AN OKEHAMPTON shopkeeper has accused the police of failing to take action to halt what she describes as an ‘epidemic’ of shoplifting in the town.

Nicola Bentley-Lovell says she has lost out to the tune of £5,000 from thefts and vandalism at her shop NBL Antiques over the past 18 months.

On one occasion, she had 30 rings stolen from her premises in St James’s Street. On another, seven items including a silver box were taken, with the offenders being caught on CCTV. The windows of her shop have also been smashed three times.

‘Each crime I have sustained has been described by the police as ‘low level’,’ she said. ‘However, in my eyes it ceases to be low level when nothing is done about any of them.

‘The cost to me is well over £5,000 in damages and stolen goods and for a sole trader in an 18-month period this is quite devastating.’

In the case of the theft captured on CCTV, in August, the male offender caught on camera was cautioned by the police and two items taken from the shop were returned. However, Ms Bentley Lovell has questioned why the police have not pressed charges.

She also claimed that shoplifters were targeting many shops in the town and the police were not doing enough to stop them.

‘Recently someone was outside my shop trying to sell an armful of electric toothbrushes from a well-known chemist in our townshe said. ‘On seeing this, I rang said store and asked if they missing a load of items. They said they were and they could also confirm who took them.’

Sgt Pennie Channing of Okehampton Police said though that shoplifting in the town had in fact fallen in the final quarter of 2017, compared with the same three months of the year before.

‘We had 21 incidents reported to us for those last three months of the year compared to 44 for the same part of the year, so considerably less, and most of them were from the big shops in the town. More of the smaller shops were targeted the year before, 2016.’

She said that in the case of the CCTV footage of the theft last August in NBL Antiques, the police had cautioned an offender but had not taken further action because the footage did not show an actual theft taking place.

‘The difficulty with shoplifting is that in order to prove it beyond all reasonable doubt you have got to have continuity of CCTV,’ she said. ‘Sometimes on CCTV, you can’t see what they have picked up and then they move to the other part of the shop and so they go off screen. It is frustrating for shopkeepers, but we can only use CCTV if it shows a theft taking place.

‘The best evidence is if a shopkeeper can catch the shoplifter in the act. We are not asking people to be the police but we would encourage them to at least challenge them if they suspect someone is shoplifting.’

She said that they would always investigate thefts from small independent shops thoroughly. ‘We would be more likely to follow up a theft in a small shop because it is a big deal for a small shop,’ she said. In the case of the electric toothbrushes taken from Boots in Okehampton, the store had not reported the theft.

‘From our point of view, if it is a choice between investigating the case of a 14-year-old girl being groomed online or visiting a big multi-national company to persuade them to give us a statement about stolen toothbrushes, then we will do the former,’ she said.