complained to primark about plastic bags!

shopbot

Lillibet wrote:

But an arrestable offence is only proven to have been committed when a guilty verdict is reached at trial or if a culprit admits to it, until such a time it is unproven that an offence has been committed and therefore a person cannot be detained on suspician by someone without authority i.e a security guard or store manager. It is a loophole in the law. If you ask to leave & offer your name and address for them to submit to the police they cannot continue to hold you (although they obviously will) and they are therefore holding you against your will & denying you your liberty which is Kidnapp. I am farily sure but not totally certain that you can ask to leave anyway & if they continue to detain you it is still kidnapp, whether you offer up any details or not. Citizens arrest is not legal although it is recognized within the law. Another loophole is that although citizens arrest is not legal, citizens do have the legal right to use reasonable power when making the (unlawful) citizens arrest.

But you are totally right that this is nothing to do with this thread & I shall now desist:D

The following link is from a website run by West Yorks Police and Assoc of Chief Police Officers: http://www.askthe.police.uk/Content/Q508.htm

Bearing in mind that it is a Police website - it clearly shows citizens arrest is lawful.

All retail security staff are doing is using the powers in law that we all have i.e if someone enters my house and steals I am entitled to detain them using reasonable force or if I see someone breaking into a car in the street I also allowed to detain them. The fact that the offence is unproven is immaterial as the law states that you only need a reasonable belief that a crime has been or is about to be commited.

Altarf

Capyboppy wrote:

My husband used to be a security guard

The law changed this year.

It used to be the case that an arrest by someone other than the police would be illegal unless the person had actually committed an indictable offence. It was only the police who could arrest someone who they reasonably suspect to be committing an indictable offence.

So in the past if a security guard arrested someone suspected of shoplifting, but when searched they had not in fact stolen anything, the arrest would have been illegal. If a policeman had done the same thing it would have been legal.

Now as shopbot has pointed out, anyone can arrest someone who they reasonably suspect to be committing such an indictable offence. So it is now legal for the security guard to arrest someone they have reasonably suspected of shoplifting, even if later turns out that they have not done so.

So in the past if you left a shop and the alarm at the door went off. You could tell the security guard to get lost if they asked you to come back in, since if you knew you had not stolen anything if they did arrest you it would be illegal. Now the security guard could arrest you if you refused, as the alarm would provide his reasonable belief defence if you were innocent.

So returning to Primark, if you deliberately go out of your way to disrupt their security policy, don't be surprised if the security guards think you are up to something funny. And since all they have to have is a reasonable belief you are up to something funny....

hollydays

Reasonable belief.-its not just two words and we are not legal experts so lets not try to interpret what the words actually mean in law.alarms going off proves one thing-that there is an alarm tag on the item (often left on by staff).It does not "prove" or even suggest an offence worthy of arrest has been commited. Maybe if the person ran off it might do,but that is a lot more positive,not just a vague suspicion.For goodness sake, under that criteria anyone could arrest anyone they liked,and it be legal.think about it.

Re citizens arrest,even prior to the changes in the law it was valid,that is the same powers of arrest that police community support officers had.They had not much more powers than the public,
.Capyboppy is talking sense here.
Lillibet where did you get that stuff from,out of interest,cos its way off the mark.

Law says "any person can arrest without warrant anyone who is committing an arrestable offence".There are a lot of poor security guards who have heard the words "Reasonable suspicion" and think they can stop people for no lawful reason-the interpretation of the law is not as simple as that. Also When a person has been detained,only a pc can forcibly search their bags,and if not detained any citizen,shop manager,security guard etc can not search them at all.

Kittiwiz-if a security guard saw someone with something in his pocket and arrested him,he would be a very poor security guard.He has to have seen the person has "dishonestly appropriated property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive"(definition of theft).If he has not seen the person pick the item up and therefore is not sure it is the stores property,he has not satisfied himself about the "belonging to another" and does not have a power of arrest in the first place.Obviously the thiefs defence would be he bought it yesterday,or someone gave it to him.THeft has to be proved-you cant just stop someone on a whim.

kittiwoz

hollydays wrote:

Kittiwiz-if a security guard saw someone with something in his pocket and arrested him,he would be a very poor security guard.He has to have seen the person has "dishonestly appropriated property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive"(definition of theft).If he has not seen the person pick the item up and therefore is not sure it is the stores property,he has not satisfied himself about the "belonging to another" and does not have a power of arrest in the first place.Obviously the thiefs defence would be he bought it yesterday,or someone gave it to him.THeft has to be proved-you cant just stop someone on a whim.

I got that. I used the idea of a security guard making a citizen's arrest on someone for this reason because that was the type of thing being suggested by the email recieved by Mellancholy from Primark re. why customers were being compelled to take unwated bags: "Loose garments placed in customers own shopping bags could, therefore, lead to incidents where customers would be requested to return to the store after leaving in order to provide proof of purchase." It was my intend to show this statement up as being ridiculous. If you read my post you will see I pointed out that if the customer were compelled to return to or remain in the store this would be an unlawful arrest unless the item did transpire to have been stolen. It would thus be ridiculous for a security guard to stop someone without having good grounds for beleving they had stolen something and this is the point I intended to make. It shows that unreasonableness of the statement made by Primark.

Capyboppy

Reasonable suspicion seems to be the key word. On many occasions we were doing nothing other than just walking around the store. Sometimes we would walk through the entrance (This seemed very common at ToysRus) and there would be a security guard already there just inside the doors. No sooner had we walked past us he would come up to us asking to see inside our bags, to which we refused. Other times we might be just followed around as we were browsing or even buying. This was particularly disturbing as they had obviously seen us pick the item up, go to the till and pay for it. Absolutely no grounds for stopping us and wanting to search our bags in our opinion.

Another occasion a few years ago I was in Wilkinsons when an old lady had just gone through the till and visibly purchased items. When going through the exit door an alarm sounded, obviously someone had forgotten to take the security tag off. A very fierce woman assistant went over to her and actually snatched the bag out of the lady's hand and said. "I need to check your bag." The poor lady was in a right state as you can imagine. The assistant didn't even say something like, "Don't worry, a security tag has probably been left on, could you show us your items so we can take it off." I am sure the assistant did not have the right to just snatch the bag off her like that. The lady was in a very distressed state. It may have been a case of the staff not being fully aware on how to deal with such situations, but a little bit of having customer awareness wouldn't have gone amiss.

I still say though, that if I am walking around a store, especially if I am being followed and then asked for my bags to be searched with no good reason I can refuse and carry on walking out. In fact if this happened I wouldn't buy from there anyway.

hollydays

Agree totally,you would be surprised though how many come back with the ridiculous "if you have nothing to hide,what are you worried about." in response to what you have said.Toys r us are a different thing altogether if you searched this board you would see they are not customer friendly at all.