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The cost of crime: shop-lifting and other offences in Croydon town centre in 2025 cost businesses £2.5m
There is a figure in the latest Croydon BID business crime survey that should stop anyone running a shop in the town centre in their tracks. The combined cost of crime to local businesses last year came to an estimated £2.5million. Spread across those affected, that works out at around £21,000 each.
That is not an abstract number. It is stock walking out of the door, staff time spent dealing with the aftermath, higher insurance and, in too many cases, the cost of fear. Nearly half of the retailers surveyed said their staff had faced assaults or threats. Almost three-quarters said they were hit by shoplifting at least once a week.
The survey, drawn from more than 400 town-centre businesses, paints a picture most traders in Croydon would recognise without needing the statistics. More than half said crime affecting their business had risen over the past year. The squeeze is not Croydon’s alone: shoplifting offences across England and Wales rose 13% in a single year, reaching well over half a million recorded incidents. The instinct, understandably, is to call for more, more police, more patrols, more visible presence on North End: 83% of businesses said exactly that.
But there is a quieter question buried in all of this, and it is worth asking plainly: what are all the CCTV cameras actually doing?
The expensive habit of watching crime happen
Almost every business in Croydon already has CCTV. It has been the default answer to security for decades. And for decades it has done roughly the same thing: record footage that someone reviews later, usually after the theft has already happened and the stock is already gone.
Watching crime happen: conventional CCTV records crime, it doesn’t deter it
That is the catch with traditional camera setups. They are witnesses, not guards. They tell you what happened after the fact, often grainily, often too late to matter. A shop owner can have a dozen cameras and still spend an afternoon scrubbing through footage to find the 30 seconds that show a familiar face lifting goods, again. The crime was filmed. It was not prevented.
The town has already seen what a more active approach looks like, for better and worse. The Met’s live facial recognition pilot, with cameras fixed to lampposts at either end of the high street, made headlines precisely because it tried to do something cameras have not traditionally done: spot a wanted person in real time and act on it.
Whatever one thinks of that scheme, and plenty in Croydon have strong views, it signalled a shift. Even the authorities have concluded that passively recording footage is no longer enough.
What has actually changed in security technology
The interesting development for ordinary businesses is not facial recognition on a council lamppost. It is what has happened to the technology a shop or office can put on its own premises.
For most of their history, security cameras got sharper but no smarter. That has changed. A new wave of what the industry calls AI-driven physical security is built around a different idea: that a system should understand what it is seeing and respond while something is happening, not hours afterwards.
In practice that means a few things. Detection in real time, so an alert can be sent the moment something looks wrong, rather than discovered the next morning.
Plain-language search, so finding the relevant clip takes seconds instead of an afternoon.
And, increasingly, systems that join the dots between cameras, doors, and alerts instead of leaving them as separate boxes that do not talk to each other. Companies building in this space, such as Coram, are designed to run on a business’s existing cameras rather than demanding everything be ripped out and replaced, which has historically been one of the biggest barriers to upgrading.
None of this is magic, and it is not a substitute for policing. But it changes the economics in a way that matters to a business losing £21,000 a year.
Why the maths is different now
Consider the difference between the two models. A weekly theft that is filmed but not stopped is a recurring, predictable loss. A system that flags an incident as it unfolds, alerts staff and gives them the chance to intervene or call for help in the moment, is trying to break that pattern rather than document it.
For a single business, the appeal is straightforward. Fewer successful thefts, faster response, less time lost to reviewing footage, and better evidence when something does need to go to the police. For a town centre as a whole, the effect of many businesses moving from passive recording to active detection is harder to measure but points in an obvious direction.
The Croydon BID survey was, at its heart, a plea for the town centre to feel safer and more confident. Most of that work rightly falls to policing, partnership and the basics the BID itself flagged: lighting, cleanliness, visible presence. But part of it sits with businesses themselves and the tools available to them are no longer what they were when most of those cameras went up.
The cameras watching Croydon’s shops have spent years recording the problem. The technology now exists for them to do something about it. For businesses counting the cost in five figures a year, that is a conversation worth having sooner rather than later.
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If there were more staff on the shop floor, that might act as a disincentive to theft. Which reminds me, there was no one available to provide a blind man, me with support to shop in M&S last Saturday at just after 1. Yes, middle of the day on a Saturday. No wonder shoplifting is increasing.