How Worthing Became 'The Shoplifting Capital of the UK' — And Why That Was Never the Real Story

On 17 February 2025, a Huddersfield firm that sells stainless steel fasteners published a study naming Worthing the worst town in Britain for shoplifting. Accu Components put the figure at 23.2 incidents per 1,000 residents, built from ONS, NISRA and Scottish Government data, and within a week the finding had travelled from Radio Worthing to The Argus to the Sussex Express. By the following weekend it had shortened, as these things do, to “the shoplifting capital of the UK.”

What actually happened in Worthing was closer to the opposite of a crime wave. Sussex Police had spent 2024 rolling out One Touch Reporting across Adur and Worthing — a scheme built to make it faster for shop staff to log theft with police. A recorded-crime figure only counts what gets reported. Make reporting easier, and the figure goes up, whether or not the underlying rate of theft has moved at all. Worthing’s rise was, in large part, the reporting scheme doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne responded within days of the Accu study. Her statement defended the reporting scheme in principle — “you cannot tackle what you cannot measure” — and noted that two Sussex towns now ranked in the national top ten for reported shop theft. What it did not do was challenge the ranking itself, or explain to the reporters who had just called Worthing the worst town in Britain that the number they were quoting was substantially an artefact of the force’s own success at getting people to report.

The explanation that arrived a year late

That explanation did eventually arrive. In April 2026, more than fourteen months after the Accu study, a Sussex Police statement said: “With more incidents now being reported, we often see Sussex cited as having some of the highest volume of shoplifting offences per head of population. The reality is that increasing reporting has enabled Sussex Police to take robust action.”

That is the correct answer. It is also, by the time it was given, the third correct answer the force could have given — because Accu was not the last company to run this ranking.

LEI Register published its own shoplifting table not long after, again putting Worthing first, this time at 231.79 incidents per 10,000 residents — a different denominator, arriving at the same headline. Then Avigilon, the security-camera manufacturer owned by Motorola Solutions, published a third version: Westminster first at 25.26 per 1,000, Worthing second at 22.8, Adur third at 21.19. Avigilon’s director of product management was quoted in the coverage recommending forces invest in “high-definition video and analytics” — which is to say, in Avigilon’s own product range. The Sussex Express republished those figures in March 2026, more than a year after they first appeared, with nothing in the piece to flag that the data was over a year old.

Three vendors, three rankings, one town named worst (or near-worst) each time, and — buried in each case — a commercial motive for making the finding as alarming as the methodology would allow. None of this makes the underlying figures fabricated. It makes them a selectively framed reading of numbers a police reporting scheme had itself inflated, recycled by each new publisher without anyone checking whether the story still held.

What the force’s own figures show

According to figures supplied by the PCC’s office, Worthing’s recorded shoplifting fell to 1,856 incidents by September 2025, down from 2,596 the year before — a fall that coincided with, rather than followed, the period the town was being publicly ranked as the country’s worst. Shoplifting across Sussex as a whole was down five per cent over the same window. Sussex Police’s response to the March 2026 coverage cited a 69% fall in violence against shopworkers and a new GPS-tagging scheme targeting prolific offenders, but again did not address the methodology of the ranking being reported alongside those figures.

Then there is the fourth ranking. CrimeRate.co.uk has since compiled a table using daytime population as the denominator — closer to who is actually available to shoplift from a town at any given hour, rather than who sleeps there — and it puts Kensington and Chelsea top at 19.17 per 1,000, followed by Middlesbrough at 16.22 and Brighton and Hove at 14.91. Worthing doesn’t feature. Neither does Westminster, which had topped Avigilon’s ranking barely a year before.

Four studies, four denominators, four different “worst” towns, from broadly the same underlying ONS and police-recorded data. That is not a scandal in any one of them individually — reasonable people can choose residential population over daytime population, or vice versa, and defend the choice. It is a demonstration of the point the More or Less Policing strand on this site exists to make: a rate is a numerator over a denominator, and change the denominator and the same numerator tells you something entirely different. Whoever picks the denominator picks, to a significant extent, the headline.

Why this is a communications failure, not just a data one

None of the four organisations involved did anything against the rules. Crime data under an open licence is there to be used, and a company that sells fasteners or CCTV analytics is entitled to build content around it, flattering framing and all. The gap that matters here sits with the force, not the vendors.

Sussex Police knew, from the point it switched on One Touch Reporting in 2024, that recorded shoplifting in Adur and Worthing was going to rise as a direct and predictable consequence. That is not hindsight — it is how a reporting-improvement scheme is supposed to work, and any force running one should be able to say so in a sentence before a journalist ever asks. The PCC’s February 2025 statement had the opportunity to make exactly that case in response to the first ranking. Instead it defended the scheme’s aims without disarming the specific number being quoted against it, and the same unexplained figure went on to do service in two more commercial studies over the following thirteen months, each treated by local coverage as fresh news rather than a year-old number making its third lap.

The April 2026 statement shows the force knew the explanation the whole time. “The reality is that increasing reporting has enabled Sussex Police to take robust action” is a good line — clear, defensible, and true. It should have been the first line, not the third correction.

What other forces should take from this

Any force introducing a reporting-improvement scheme — easier online reporting, a retail-crime hotline, a dedicated portal, anything with the explicit aim of surfacing more of what’s currently going unreported — should expect the recorded-crime figures to rise as a direct mechanical result, and should be ready to say so publicly before that rise gets picked up and reframed by whoever finds it first. In practice that means three things: publish the reporting-rate context alongside the launch of the scheme, not after a ranking forces the issue; brief comms teams to have the “why the numbers went up” answer ready on day one, not as a reactive line fourteen months later; and when a commercial ranking does land, respond to the methodology directly rather than only defending the policy around it. Katy Bourne’s February 2025 statement did the second half of that well. It skipped the first.

The frustrating part is that Sussex Police’s underlying story is a genuinely good one — a force that made shop theft easier to report, used the resulting data to target prolific offenders with GPS tags, and cut violence against shopworkers by 69% in the process, all while recorded shoplifting was falling. That story took fourteen months and three separate commercial rankings to surface. It should have led the coverage from week one.