Good example of how big brother has his work cut for him. From Sunday Herald, by Jenifer Johnston:
In the controlled experiment dozens of thieves came away unchallenged and unrecorded in their efforts to take goods without paying for them from shops across the UK.
Hart said: "CCTV is useless in terms of loss prevention. We fitted out offenders with cameras and watched them as they stole – not one of them was stopped or challenged by staff in high street stores.
"They simply go out of sight of CCTV cameras and conceal what they are stealing. Often they will work in pairs with one person acting suspiciously as a decoy while the other hides the goods on their person in a camera blindspot. CCTV’s only function is to provide evidence for the police should the shoplifter be caught."
Hart and other experts will tell a major conference this week at the University of Leicester that retailers would be better spending their security budget on training workers at the tills to spot suspicious behaviour than on expensive surveillance equipment.
Hart added: "If staff in a store say 'hello' to each customer, then dedicated shoplifters will immediately become paranoid that they have been rumbled and leave the store. But stores want easy technology instead of having to train staff in loss prevention."