Retail Video Analytics Software: How UK Retailers Are Reducing Shoplifting?
The numbers from the British Retail Consortium’s 2026 Crime Survey are not the kind you can attribute to a bad year or an unusual set of circumstances. Five and a half million detected incidents of shoplifting in the past year. 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against retail staff every single day, nearly four times the pre-pandemic level. A total cost of £4.2 billion when theft and prevention spending are combined. And the figure that most starkly illustrates the scale of the challenge: retailers now spend £1.8 billion annually on crime prevention alone, up from £1.2 billion in the previous year and the problem is still growing. For UK retail operations teams, this is the operating environment of 2026. And the businesses that are actually reducing their shrinkage are not doing it primarily by adding security headcount. They are doing it by making their existing camera infrastructure work as a genuine retail video analytics software layer, one that watches every camera feed continuously, identifies suspicious activity in real time, alerts security teams while the situation is still developing, and builds the evidence base that supports prosecution rather than just post-incident review.
JARVIS by Staqu is the platform a growing number of UK retail operators are using to build this capability. Deployed across Metro Brands, Manyavar, Skechers, Kama Ayurveda, Biba, Rare Rabbit, Titan Eye Plus, and a dozen more retail clients across fashion, footwear, lifestyle, and specialty retail and increasingly deployed in the UK specifically for the loss prevention and operational intelligence capability that the current retail crime environment demands, JARVIS connects to existing CCTV cameras without hardware replacement and activates real-time suspicious activity detection, known offender alerts via facial recognition, POS comparison for pilferage identification, and staff compliance monitoring simultaneously. The platform is deployed across India, the US, the Middle East, South Africa, and the UK, with the UK deployment profile shaped specifically by the organised retail crime pressures that British retailers are navigating in ways that most other markets are not yet experiencing at the same intensity.
Retail video analytics software: The Real Scale of the Problem UK Retail Is Actually Dealing With
Before getting into how retail video analytics software addresses this problem, it’s worth being specific about its scale, because the public numbers consistently understate what retailers are experiencing operationally.
The BRC Crime Survey 2026 recorded 5.5 million detected incidents of shoplifting last year. The word “detected” is doing significant work in that sentence. The BRC estimates that only 8 percent of shoplifting incidents are actually reported to the police. What is being counted is the visible surface of a much larger problem, organised retail crime operating at a volume that the reporting and prosecution system is structurally inadequate to process. In the year to June 2025, only 19.1 percent of recorded shoplifting incidents led to a charge, meaning that more than 80 percent of the incidents that were reported and recorded produced no legal consequence for the offender.
The profile of retail crime has also changed significantly. What the BRC describes as organised retail crime, gangs that case stores, target multiple branches in a single day, and move goods through established resale networks, now accounts for a substantial and growing proportion of total losses. Greater Manchester Police recently arrested seven people suspected of running a nationwide shoplifting ring targeting major supermarkets. The Met Police staged the UK’s largest crackdown on organised shoplifting gangs, raiding over 120 shops, seizing thousands of stolen items, and making 32 arrests. In the first three months of 2026 alone, there were 18 smash-and-grab attacks, ten involving weapons, resulting in £3.2 million in stolen goods.
Helen Dickinson, CEO of the BRC, described the current situation clearly: theft remains a huge issue, with an increasingly concerning link to organised criminal gangs who continue to systematically target one store after another, stealing tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of goods in one go. The Crime and Policing Bill, which passed into law on 29 April 2026, creates a standalone offence for assaulting a retail worker and strengthens sentencing. It is a meaningful legislative development. But legislation addresses consequences. What retail operations teams need is the ability to address the situations before they reach the consequence stage.
That is precisely what retail video analytics software is designed to do.
