A man has been sentenced after carrying out a 22-month shoplifting spree at a London store, where he stole board games, books and toys with a total value of thousands of pounds.
Paul Mangal, of Haringey, north London, received a 12-month jail term, suspended for two years, for stealing more than £3,000 worth of goods.
The “prolific shoplifter”, 58, repeatedly targeted a Waterstones store on The Broadway in Crouch End, Haringey, between April 2023 and February this year, the Metropolitan Police said.
The force found out about his stealing from store staff after increasing the number of patrols it carried out in The Broadway since last September.
Officers gathered CCTV footage and other evidence to identify Mangal in January, during a month-long operation.
When the suspect entered the store and made off with several items in a suitcase the following month, staff alerted officers, who arrested him near his home in Hornsey and charged him the following day.
Mangal admitted 23 charges of theft at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court in February.
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In addition to the suspended jail term, Mangal was banned from entering Crouch End or Hornsey for two years, and from being in possession of a suitcase in either of those areas.
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Sergeant James Elliott, of the local policing team in north London, who led the investigation, said shoplifting is something that worries local people and businesses in Haringey, and “we are stepping up our efforts to tackle it”.
He said the strong relationships they built with staff at the branch allowed them to identify Mangal “by assessing his patterns of offending, which appeared to ramp up before, during and immediately after Christmas, then almost daily up until his arrest”.
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Some businesses on The Broadway are being targeted so often, Sergeant Elliott said, that “many have stopped reporting thefts to police”.
But, he said, through proactive measures such as “relationship building and doubling the number of officers on the ward since February”, they have managed to reduce the number of thefts in the area by 35% since December last year.
The Met says it plans to introduce Live Facial Recognition (LFR) patrols to identify offenders, and over the summer, officers will be out on bicycles “so they’re able to react quicker to shoplifting incidents when they occur”.
