Romford’s Shoplifting Crisis: Are Our High Streets Under Siege?

The battle against shoplifting continues across Havering.

Shoplifting in Romford reached nearly 5,400 incidents recorded in the area last year alone, marking a sharp 23.3% rise. It now makes up nearly 10% of all crime locally.

Romford has two teams of very proactive and hardworking police officers. These officers tackle shoplifting daily. but as fast as they remove one, more arrive.

Retail staff are reporting an increase in daily thefts, as staff are being verbally abused, threatened, and left to deal with the emotional aftermath of confrontations with aggressive thieves.

Romford’s shopkeepers are working closely with their policing teams in the battle against thieves, but as the summer holidays approach and crowds gather across our centres, are shopkeepers rightly fearing for the worse?

One Romford resident told the Havering Daily: “You cannot believe how many school children now openly go into shops, take what they want and just go out without paying. I have witnessed it myself. Shoplifting really is an epidemic. Children are just not scared to steal anymore.”

It’s not just children, its gangs that are given shopping lists of items to steal, or even organised crime gangs.

Fortunately a pilot operation called Clear, Hold, Build in Harold Hill has already brought shoplifting down by 54% in the area. But this needs to be rolled out across Romford, where police are often stretched thin due to resources being diverted to central London protests.

Last month, Romford officers recovered £6,000 worth of stolen goods from the town centre alone.

London-wide, shoplifting has soared by 54% in 2024, with more than 90,000 offences reported. Across the UK, police recorded over half a million incidents last year—costing retailers around £2.2 billion in losses.

“We’re not just losing stock—we’re losing our community,” one Romford business owner told The Havering Daily. And that sentiment is growing. While shoplifting is sometimes written off as a low-level crime, it’s having a high-level impact on local morale, business viability, and public safety.

Shoplifting may once have been dismissed as petty theft, but in Romford today, it’s a symptom of something far more serious—a town under pressure, and a high street crying out for help.

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