- Read GUY ADAMS’S special report on how police are allowing shoplifting gangs to run riot
- Shopkeepers tell how they are living in fear of gangs who strike daily
The clock had struck 6.35pm when seven young men barged their way into Riccado, a family-run men’s fashion boutique in the wealthy West London neighbourhood of Chiswick.
Each wore a black, hooded top and had covered his face with a scarf or surgical mask. Having gained entrance to the premises, they swaggered to the back of the store and began aggressively pulling high-end puffer jackets off a clothing rack.
An eighth gang member, acting as the lookout, propped the glass front door open while keeping an eye on the increasingly terrified shop assistant.
It took exactly 40 seconds for his accomplices to finish ransacking the shop. Then they rushed outside and sprinted into the darkness of Chiswick High Road, carrying stolen clothing worth an astonishing £25,000-£30,000.
The raid, which took place shortly before closing time on Tuesday, February 6, is part of a dramatic crime wave that began sweeping through this ultra-fashionable corner of our capital city roughly six months ago.
Barely a day goes by without a fresh report of some feral gang striding into a local store and casually 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 casually smashed a glass display cabinet holding perfume. 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 worth 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.
Perhaps 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 down 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 £2million 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 front line 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 fashion 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 from gangs. We shall call her Siobhan.
In the chaotic moments after the raid on her store, Siobhan was telephoned by the traumatised shop assistant, one of seven people her business directly employs. She advised him to shut up shop and go home for the night to recover. 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-worth of kit. So I expected someone to come round.’
But instead of a helpful 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 that 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.
Eventually Siobhan 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 then 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 telephone 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,’ the message read. ‘We have therefore closed this case.’
Perhaps inevitably, given the Met’s evident lack of interest in doing the most basic detective work, the gang continued to loiter outside the boutique.
Things culminated last Thursday, when eight of them attempted to gain entrance, in scenes also recorded on CCTV, by trying to kick down 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 Knuckle’ brand, whose £1,500 jackets were targeted in the original raid.
‘I am a woman, a mother, whose door is 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 local 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 the local Halfords. ‘They were on e-scooters, and nearly knocked over an old lady as they drove off,’ said one retailer.
Other posts warned that the local outpost of 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 a local website called The Chiswick Calendar.
‘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,’ the site 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 sort of human chain, clearing stock from the 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 dresses. ‘I have CCTV, I had security but, even if you employ security they are powerless, and the police in England don’t come.’ While Andy Sands, the owner of the aforementioned Chiswick Camera Centre, has dubbed the Met ‘useless’ for failing to apprehend the gang who made off with £70,000-worth 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 suspect 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 just getting away with it.’
At least some of the recent rise in shoplifting can 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, now 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 duly 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 £1billion pounds per year, adding: ‘Retail crime has been getting increasingly worse, with thieves becoming bolder and more aggressive.’
Many of Chiswick’s storekeepers also complain that Labour-run Hounslow council is more concerned with virtue-signalling than stopping crime.
For example, a policy of ‘dimming and trimming’ streetlights to help reduce carbon emissions mean there are more dark corners and alleyways for criminals to lurk in. Endless new bus and cycle lanes mean that it takes significantly longer for police to drive to Chiswick High 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 has been 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). It has seen 72 civil enforcement officers employed to patrol the nextdoor borough’s streets, with a particular emphasis on protecting retail areas.
There are, apparently, insufficient funds to do something similar in Chiswick, though the 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 Metropolitan Police, they now finally appear to be taking the £30,000 raid on Siobhan’s store seriously. On Wednesday afternoon, 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 very morning.)
They have since issued a grovelling apology for their handling of the case, saying: ‘We are acutely aware of the distress shoplifting offences cause, and recognise that 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 precious few retailers can expect a better response from the local police.
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Guy Adams
