Prolific shoplifters behind more than 28,000 offences, BBC finds

ByEma SabljakEngland Data Unit and Ben Moore and Alex BishSouth East Investigations

At the height of his offending, Jeff Ashman estimates he walked out of shops with goods worth £400 to £500 on a daily basis.

"It's mind-boggling," he said, describing how much he had stolen from stores in Hastings to fuel his addiction to heroin and crack cocaine.

"I know the misery and grief and despair that I have caused these people for a long period of time."

Shoplifting is now firmly in the past for Ashman, but prolific shoplifters like him continue to plague communities across England.

We asked police about the 10 suspects their forces had most often linked to shoplifting offences between 2020-21 and 2025-26.

It revealed 28,415 recorded offences had been linked to just 270 suspects by the 27 forces who shared data with us.

It is an average of 105 offences per person - and those are just the occasions where a theft was formally reported to police and officers identified a suspect.

The suspects identified include one in Sussex who had been linked to 247 shoplifting offences, the equivalent of a reported crime every 10 days.

Policing minister Sarah Jones said shoplifting was a "pernicious crime that for too long has gone unpunished".

She said: "They need to know that they are going to be punished for what they have done."

Official data shows police forces across England and Wales, excluding the British Transport Police, recorded 502,011 shoplifting offences in 2025-26 alone.

More than half of those investigations were closed with no suspect identified.

The government says it is exploring other avenues of tackling prolific shoplifting, in addition to prison sentences and drug treatment, such as technology or court orders preventing them from visiting certain shops or areas.

Back in Hastings, Ashman was brought face-to-face with a man he once considered his "public enemy number one".

John Bownas leads a team that supports shops in the seaside town, including working together to reduce crime.

"You and this town and shoplifting," Bownas said to him, "it's a bit of a history."

Bownas continues to see the impact of shoplifing on local businesses and those who work for them.

"It's a frustration that the system is letting so many people down," he said. "What that ends up with is young members of staff who are just paid minimum wage to put a few things on the shelf faced with quite often really quite violent characters.

"There are threats of needles and threats of knives and that's not what a young shopworker should be faced with day in day out."

The Home Office has made assault on a retail worker in England and Wales a specfic criminal offence through the Crime and Policing Act 2026.

Those found guilty can be sent to prison for up to six months and face an unlimited fine.

One shop manager in Canterbury said it was "really upsetting" to witness her staff be attacked by shoplifters.

Laurissa Woolgar said: "My colleagues have been wrestled with as they've tried to get items off [them]. We've been sworn at, there's a lot of verbal abuse."

While tougher laws may make some think twice, the ability to catch and prosecute violent shoplifters will also matter.

Around one in five shoplifting offences in 2025-26 led to a charge or summons, with 285,667 reported crimes remaining open or being closed without any action.

Some retailers told the BBC they had had to identify suspects themselves to ensure an arrest.

That was the case when shoplifters made off with gold jewellery worth £1,000 from Dion Smith's workshop last year.

He has run the business in Leeds for 16 years and said shoplifting has "got out of control" in the past five to 10 years.

His wife took pictures of shoplifters selling off their stolen merchandise in a second-hand goods store, but police could not identify them until the business-owners shared the images on social media.

"We had so many comments and people messaging us telling us they knew who they were and where they lived," Smith said.

Smith added: "There has to be consequences; we've got to come up with something to deter them because at the moment they're being given a green light to do whatever they want; they are running amok."

Emmeline Taylor, professor of criminology at City St George's University in London, said shoplifting was also being driven by organised crime.

"Post-pandemic, we have seen what's been described as a shoplifting epidemic on the streets of the UK," she said.

"What we are seeing is organised criminals stealing very specific items, clearing entire shelves and selling that on to other markets, maybe online, maybe at car boot sales," she explained.

"But we also have prolific local offenders, these individuals maybe drug affected, they already know where they're going to sell the goods on."

Specialist police unit Opal set up an organised retail crime team two years ago, which often spans multiple force areas.

Jim Taylor, a former detective chief superintendent who previously led the unit, says this allows them to link organised crime gangs to offending across the country.

"There are individuals exploiting the lack of coordination between stores, between police forces and making vast sums of money," he said.

One such case spanned across 30 different forces and the unit has uncovered crime groups responsible for "millions of pounds of theft".

The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) emphasised a strategy launched last year has brought "real results" by uniting policing, retailers and the government.

Assistant Chief Constable Alex Goss, NPCC lead for retail crime, added that "tackling retail crime cannot be achieved by policing alone".

The strategy aims to target organised retail crime, implement an offender management programme and to establish preventative measures.

One example of this approach is a new crime intelligence platform named Auror, which allows retailers to report directly to the police to tackle prolific shoplifting.

Hertfordshire Constabulary, one of three forces now using Auror, was able to arrest two shoplifters at a retail park in Stevenage thanks to the tool.

The men were linked to dozens of thefts from Boots stores across the country.

Similar information sharing is key to the work of Partnerships Against Business Crime in Staffordshire, which provides updates on known offenders to registered retailers.

Paul Greenhough, who manages the scheme, said: "I think unfortunately it has become partly accepted that stores are going to lose things.

"For us, it's about saying, 'No, that's not acceptable - we need to do something about it'."

From a government perspective, Jones said a slight year-on-year drop in recorded shoplifting crimes indicated the country had "turned that corner".

But she added: "We all know there is a lot further that we need to go and a lot more we need to do."

Additional reporting by Clodagh Stenson, Nicola Rees, Lee Bottomley and Tony Fisher