ISJ hears exclusively from Nicholas Dynon, Group Brand Strategy & Innovation Director, Optic Security Group about what retail crime really looks like today.
Post-COVID retail crime surges don’t represent a ‘new normal’, and they’re not as big as the statistics suggest, writes Nicholas Dynon, Group Brand Strategy & Innovation Director at Optic Security Group.
Retail crime – ram raids, smash ‘n’ grabs, and just plain old shoplifting – has been big news in recent years, with post-COVID hikes in retail crime making headlines around the world.
In New Zealand, where I am based, concerns over the apparent retail crime wave has driven a range of reactive policing measures, legislative changes and significant investments by retailers in new security technologies.
Moral panic in media reportage and virtue signalling by our political leaders point to this crime wave as constituting an ‘unprecedented crisis’, part of a ‘new normal’.
Yet, according to a little talked about but weighty body of academic research, it’s not.
What this research tells us is that the retail crime surge has less to do with oft cited socio-moral factors – truant youths seeking social media notoriety, drug addicts funding their fix and a society-wide slide towards incivility – and more to do with plain old economic cycles.
It’s the economy, stupid!
The authors of a study published in 2007 by the journal Global Crime that examined the relationship between property crime and inflation and unemployment in the US from 1960 to 2005, point out that retail crime – or property crime more broadly – is associated with periods of high inflation.
Eminent American criminologist the late Richard Rosenfeld and American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Brent Orrell, similarly note that inflation is the most powerful economic predictor of crime.
Historically, periods of low inflation produce relatively low crime rates while periods of high inflation produce relatively high crime rates.
According to the research, when there’s a cost of living crisis, organised retail crime (ORC) groups respond by stealing more items and selling them more cheaply than folk might pay for them over the counter.
In other words, inflationary spikes result in market conditions that are ideal for ORC group profiteering from the selling stolen goods.
In New Zealand, our 2023-24 retail crime spike occurred in the context of historically high inflation, which peaked at 7.17% in 2022 following over a decade between 1 and 3%.
It’s a pattern that had also played out with the inflation hikes of the 1991 recession and 2008 GFC.
Our inflation has since cooled to around 3% – and official retail crime stats have also fallen since post-COVID highs.
Lies, damn lies and statistics
But inflation alone is not solely responsible for the dramatic spike in New Zealand’s retail crime stats.
Playing their part are big changes in how retail security incidents are being reported.
Our national retailers’ association, Retail NZ, has been actively pushing its members to report more crime and sub-crime incidents “regardless of the scale of the offending”.
While this initiative is informed by the noble imperative of addressing chronic under-reporting of retail crime, the problem is that it has skewed the official retail victimisation stats – preventing any meaningful comparison between recent victimisation rates and previous years.
In addition to this, the rapid adoption of crime intelligence platform technologies, such as Auror, that make it easier for stores to report incidents, has created a new abundance of reporting that has literally overwhelmed New Zealand Police.
Police state that Auror theft reports doubled from 4,000 a month in 2022 to 8,000 in 2025, a big number considering that the police’s official retail crime victimisation numbers for the same period oscillated between 8,000 and 10,000 per month.
It’s been a perfect – and unnatural – storm.
The thousands of new incidents now being reported are appearing in both official and non-official metrics, whereas they weren’t previously.
These incidents, that would have gone unreported in the past, likely account for the majority of the increase in the country’s post-COVID retail crime stats.
International patterns in the data
A quick scan of commentary from other Western market economies indicates strong parallels with New Zealand’s post-COVID retail crime story.
Firstly, each of these economies experienced sudden COVID-induced spikes in inflation between 2021 and 2023 following decades of relative inflation stability of 1-3%.
In each of these economies, pandemic-era supply disruptions caused sharp increases in goods prices, resulting in sudden hikes in the cost of living.
Inflation rates eased throughout 2023 and 2024 in each of these markets, returning to their pre-COVID resting rates in all but the UK and Australia.
Secondly, in each of these markets, media reportage, retailer industry group surveys of retailers and – to varying degrees – official statistics, point to sharp post-COVID escalations in retail crime following long periods of relative crime rate stability throughout the 2000s.
The high inflation-high retail crime rate patterns across these markets post-COVID add additional evidentiary data points to the pre-existing research establishing that inflation hikes cause retail crime spikes.
Thirdly, there appears to be well-founded dissatisfaction with the accuracy of retail crime data across these jurisdictions.
Vaughan Allen, Chief Executive at CityCo Manchester and Manchester BID, for example, identifies inconsistencies between British Retail Consortium (BRC) claims of surging retail crime and data from the Office of National Statistics that indicate 2022-23 shoplifting figures to be less than pre-COVID numbers.
Allen states that the BRC’s statistics are in part driven by “what the aims of the BRC are at any particular time”.
John Hall of the Manhattan Institute raises similar concerns with US National Retail Federation (NRF) data.
He suggests that small sample sizes may limit the generalisability of the NRF survey, and that the results of the survey are subject to voluntary response bias.
“Retailers with stronger feelings about theft or security may be more likely to take part, thereby skewing the results,” he writes.
“Similarly, the rising salience of shoplifting might induce more retailers to take part. If so, the survey would overestimate serious shoplifting concerns.”
In a report published by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, Ames Grawert and Ram Subramanian highlight statistical anomalies that can occur due to how theft is reported.
They cite the example of a Target store in San Francisco that reported 10 times more shoplifting incidents in September 2021 than the preceding month due to a “new reporting system” that made it easier for the store to document incidents with the police.
The increase was so large, they write, that it skewed citywide data “making it look as if monthly shoplifting counts had doubled across San Francisco.”
From early scaling pre-COVID to rapid large retailer uptake from 2020 onwards, the proliferation of crime intelligence platforms like Auror has occurred contemporaneously with – and indeed driven – the spike in retail crime statistics.
Let’s get real
Governments and retailers alike have responded to the retail ‘crime wave’ with reactive legislation and investments in increasingly intrusive security technologies… such as the use of live facial recognition in supermarkets.
Significant amounts of effort and money – including taxpayers’ – is being spent on the basis of misleading data.
The research tells us that we have not entered a retail crime ‘new normal’.
It’s temporary.
The apparent retail crime wave provides no credible justification for wholesale changes to how we legislate against retail crime or for the deployment of disproportionate security measures in stores.
Although official and non-official retail crime datasets are clearly misleading, they are nevertheless being used by stakeholders throughout the security supply chain – from manufacturers to consultants to integrators to customers – to push for the sledgehammer securitisation of retail stores.
Statistics are always wide open to misinterpretation and misrepresentation, and crime statistics can be cut in many different ways. Security professionals advising retail operators owe it to their customers to understand the nature of the statistics they’re citing and to investigate how the statistics were arrived at – and by whom.
For the time being, we’re fighting a retail crime pandemic that doesn’t really exist.