Why Scotland must crack down on shocking numbers of shoplifters and fare-dodgers
Scotland faces a bleak spiral into a culture of criminality if it continues to tolerate high levels of supposedly ‘minor’ crimes
As offences go, some may regard failing to pay a taxi fare at the lower end of the scale. However, as we report today, more than 200 drivers have been victims of this crime in Edinburgh in this year alone. And, with annual losses of an estimated £40,000, that is not a petty crime, it’s someone’s livelihood.
It is hard not to draw a parallel between the increase in this form of dishonesty and the surge in cases of shoplifting, with figures published in February showing a 128 per cent rise in just four years. Police Scotland said that, in the year to September 2025, there were 48,564 shoplifting offences, compared to 21,175 in the year ending September 2021.
David Lonsdale, director of the Scottish Retail Consortium, warned thieves were becoming “bolder and more aggressive” to the point that they were discouraging ordinary people from visiting town centres.
READ MORE: How the tiny number of shoplifting convictions in Scotland shows the SNP just does not care
The situation has not been helped by the widespread use of self-service checkouts. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Marks and Spencer chair Archie Norman said that “normally good, honest people” were turning into shoplifters in situations where an item they wanted to buy wouldn’t scan and there were no staff at the checkouts, leading them to decide: “It’s not my fault and I don’t have much time so if I can’t get my strawberries through, I’ll just put them in my basket.”
Doubtless, amid the cost-of-living crisis, people who are struggling to get by but would also not normally steal have been enticed to do so by the ease with which it is possible and the apparent lack of consequences. This is almost entrapment. And when supermarket staff can be punished or even sacked for tackling a shoplifter, something has gone badly wrong.
The broken windows theory of crime is essentially that failing to repair a broken window and catch the vandal results in more broken windows and a normalisation of low-level crime, then more serious offences.
It is this bleak spiral into a culture of criminality that Scotland now faces, particularly as our schools seem to have adopted a ridiculously tolerant attitude towards violence and abuse by pupils – to the horror of many teachers.
Values really do matter. The government, the police, schools, shops and each and every one of us need to start enforcing them, or we will suffer the consequences of an increasingly lawless society.