Moment masked shoplifters brazenly steal booze from Belsize Park Tesco while security look on

14 February 2024, 13:02

This is the moment a pair of masked shoplifters ran into a branch of Tesco in London and brazenly helped themselves to booze from a fridge.

Bystanders filmed the incident where two thieves piled bottles of alcohol into a large bag.

One of them wore a blue jacket and orange hoodie and the other was dressed all in black with a red hood.

A security guard in a high-vis jacket and a Tesco employee look on and chose not to intervene while an alarm sounds.

The robbery took place in front of stunned customers at around 8.10pm on February 3 and the bystander filming the theft even appears to have his phone grabbed out of his hand by one of the shoplifters. 

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Violence and abuse against shop workers spiked last year with about 1,300 incidents a day, according to an industry group which slammed the "woefully inadequate" action taken by the Government to address the "crisis".

The British Retail Consortium's (BRC) annual survey found that the amount lost to shoplifting in the latest year was the highest ever recorded.

The number of incidents against staff rose by 50% to 1,300 per day in the year to September 2023, from 870 the year before.

About 8,800 of the total across the year resulted in injury.

Retail staff faced a barrage of violence and abuse from racial abuse and sexual harassment to physical assault and threats with weapons.

The number of incidents tripled during the Covid-19 pandemic when people took out frustrations with Covid safety measures on members of staff.

Incidents have remained significantly higher than before the pandemic, and were on a par with Covid-era levels last year.

The BRC, which has thousands of members including more than 200 major chains, surveyed a sample of retailers representing some 1.1 million employees across the country.

It found that customer theft doubled to 16.7 million incidents a year, up from eight million.

Shoplifting cost retailers about £1.8 billion in the latest year, the highest recorded amount and the first time it has surpassed the £1 billion mark, the BRC said.