The annual Advent shopping season attracts honest shoppers and pickpockets alike. They target inattentive shoppers in stores and markets in the pre-Christmas rush. Each year, the number of petty thefts increases by around 25% in the run-up to Christmas. The police are therefore increasing covert and visible surveillance in shops and car parks as part of crime prevention. There is also an increase in the number of organised groups trying to pass through self-service checkouts without paying.
During the Advent period, there are significantly more people in Czech shopping centres. Everyone is in a hurry, buying presents and shoppers often find themselves in stressful and tense situations, concentrating on their shopping and not paying so much attention to their possessions. It happens that shoppers leave their possessions in a shopping cart, from which they turn to the shelf and a thief takes advantage of the inattention to steal the possessions from the cart. According to Daniel Velčovský, security manager at ABIS, the number of pickpocketing incidents during the Advent period increases by approximately 25% compared to the normal period.
“This is due not only to the general rush, when victims lose caution in the hunt for gifts, but also, of course, to increased footfall in shopping centres. There is also an increase in the frequency of thefts of items from vehicles, where people are not paying attention to the fact that the car is not a safe,” Velčovský says. According to the police, the most frequent cases of theft are of wallets, mobile phones, vehicle keys or credit cards from shopping bags or items from parked cars.
“As part of our preventive activities in the run-up to Christmas, we are focusing on shopping centres and their car parks, as well as, of course, on hidden and visible surveillance in these places in order to prevent and detect crime,” says David Schön, spokesman for the Police of the Czech Republic. Increased caution is therefore advised – keep an eye on your valuables at all times, do not put wallets and phones in your back pockets and do not leave any valuables visible inside a parked vehicle.
The Advent season also sees an increase in the number of thieves targeting goods in shops. “Typical representatives of stolen goods are confectionery, butter, alcohol, sausages, cheese, more expensive legos, but also textiles,” says Oldřich Rutar, vice-president of the Czech branch of the International Security Management Association. He adds that today’s trend among thieves is for organised groups to try to pass through self-service checkouts without paying to a greater extent. To counter this trend, supermarket chain Kaufland, for example, has introduced security gates in self-service checkout areas where customers must scan their receipt to leave the store.
Christmas stalls in shopping centres are also often attractive to thieves and can have very low levels of security. “In our work, we detect these risky sales outlets and recommend various security measures to their owners in addition to CCTV surveillance,” says Velčovský. It is CCTV systems that can be key in detecting thieves, who Rutar says are trying to more sophisticatedly entertain shop attendants this year.
