Last week’s figures from the British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) Annual Crime Survey made for headline grabbing stuff. Every day, more than 2,000 shopworkers suffer violence or abuse at work. More than 70 such incidents per day involve weapons.  Retail thefts rose by 3.7m, to over 20.4m last year. The cost of shoplifting to businesses hit more than £2.2bn, adding £133 to the average household’s annual shopping bill. The problem is “out of control” reports the BBC, with brazen, ‘kamikaze’ shoplifters terrorising high streets across the country, emboldened by a pitiful lack of policing and paltry punishments.

It’s become a familiar narrative over recent years, which the media seem only too happy to perpetuate: one that seems to say something profound and uncomfortable about modern society and the wrong-headed priorities of the institutions supposed to maintain order and keep us safe.

The rise in retail crime is, undoubtedly, a worrying problem. No one should face threats or attacks at work, retailers – ranging from local corner shops to multi-national chain stores – shouldn’t have their businesses jeopardised by crime, and no one wants their local shopping streets to become hostile, lawless places. It is unarguably also true that effective policing and criminal justice responses are part of the solution. However, there are other ways of looking at the issue that avoid the overly simplistic attribution error at the heart of the media narrative.

There are bad people out there – so the story goes – agents of chaos, who will only respond to the threat of punishment and need to be caught and taught a lesson, so they, and others like them, won’t do it again.

Put simply, such arguments ignore the role that opportunity plays in crime (and, rather conveniently, shifts the onus and cost of dealing with it back to the state and the taxpayer).

Now, hang on a minute! – the retailers protest. We already spend millions on crime prevention (£1.8bn each year, according to the BRC, clearly pre-empting the challenge). We employ security guards, and give them body worn video cameras, and fit CCTV, and use security tags, and display dummy products – and so on and so forth.

Well yes, and that helped close off some of yesterday’s opportunities. But, as the figures and CCTV footage tell us, criminals innovate and adapt and learn new strategies, and the environmental conditions change, which can tip the balance back in their favour. That might include a change in police capacity and priorities, but it also covers things like the growth of second-hand resale websites, the cost-of-living crisis, and the rise in self-service checkouts that depersonalise the shopping experience and reduce natural surveillance.

So, just like the criminals, retailers need to innovate and adapt as well. Prevention is not a static set of techniques and practices but a constantly adaptive process. Of course, this can be effortful and costly – it’s a version of what biologists (and criminologists borrowing their analogy) call Red Queen evolution (after Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen who told Alice that, in her country “you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place”). Predator and prey lock into an all-consuming evolutionary arms race, each looking to exploit the other’s weaknesses and make best use of prevailing conditions to maximise their chance of success.

The issue for retailers, of course, is that they have other kinds of competitors as well, and they must simultaneously balance their efforts across crime-fighting and commercial fronts. Simply put, some of the things that could reduce crime are bad for business: they cost money, might deter customers or mean they have to put their prices up. We may not want that as consumer-citizens, but we don’t want crime-ridden high streets either.

40 years ago, criminologist Paul Ekblom undertook a fascinating study of a central London record store, which, at the time, accounted for more than a third of all the shoplifters passing through Marylebone Police Station (which covered the whole of Oxford Street – the country’s businesses shopping area). He found that, owing to the high volume of customers needing to be served at the tills and the limited storage space available, the store had decided not to use the standard industry practice of removing records and cassettes from their cases, but instead chose to display them intact, while employing a cadre of security guards and in-store detectives to try and stop people leaving without paying. The guards caught a lot of shoplifters, and kept local police very busy, but many also got away. On balance, the policy worked for the bottom line.

What goes for individual stores can also apply to whole sectors. No one retailer wants to be the one to adopt the crime reducing measure if it puts them at a disadvantage. We end up with a settlement of sorts, which can create the illusion that this is the way of things have to be. Of, course it suits the settlement to suggest that only more policing and state-sponsored deterrence can shift the dial, but it’s just not that simple.

Some years ago, I visited Vietnam. It’s a wonderfully vibrant country, full of colour and bustle and commerce. There is a marketplace in every district, a stall on every corner and street vendors hawking all manner of wares in between, (it’s also, incidentally, a country of highly officious, stern-faced men and women in a multitude of militaristic uniforms and notoriously harsh punishment). In one town, I came across something very familiar but strangely incongruous among the hustle and street-trade: a brand-new, western style supermarket, complete with air conditioning and piped music – but also a startlingly intensive and imaginative approach to in-store security.

Even before entering, the aggressively surly security guard insisted that I take my hat off (presumably so I could be seen clearly on CCTV). He then took my bemused companion’s shoulder bag and used a special machine to seal it in plastic so that nothing could be slipped into it while we shopped (and then, for reasons not entirely clear, did the same to my metal water bottle). Once inside, anything with a slightly higher value (imported drinks, branded toiletries etc.) was kept inside locked cabinets with attendants on hand should we wish to inspect or purchase anything. Finally, after walking the 10 or so paces from the till (where we had paid and packed our purchases in clear carrier bags) to the exit, another surly security guard checked our shopping against the receipt – presumably to ensure we weren’t conspiring with the checkout clerk to slip anything out without paying.

Now, I’m not for one second suggesting that Vietnamese-style security should become common place on UK high streets. What I am saying is that there are other ways of doing things that suit the bottom line in different contexts, and narratives that imply that it’s all about rampant criminals, disinterested policing and lenient magistrates are only telling part of the story.