London's Retail CCTV Pilot

London’s Metropolitan Police are testing a tool that lets shops send crime reports and CCTV straight to officers, cutting out the usual wait for evidence. (news.met.police.uk) The pilot has run since January in Lewisham and central London. The Met said cases using the system have produced a 21.4% positive outcome rate — meaning an arrest, charge or conviction — against a force-wide average of 14%. (news.met.police.uk) Deputy Commissioner Matt Jukes told LBC that only about 20% of shoplifting reports currently arrive with CCTV attached. When clear footage is supplied, the Met said officers can identify around 80% of suspects by checking images against facial recognition software and crime databases. (lbc.co.uk; news.met.police.uk) The change is less about adding cameras than speeding up the handover of evidence police already need. The National Business Crime Centre says retailers should send the full incident footage and a shoplifter image through digital evidence systems as quickly as possible after the offence. (nbcc.police.uk) That workflow sits inside a wider policing push on retail theft. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s Retail Crime Action Plan, launched in October 2023, told forces to prioritise attendance when violence is used, a suspect is detained, or evidence needs to be secured quickly. (nbcc.police.uk; gov.uk) The app also tries to bundle repeat offending into one picture instead of one low-value theft at a time. Jukes told LBC that linking reports can show courts “not for £50 pounds, but for £3,000” and “not for one offence, but for 40 offences.” (lbc.co.uk) In Lewisham, officer Danielle Pyke showed LBC a case in which a shop uploaded a named suspect, an itemised list of £59 in stolen goods and CCTV footage in one report. She said the system can then flag whether the same offender has hit another store. (lbc.co.uk) The Met said it solved nearly double the number of shoplifting offences last year and made almost 50% more arrests, up by 1,800. Across London, the force said shoplifting fell 3.7% between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, about 3,200 fewer offences than the year before. (news.met.police.uk) Police guidance gives a reason they keep asking for the footage fast. The College of Policing says CCTV can establish timelines, identify suspects and witnesses, and provide evidence strong enough to support an early guilty plea. (college.police.uk) For now, the Met is presenting the London pilot as a way to turn shop cameras into usable case files before footage is lost, deleted or left sitting with store staff. The test in Lewisham and central London is the clearest sign yet that the bottleneck is no longer the camera on the wall, but the path from the shop floor to the case officer. (news.met.police.uk; nbcc.police.uk; college.police.uk)