A MOTHER and daughter walked into a small salon business the other week in one of our busiest shopping centres.
While the mother distracted the shop attendant her daughter helped herself to hair products and walked out the door without paying.
Another worker in the store saw the theft and went out immediately and confronted the girl and asked her to return and pay for the items or hand them over. Instead of doing just that the young girl arrogantly said “I have them now and there is nothing you can do about it?” and with she continued to walk away with her mother who was now by her side.
The police were called over the incident, but they said they were too busy to attend to it, especially as it for a such a small theft.
You may like to believe this was a one off and most teenagers don’t carry on like this, but unfortunately it has now become a common occurrence and the shopping centres are battling to control it.
One group of teenagers recently walked out of a major local retail store waving clothes they were stealing and daring someone to take the items off them.
If that wasn’t enough, they then went to the toilets got changed into their new clothes ripped the labels off them and then walked back into the shop as though nothing happened.
While shopping centres have security staff they are limited in what they can do in regards this spate of petty shop-lifting, unless the thief shows threatening behaviour to them they cannot call the police for assistance.
They can’t touch them nor take the products back off them and they cannot make serious threats.
The recent decision by the Queensland government to close the police beat offices in local shopping centres is not helping this situation.
Teenagers are no longer under the watchful eye of regular patrolling officers and the latest crime figures reveal exactly this.
They show police are now investigating far fewer shopping centre offences, and the reason is simply because they aren’t in the centres to see what’s happening.
Shop owners are now beefing up their security to try and catch the young culprits, but these teens know the law and they know how they can flaunt it.
Basically, they don’t give a damn because they know the police aren’t interested in this small dollar shop lifting plague. Unfortunately for the battling shop owners their efforts to stay profitable and keep the doors open has no become just that little bit harder.
Do these delinquents care? The answer is no and now it seems nor do their parents.
