Would you stop a shoplifter? I didn’t. This is why I hesitated

There I was, strolling towards Sainsbury’s for milk on Friday, only to pause outside Savers in Crystal Palace because I could hear a commotion going on inside: shouting, banging, the rattle of coins being shaken in a till.

I stuck my head through the shop door and saw a big guy in a grey tracksuit robbing it, trying to get to the cash across the counter. Baskets of cotton wool pads and hand soap had been thrown to the floor and the staff had hit the alarm but, even standing in the doorway, the siren sounded pitiful — a noise frankly less threatening than my phone alarm.

Beside me, an older woman stopped and rolled her eyes at the disorder going on inside. “Shall I call the police?” I asked, phone in my hand. She shrugged.

I was torn. Calling the police felt like the sensible, helpful thing to do in the situation. But how long would they take to arrive? And maybe they’d been called already? Was I about to interfere in a situation that I should steer well clear of?

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Should I take a video, was my other, perhaps less sensible thought. Maybe I should stand in the doorway of Savers like a vigilante, taking a video or photos that could be useful to the police if and when they arrived. But also, would I get knifed?

Moments later, clearly unable to get any cash from the till, the robber gave up and strolled out, and here’s an extraordinary thing: he didn’t bother to run. He emerged looking a bit disgruntled, then walked past me and fell into step with a pal who’d been loitering outside.

I watched them slowly walk down the high street together, practically whistling, as if the big guy had only nipped into Savers for a family pack of toothbrushes. This man had just caused a big and fairly terrifying scene in Savers, and the poor staff were now scrabbling on their hands and knees, picking up the stuff he’d kicked and thrown to the floor, but he was clearly unafraid of any repercussion.

I did take a photo at that point, although the big guy then turned and looked at me, and I quickly lowered my phone, knowing this wasn’t my best idea. What was I going to achieve with a picture anyway? Some sense of middle-class smugness at giving the police a terrible photo of the back of a suspect? Well done me, I’d really done my bit! The police still hadn’t arrived but, worried that I’d been spotted taking a photo, I darted into Sainsbury’s to buy my milk, feeling safer among numerous shoppers. Then I walked home glancing over my shoulder. Some copper I’d make.

Actually, it was the second of two incidents I witnessed in my south London neighbourhood last week. A couple of days earlier, I’d headed to the nearest Tesco Express to buy yet more milk (I work from home; I drink 900 cups of tea a day) and had to go past the security guard and a man with a dog who’d been held in the entrance for trying to nick several packets of steak.

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I literally stepped through them in the doorway like a Richard Curtis character — “Excuse me, sorry, excuse me, I’m so sorry” — paid for my milk and stepped through them again to leave as they continued to shout about the steak.

Incidents like this are on the rise. Figures last week revealed that shoplifting in England and Wales is at a 20-year high. Increasingly ludicrous items are tagged with security labels (Lurpak, Nescafé, boxes of Maltesers) but on it goes. A couple of weeks ago in Birmingham, when a couple of lads strolled into a newsagent with a machete and demanded cash, the shopkeeper bravely ran around the back of them, got outside and managed to close the door, locking the pound-shop ninjas inside (until they clambered through the shop’s back window and escaped).

According to Richard Inglis, who runs a chain of Co-ops in Hampshire, the police have told him they won’t investigate incidents any more unless the theft is over £200 and there’s clear CCTV footage. Shoplifting, says this Co-op boss, has effectively been decriminalised. It doesn’t sound dissimilar to what happens when you get your phone pinched, as mine was a year or so ago. You can report it to the police, and indeed you have to report it for a crime number if you’re insured, but nothing else will happen. The police can’t possibly investigate every iPhone that gets filched, just as they’re struggling to deal with every shoplifter now.

So what happens? Not sure. There’s a popular line I’ve seen doing the rounds on Twitter, which says, “If you see someone shoplifting baby formula, no you didn’t.” In other words, theft of items like baby formula and nappies don’t count.

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Some retort that drug dealers cut their wares with baby formula, so it absolutely should be reported. Is theft theft, whether it’s cash from a till or Aptamil? If you see something like the above happen, what should you do? Leave it well alone for your own safety? Or is that making the problem worse? Are we tacitly allowing this boom in shoplifting if we turn a blind eye? It feels depressing to do literally nothing but, again, not being Crocodile Dundee I’m unsure what I could usefully offer.

I was mugged many years ago and even now can reduce disloyal friends to tears (of laughter) by recreating the whimpering noise that I made while the teenager pulled my bag off my arm. I stood there bleating as my assailant disappeared into a waiting getaway car on my street in Stockwell, not having resisted him at all.

One imagines fighting back in such scenarios. A grisly self-defence lesson at school told us to hold our keys between our fingers and go for the eyes if we needed, but the chances of stabbing this chap in the eye with my Chubb key at that precise moment were precisely nought. I was frozen. Although I did get the car’s number plate, the police then searched his flat, found a hoard of stolen phones and the guy received 18 months in juvenile detention. So it wasn’t a total loss.

Point being, you may think you’ll be able to save the day with your heroics in certain scenarios, but when you’re faced with a drama of the sort going on up and down the country right now, you might act quite differently.

I went back into Savers after the furore on Friday and offered my photo of the big guy, but they looked a bit sad when I showed them the back of an entirely unidentifiable man in a grey tracksuit, walking away with his hood pulled up. Really useful to the police, no doubt, although when I returned on Monday, four days later, they still hadn’t sent anyone to speak to the staff.