Jason Stockill: Woolworths Retail and Franchise Director on new retail crime changes

Woolworths says it takes a community effort to curb retail crime. 

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has unveiled the plan for Police to issue infringement fines for people stealing - similar to speeding tickets. 

It is based on suggestions from the Retail Crime Ministerial Advisory Group. 

Woolworths Retail and Franchise Director Jason Stockill told Ryan Bridge the announcement is an example of collaboration across the sector. 

He's hoping for more initiatives which will help deter shoplifting. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are getting harsher penalties for theft and new fines for shoplifting.
Changes these are proposed at the stage include infringement fines
of five hundred bucks if the value of the stolen
goods was below five hundred dollars, or up to one
thousand dollars if the stolen goods worth more than five
hundred bucks. For theft, maximum penalty will be one year
in prison if the value is two thousand or less,

(00:20):
up to seven years in prison if goods were valued
at more than two thousand dollars. Jason Stockel is wil Worst,
director of Retail with me this morning. Hey Jason, morning,
How are you good? Thank you? Do you think this
is going? I mean, if somebody is stealing stuff, they're
probably not massively well off. We'll a fine deter them,
do you think.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Ryan, it'd be a nice to see how that system works.
But from our point of view, we're just pleased that
we've had the announcements. It's a positive step forward and
we're happy to look at any initiative that's going to
make our stores safer for our team and our customers.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
How does it work? If you want to issue it
on the spot, fine, it's the cops that do it,
So you have to wait till the cops arrive to
do that. What happens if the offender leaves in the interim, You're.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Right from what the detail we're looking at is, the
police will obviously shoe those fines on the spot, and
if they have left, they've left, we'll obviously do our
normal reports who are on our CCTV reporting to hopefully
that they can track them down. But again, as you said,
it all depends on what the value is that we'll
report everything where we can to the police.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
So you're not you're not going to change your practice
of not because at the moment you know you'd always
you don't let your staff hold the trolley or hold
the person. Your security guards are told not to do
that as well. Is that correct?

Speaker 2 (01:37):
If we can't restrain anybody, we can approach if we've
had our team trained correctly to approach the offender or
the thief. But the main aim for us is to
keep our team and customers safe.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Would you like the authority to restrain people?

Speaker 2 (01:54):
It'd be an interesting concept, and when we've talked about
the citizens' arrest yesterday, actually it'll be interesting but again
we've got to have some real type time framework around
that because you put your team or your customers in
the way of a cistans arrest, you don't know what
the outcome is going to be, particularly when we've got
knife threatening and abuse from theft at sixty five percent

(02:15):
increase on last year, so you just don't know what
they're carrying nowadays. So again for me, it's about how
do we keep our team safe. But we'll watch this
space with what the government come out with.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Okay, but if it wasn't your staff but security guards,
if they were able to do it, would you be
open to then?

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Look again, probably would be. But again we've got to
make sure that the training is right. Ryan. We've got
to make sure that is third party security company that
get involved in citizens arrest, particularly if they're in a public,
open area, which our supermarkets are, we've got to make
sure that they've got exactly the right training to keep
them safe and the customers around them.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Should anyone have a taser because that's one of the
things that were going to recommen was taser training for
security guards.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, again, I won't go down that path. I've seen
it happen our stores though, but it wasn't the security
guards at the police. But again we've got to watch
what that looks like and see what the government recommend.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Jason appreciate your time this morning. Jason Stockholm, world Worst
director of Retail. For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge,
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