A woman smashed her way into a Melbourne clothing store. Bystanders watched passively

The video was labelled “another day in Melbourne”. A woman, who looked like she was in her 20s, could be seen brazenly bashing her way into a high-end clothing store on Elizabeth Street in the centre of the city on Saturday.

Dozens of bystanders watch as she shoves clothes into a large handbag, turns around to say something to the staff and leaves, her face clearly visible.

Four days later the woman had not been arrested, despite the recording of her crime circulating widely on social media. “I can’t believe people just stand there and watch!” wrote one person on TikTok, where 2200 people “liked” the clip. “Do something people.”

The incident is the latest example of a crime spree rocking the city that likes to think of itself as the nation’s shopping capital. Identified shoplifting cases in Victoria last year rose 38 per cent to 41,270, according to the police, or one every 13 minutes.

Nationally, theft rose six per cent, according to the statistics bureau. Criminologist Michael Townsley calculated total annual losses at $7.8 billion, enough to cover the grocery bills of 850,000 families for a year.

Victoria is the epicentre of the problem. Groups of disaffected young people seeing what looks like a lax legal system have taken up crime, experts say. Grocery stores, liquor outlets, hardware stores and clothing shops are seen as easy targets, providing a stream of products that criminal gangs provide to legitimate-seeming independent shops.

“Some people ideally see that stealing from a supermarket, discount department store or department store is fair game,” former Myer chief executive Bernie Brookes told The Nightly. “They know perfectly well that the retail store staff will not intervene and stop them running out the store.”

Extreme measures

Behind the figures is a more worrying trend: criminals are injecting a far higher level of aggression into shoplifting than ever before.

“What used to be people going in and stealing confectionery has now escalated to criminals going in to the stores with machetes and threatening workers’ lives,” David Southwick, the Victorian shadow police minister, told The Nightly.

To protect staff and products, retailers are resorting to measures that would have been considered extreme a decade ago.

Coles and Woolworths are equipping staff with body cameras to record violent and abusive behaviour in high-risk locations. Store managers are being taught when and how to lock down their stores when faced with armed thieves. Super Retail Group blamed a profit hit on robberies from Rebel Sport stores in Victoria. Dan Murphy’s and BWS bottle shops have moved expensive spirits and wine to locked displays.

Concerned the police don’t have enough officers to deter crime in central Melbourne, the city’s council plans to hire private security guards to protect shops over the busy pre-Christmas shopping season. They will be called community safety officers.

Myer’s executive chairman, Olivia Wirth, said threats towards staff — which happens in about one quarter of shoplifting cases — rose 79 per cent last financial year. “The problem is endemic and has clearly escalated in the past 12 months, and particularly in Victoria,” she said on Tuesday.

Gang life

In March Victoria Police launched a campaign against shoplifting. Using the slogan Retail Crime Costs Us All, the police publishes stills from CCTV footage of some of the worst offenders, hoping the public can help identify them.

They include five young men who walked into a Myer outlet in Bendigo two weeks ago during the day and took clothing worth $5000. Three of the men can be seen walking out with their arms full of clothing, the tags visible.

Experts say the problem is driven by gangs. The top 10 per cent of shoplifters were responsible for about 60 per cent of the losses in Australian shops last year, according to Auror, an anti-crime technology company that works with department stores.

“Repeat offenders are more than four times more likely to be violent,” Auror’s senior director of trust and safety Nick McDonnell told The Nightly.

Coles believes it is being singled out by organised crime gangs, who intimidate staff with threats and abuse. “These criminals are specifically targeting high-value items they can see on the black market, including skincare, makeup and medicinal items, as well as expensive cuts of red meat such as eye fillet and lamb backstraps,” a Coles spokesperson told The Nightly.

The Victoria Police say they broke up one of Melbourne’s most active gangs last month when 19 people were arrested under Operation Supernova. The group stole more than $10 million of baby formula, medicines, vitamins, skincare products, electric toothbrushes and toiletries from supermarkets over five months, according to the police.

The State opposition last week promised to allow police officers to check people for knives, without their permission, using handheld metal detectors. The power would be used in shopping centres and areas suffering a lot of crime, Mr Southwick said.

The Labor government has given police the power to search people for weapons in specific locations from periods of 24 hours to six months, depending on whether there has been violence nearby, and make it harder to obtain bail. Premier Jacinta Allan has promised to toughen penalties for shoplifters who intimidate sales assistants.

“We know there is more to do,” she said two weeks ago. “We are doing it. We are strengthening the powers of Victoria Police and will continue to support the work of Victoria Police.”

Mr Brookes blamed weak court sentencing for shoplifting losses typically making up 2 per cent of revenue among some retailers.

“There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “They rely on the court system to provide sufficient enough deterrence so that the same person’s not back stealing things in your store on parole or evidently at a later date.”