and we’re shoplifting more violently – in the public squares of the 21st century, writes Nicholas Dynon.

I came across a word the other day that I didn’t recognise: ‘jeremiad’. For a wordsmith like me, not knowing the meaning of a word can be intolerable, so I looked it up.

A jeremiad, Wikipedia told me, is a “long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s imminent downfall.”

I instantly liked this new word, and immediately turned my mind to the exciting – if not self-indulgent – challenge of how I might make myself look intellectual by dropping it into an upcoming article. The topic of spiralling out-of-control retail crime in New Zealand presented a possible fit.

Media and political commentators tell us that we’re being subjected to increasingly brazen and violent retail thefts – smash-andgrabs and ram-raids in particular. Crime statistics are providing metrics that justify the hysteria.

Could this proliferation of violent thefts by gangs of youths who possess a flagrant disregard for lives, livelihoods, laws and school attendance – and a penchant for posting postcoital ‘theft porn’ – provide me with the content to justify a jeremiadic rant?

Could I denounce all of society for its wickedness and prophesise its downfall based on the hormone and inflation-fuelled acts of these young criminals alone? Surely not. What about the rest of us good folk, the law abiding consumers who are happy paying for the stuff we want?

I didn’t ruminate on that question for too long before debunking my assumption around “happy” consumers. Customerinitiated violence, aggression and anti-social behaviour is – retailers are telling us – at unprecedented levels far exceeding pre-COVID. If violent thieves stealing their goods isn’t bad enough, retail staff are being subjected daily to verbal and physical abuse by a continuous flotsam of selfrighteously aggressive customers.

The operators and staff of shopping malls, strip malls and dairies across New Zealand have become the new punching bags of an increasingly pugnacious, perfunctory and polarised society. Bruised and bloodied, they stand fast behind their counters as their fellow citizens beat a retreat from civility and descend one ram-raid, one racial slur at a time into modern-day barbarism.

It’s not just the criminals, it’s all of us.

The Thieves: Violent Retail Crime

Retail NZ, the peak body for retailers, has expressed concern for some time that criminals have become increasingly organised, brazen and violent.

On 4 May, Parliament’s Justice Select Committee heard submissions from various parties on youth crime trends, including from Retail NZ chief executive Greg Harford. According to Harford, his members are telling him that perpetrators are becoming more brazen and violent via ram raids, aggravated burglaries and shoplifting. Ram raids have increased more than 500 percent since 2018.

In mid-June, retail crime hit Parliament again when MPs received a petition on crime against retailers from the Dairy and Business Owners Group and members of the Chinese community.

In figures released by Foodstuffs on 07 June, reported cases of retail crime at their North Island supermarkets reached 3,285 between February and April this year (an increase of nearly 40% on the same period last year). Serious offences – burglary, assault, robbery, and threatening behaviour – are up 36%, with repeat offenders responsible for around one third of all reported incidents.

“I see the reports of what our store owners and their people are dealing with on a daily basis, and it’s distressing when we have people threatening our team members with weapons and throwing punches,” said Chris Quin, Chief Executive of Foodstuffs North Island. “Every New Zealander has the right to work in a safe and secure environment and not be threatened, assaulted, spat on, yelled at, or racially abused as they go about their working day.”

“Brazen and violent” isn’t just a catchphrase being used in little old New Zealand to describe the new theft-scape. According to Matthew Shay, President and CEO, of the US National Retail Federation (NRF), “criminal groups have become more brazen and violent in their tactics”.

In its recently published report, Organized Retail Crime: An Assessment of a Persistent and Growing Threat, the NRF’s analysis of 132 Organised Retail Crime (ORC) groups found that 21 groups (16 percent) used at least one violent tactic —smash-and-grab, use of firearms or other weapons, battery, flash mob tactics or threats of violence against store employees or customers.

Fifteen of the 21 violent groups identified by the study began operations in 2021, which, according to the NRF, suggests the uptick in the use of violent tactics during theft operations is a recent development.

Eight in ten retailers that participated in the NRF’s 2022 National Retail Security Survey reported violence and aggression associated with ORC incidents increased in the past year, and a majority of the respondents to surveys conducted in 2020 and 2019 reported that ORC gangs exhibited more aggression and violence compared with the previous year.

The uptick in violent tactics such as smash-and-grab in retail theft was attributed by the study to young or inexperienced thieves, “some of whom may have mental health issues or other problems” (established professional perpetrators were generally nonviolent because they sought to avoid detection).

“Demand for ORC goods may also be sustained by a segment of youth who champion an emergent booster subculture that espouses a vague anti-capitalist ideology, states the report. “Videos tagged with terms related to shoplifting have accumulated millions of views on social media platforms such as TikTok”.

So it’s not just a New Zealand problem. Within several comparable jurisdictions internationally, violent and destructive retail crime, it seems, is being met with an abundance of instant social rewards and a paucity of long-term punitive consequences.

The Rest of Us: Customer Initiated Violence

Customer aggression and violence isn’t a new workplace hazard, says the Australian Retailers Association, but COVID-19 saw “an increase in customer aggression and violence for some businesses in the retail sector.”

