3 - Shoplifting in Practice

Summary

For the shoplifting crew are so vigilant and dextrous and come under so many disguises, that the tradesman cannot be too watchful, and in spight of all their sharp-sighted servants, they are sometimes out-witted and over-reach'd.

Daniel Defoe, writing his early-eighteenth-century trade manual, had no doubt that shoplifting was a battle of wits between shopkeeper and thief. In this chapter we draw on the wealth of information found in contemporary court transcripts to anatomise the tactics that shoplifters employed in order to steal, and the measures store owners took to resist their incursions. To better understand their respective stratagems and the dynamics of these encounters we turn to an explanatory framework developed in modern criminology. Routine activity theory seeks to define criminal behaviour in terms of the routines of the participants. It specifies that for a crime to occur there needs to be an offender, a target and the absence of an effective guardian against the crime. The target will be an object of high value to the thief: visible, accessible and portable. The crime will occur in a place which has a manager: for a shop, this will be the shopkeeper. Guardians, in the case of shoplifting, may be shop staff, police or very commonly other shoppers and the general public. This theory provides a useful model for illuminating the tactical manoeuvrings of eighteenth-century shoplifters and shopkeepers in their competing struggle for advantage. Repeatedly we find the evidence from the London and Northern sample cases endorses its validity for explaining patterns of customer theft behaviour in this earlier period. So, first, how did offenders identify the personal value and accessibility of their target object?

Planning the crime

While some thefts may have been on impulse, witness evidence suggests that thieves commonly took great care to size up the risks and potential rewards offered by individual shops. Birkhead Hitchcock noticed Thomas Smith ‘pass and repass the shop two or three times’, before stealing cloth from his open shop window, while Alexander White was spotted observing his chosen hosier's shop for an hour and a half.