Shopped

The eye-opening tale of the mum treated like a shoplifter has received a lot of internet attention since she posted it yesterday. For those who haven’t read it: woman is grabbed by a Tesco security guard who accuses her of stealing shampoo and won’t listen to her protestations of innocence, then released without apology when the accusation turns out to be complete rubbish.

The guard who marched Not Now Nancy through the store refused to tell her what was going on; his only remark to her was a command to “Keep walking”. It was only when she was taken to a back room that she found out what the problem was: four people, presumably store employees, said that they had seen her on CCTV putting shampoo in her bag.

She emptied her bag on the table as proof that she’d taken nothing, then asked to see the supposedly incriminating CCTV footage. Her request was refused. Why? “Data protection”, apparently.

I’ve written before about how companies use the Data Protection Act to suit themselves, but this takes the Tesco Value biscuit.

What happened to this woman is an object lesson in how not to detain a suspected shoplifter. The employees involved seem to have looked at the correct procedures for people with real law-enforcement powers and then chosen to do the opposite.

• A suspected shoplifter discovered by a police officer would be asked to accompany them to the station, and only arrested if they refused to cooperate. If they were arrested, they would be told on what grounds. Tesco’s security guard went for the “pouncing and frog-marching without explanation” option.
• Someone who’d been arrested would have the option of calling a lawyer to be present during the police interview. Tesco went for the “lead her into a back room and make her face four scowling employees alone (except for her frightened children)” option.
• Finally, someone actually charged with shoplifting would generally be given access to evidence relied on by the prosecution, including CCTV footage. But Tesco’s employees refused to show Not Now Nancy the footage that supposedly proved her crime, and their justification for refusing her this basic courtesy was “data protection”.

I hope I don’t need to clarify that the Data Protection Act does not give kangaroo courts the right to deny accused people the right to see any evidence against them. As far as I’m aware, no legal guidelines exist for the bullying of innocent shoppers by jumped-up jobsworths. This omission may just be because this bullying shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

There are guidelines about how to use CCTV in accordance with the Data Protection Act. This guidance explicitly states that individuals whose images are recorded have the right to view the images of themselves and to receive a copy of the images if they wish it.

In other words, Tesco’s staff cited the Data Protection Act in order to justify a decision which was itself in contravention of the Data Protection Act.

I don’t know the unfortunate shopper, but I hope she won't mind me writing about her experience. It's an extreme example of how “data protection” can be wrongly used by organisations (and individuals) to justify their own bad behaviour.