“During the early months of the pandemic, stores became tinderboxes for a society frazzled by lockdowns, protests and mask mandates,” writes Michael Corkery in the New York Times. “Many workers say that tension persists, even as pandemic tensions recede, and that they need more protections.”

Corkery notes that from 2018 to 2020, assaults reported to the FBI by law enforcement agencies overall rose 42 percent, with significantly higher rates recorded in grocery stores (63 percent) and convenience stores (75 percent). According to the FBI, more than half of active shooter attacks in 2021 occurred in places of commerce, including stores.

When Retail NZ’s Greg Harford spoke to Parliament’s Justice Select Committee just a few weeks ago on the issue of violent retail crime, it was by no means his first trip to the capital.

Back in November 2021 at a Retail NZ Summit on Violence and Anti-social behaviour in Parliament’s Grand Hall, Harford commented that rates of “aggression, violence and anti-social behaviour from members of the public have doubled over the past year, on top of significant increases over the last few years.”

“Many workers say that tension persists, even as pandemic tensions recede, and that they need more protections.”

According to ShopCare, in the year to May 2021, New Zealand retailers experienced an 11 percent increase in “serious behaviours” (aggressive or physically abusive behaviour or brandishing a weapon), and for the grocery sector, there was a 19 percent increase.

And the proliferation of crappy behaviour doesn’t appear to have ended with COVID. According to a recent piece in The Spinoff by Chris Schulz, aggression continues to appear in the broad sweep of societal interactions, from the supermarket to the petrol pump, workplaces to traffic jams.

According to a survey by Griffith Criminology Institute for the Profit Protection Future Forum of companies that operate more than 8,900 stores across Australia and New Zealand, incidences of theft and customer aggression are currently at far higher levels than before COVID-19.

“Lockdowns are over, and storms and floodwaters have subsided,” he writes. “But the stresses still seems to be showing up in everyday interactions.”

According to a survey by Griffith Criminology Institute for the Profit Protection Future Forum of companies that operate more than 8,900 stores across Australia and New Zealand, incidences of theft and customer aggression are currently at far higher levels than before COVID-19.

The 2022 ANZ Retail Crime Study found that violence and abuse experienced by frontline retail staff is at record levels, with supermarkets, department and discount department stores bearing the brunt of the increased abuse.

Across the Tasman, things have gotten so dire that states have started to legislate against customer initiated violence. “We’ve seen a frightening escalation in retail crime, where it is now becoming a matter of life-ordeath for workers simply trying to do their job,” said Australian Retail Association CEO Paul Zahra in welcoming the tougher laws.

In New South Wales, changes to the Crimes Act 1900 now make it an offence to “assault, throw a missile at, stalk, harass or intimidate a retail worker in the course of the worker’s duty, even if no actual bodily harm is caused to the worker.” No bodily harm now carries a maximum penalty of 4 years’ imprisonment, actual bodily harm 6 years, and grievous bodily harm 11 years.

Various experts have offered varied explanations for the worsening state of manners at our shopfronts and showrooms. We’re suffering from post-COVID blues, we’re tired, we’re struggling to managing a confluence of financial pressures and international uncertainties, we’re in need of a break.

The explanations offered for the increasing violence of retail crime are similarly inadequate. While it may be so that an influx of young and inexperienced thieves are bringing more violent tactics to retail crime, it still begs the question of why.

I find none of the rationales either singularly or collectively convincing. They provide little meaningful explanation for the moral decline of our citizenry currently playing out in the retail spaces, the public squares, the marketplaces, the points of sale that for centuries have constituted the commercial nuclei around which our cities are built.

Concluding remarks

One might say that the security industry – much like opposition political parties and puritanical preachers – is not without self interest in calling out spikes in social disorder and violence. According to such an argument, we stand to profit from insecurity-driven increases in demand for our products and services.

But more cameras, more bars, more shutters, more barriers, more guards don’t necessarily make people feel more secure. Like the sight of heavily armed police on the streets, the sight of heavier security measures tends to make people feel that they are living in communities that are indeed less safe.

Over the past several months, New Zealand Police (Retail Crime Prevention Programme) and the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (Fog Cannon Subsidy) have subsidised the installation by private security operators of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of enhanced security measures in vulnerable stores. But retailers remain fearful.

While the security industry can provide the often unsightly bandages and balms that may treat the symptoms of a more violent, less caring society, finding a cure is an altogether wider public policy challenge.

But to comply faithfully with the narrative intent of the jeremiad, I must not only lament our society’s descent into violence and to ponder its impending demise, but also to offer something in the way of a correction that might assist in the return of society to its ideal trajectory.

No matter the societal malaise that has led to the demise of civility in our civic squares, it appears logical to me that a society functions ideally and avoids entropy when rules of propriety and rules of law are followed – and when transgressors are called out and called to account.

In other words, it is unlikely that safety will come to our shopkeepers, sales assistants, waiters, supermarket workers and checkout operators unless our society – and those responsible for its legal and moral leadership – finds a way to ensure that bad behaviours are penalised and that crime does not go unpunished.