At 11.12am last Tuesday, a woman in her 70s sauntered through the main entrance of the Ruxley Manor garden centre in Sidcup, south-east London. Upstairs in its offices, the phone of director James Evans pinged.Facial recognition cameras had identified the pensioner as a potential criminal. Two weeks earlier, she had been caught stealing £15 worth of toys for her granddaughter and her image uploaded on to a private watchlist of known shoplifters.Evans deployed staff to discreetly follow her around his store. “We’ll just keep an eye on her,” he said.Even if she was caught stealing again, Evans had already ruled out calling police, confirming Ruxley Manor as among the growing cohort of retailers that have effectively given up contacting officers as a way of tackling the soaring problem of retail crime.Faced with the cost of living crisis and corresponding surge in shoplifting, the Co-op last week became the latest retailer to express concern that officers are not taking rising retail crime seriously. Announcing that crime in its outlets had hit record levels – increasing by more than one-third over the past year – the chain shared footage of masked, often armed, youths smashing through glass doors and brazenly ransacking shelves. Elsewhere, images circulated on social media of Sainsbury’s encasing chocolate bars in security tagged containers to prevent them being stolen.Evans, 48, says that the number of shoplifters has never been higher at Ruxley Manor. Yet the chosen alternative to policing – the move to install facial recognition technology by hundreds of retailers – has reignited familiar concerns over mass surveillance, privacy and human rights.Although use of the technology by police has provoked widespread controversy, its adoption by private companies has, by comparison, received little scrutiny.
Surveillance Inside Britain’s Retail Centers: Facial Recognition Cameras Monitor Shoplifters
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