Retail group relieved police petty crime change not 'hard and fast rule'
Retail NZ is still waiting to meet with Police Minister Mark Mitchell, after calling for an urgent meeting about the directive.
Photo:
RNZ / Calvin Samuel
A retail group says it accepts police don't have the resources to investigate every report of crime.
A recent memo directed police staff
not to investigate crimes under a certain value
, such as shoplifting allegations under $500.
Police clarified this was not a firm rule and that investigations were triaged on a combination of value and solvability.
"We're pleased that the police have clarified there isn't a hard and fast rule against investigating these lower value crimes ... Ideally we would have the police turning out to every report of crime but we understand they just don't have the resources to be able to do that," Retail NZ advocacy manager Ann-Marie Johnson said.
"However we know a lot of retail crime is committed by recidivist offenders and so we need them to be able to track the patterns so they can capture these people when they offend again and again."
She said police may need to refer to previous cases in order to arrest repeat shoplifters.
"We at Retail NZ encourage retailers to report all offending and that helps police track patterns and put appropriate resourcing where necessary," she explained.
Johnson had called for an urgent meeting with Police Minister Mark Mitchell, which she said was yet to be scheduled.
"We meet with Minister Mitchell fairly regularly anyway to keep him updated on our views on retail crime, so we'd expect we'll be seeing him fairly shortly," she said.
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