Long Island retailers brace for holiday shoplifting spike with anti-theft tech

'Tis the season for swiping goods, retailers say.

During the holiday season, would-be thieves ramp up their activities at Costello’s Ace Hardware, where expensive power tools, plumbing accessories and other items are targeted for theft, said George Castro, who manages the Farmingdale store for the Deer Park-based chain.

But a few years ago, the hardware chain rolled out more anti-theft measures in its 62 stores, including 25 on Long Island, such as locking power tools in clear cases, putting packaged drill bits and other small accessories on racks behind magnetized locks and replacing surveillance systems with more advanced models that store videos longer and connect to high-definition cameras.

A sensor system detects customers who are in the stores' sections with Milwaukee brand power and hand tools, which have the chain's most high-end inventory and biggest rate of theft, triggering an automated voice alert that directs staff to provide service in that section.

"And being this time of year, we know exactly what they’re looking at," Castro said, adding the hardware chain's changes have made stealing from the stores difficult.

A holiday spike in shoplifting is nothing new, but the cat-and-mouse game between retailers and thieves has fundamentally shifted. It is no longer just about watchful store detectives or convex mirrors; retailers are now deploying an arsenal of high-tech surveillance and intelligence tools to combat a type of larceny that owners say has become more organized, more brazen and increasingly violent.

Nationwide, shoplifting rates tend to rise during the holiday season for a variety of reasons, including more opportunities for thieves to hide in the bigger crowds in stores and the financial stress that the season can put on cash-strapped individuals, retail experts said.

So, retailers typically begin prepping in the summer to acquire or upgrade their anti-theft technology that they'll use all year long, said Tony D’Onofrio, president of Sensormatic Solutions, a Boca Raton, Florida-based company that is the world's largest maker of loss-prevention technology for retailers.

"Our busiest quarter is typically the quarter starting in July, where retailers are starting to get prepped for the holiday season," he said.

Retailers, particularly large chains, are using technologies such as radio frequency identification tags, which are "smart" tags that carry serial numbers that can be used to track the movement of merchandise. They also deploy "intelligent loss prevention solutions," which analyze and identify total retail loss by detecting removals of products from stores and capture the theft on linked videos, D’Onofrio said.

Other high-tech solutions include machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that uses an algorithm to tell store employees the probability that an item that just left the store was stolen, which speeds up the investigation process, he said.

Conversely, one type of technology has been falling out of favor when it comes to anti-theft efforts.

Five Below, Dollar General, Target, Walmart and other retailers have scaled back on self-checkout lanes.

“Retailers have to be finding ways to stop the stealing that happens at self-checkout," D’Onofrio said.

Larger retailers are more likely to try new technologies to reduce theft and losses than mom-and-pop stores because big chains have loss prevention departments and bigger budgets, said Mark R. Doyle, president of Jack L. Hayes International Inc., a loss prevention consulting firm in Wesley Chapel, Florida. 

Smaller retailers typically wait to see how the larger national chain stores fare with technology before they will spend money on it, he wrote in an email.

Still, there are no guarantees with technology, "as every time retailers come out with a new method, technology or strategy ... the criminals work very hard to circumvent these new methods," he wrote.

'Crimes of opportunity'

Among the stores hit hardest by shoplifters on Long Island during the holiday season — and all year long — are Target, Walmart, Stop & Shop and department stores at Roosevelt Field mall in Uniondale, according to data provided by Nassau and Suffolk police departments.

The leaders of both county police departments said they increase patrols and coordinate with local retailers and security at retail properties in the holiday season to discourage crime.

“Our focus remains on maintaining public safety through visible patrols, community engagement, and partnerships with retailers,” Suffolk County Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina said in a statement.

The Nassau County Police Department boosts the number of officers at Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream and Roosevelt Field during the holiday season, particularly on Black Friday and the days leading up to Christmas, Commissioner Patrick Ryder told Newsday in an interview.

“We try to saturate the area,” Ryder said, noting that the police detail has been increased at Roosevelt Field, which is one of the largest malls in the country, and it includes a large swath of retail outside the mall, along Old Country Road.

On Long Island, shoplifting numbers tend to rise in the late fall and early winter months, but trends can fluctuate from year to year.

For example, last year, January and August tied for having the most monthly shoplifting complaints, 596 each, reported to the Suffolk County Police Department. December ranked second, with 586. 

Last year, the Nassau County Police Department received the most monthly shoplifting complaints in October, 488.  December ranked 10th, with 391 complaints.

Nassau and Suffolk police departments are the third- and fourth-largest law enforcement agencies, respectively, in the state.

But the departments' data doesn't provide a complete picture of shoplifting on Long Island because there are 22 village, city and college police departments within Nassau County and 21 police departments within Suffolk County that respond to theft complaints within those jurisdictions. 

Most of those police departments do not count shoplifting incidents separately from their overall larceny numbers.

No agency compiles statistics specifically on shoplifting statewide.

Retailers: Thieves more violent

Costello’s Ace Hardware has invested more in technology the past few years because thieves have become more aggressive with store employees and more brazen when swiping merchandise, not because there has been a significant annual increase in shoplifting, said Michael Costello, chief executive of the chain.

“One of the trends that we’re seeing is there’s less deception, you know, somebody being sneaky and trying to slip something in their jacket versus … there seems to be more non-discreet type of theft. You know, ‘I’m going to walk out of the store and you can watch me walk out,’” Costello said.

The chain’s technology upgrades have resulted in more arrests because it is giving police more details about thefts, including getaway cars’ license plates, he said.

Nationwide, retailers reported an 18% increase in the average number of shoplifting incidents in 2024 compared with 2023, while threats or acts of violence rose 17% during the same period, according to a survey of 70 retail companies conducted by the National Retail Federation, a Washington, D.C.-based grade group.   

DII is a Brooklyn-headquartered discount retailer with 17 stores, including two on Long Island — in Elmont and North Bellmore — selling household goods, groceries, health and beauty products, toys and other merchandise.

Theft increases at the stores during the holidays, particularly for coats because they are priced higher than most of the other merchandise, so that attracts shoplifters looking to sell the stolen outerwear, said Wendell Sealy, securities and facilities director for DII. 

The retailer doesn't lock up merchandise in clear cases or put it behind a customer service desk because it doesn't want to take accessibility away from paying customers, he said.

But, after experiencing an increase in theft in the last year and a half in some of its stores, the chain has started putting alarm tags on its smaller, cheaper merchandise and began adding checkpoint systems near more of its stores' front doors, Sealy said. The systems beep when customers pass through them with security-tagged merchandise that hasn't been purchased, he said.

"I think about a year and a half ago, we ordered four more [security systems] at some middle-class areas that we probably thought we wouldn't need, like [Queens stores in] Ozone Park, Astoria, Greenpoint. And we added it just because of the incidents that we were going through," Sealy said, adding one of the security systems was installed in the Elmont store.

Increased technology has been an effective deterrent to shoplifting at Costello's Ace Hardware but nothing replaces human interaction, Castro said.

“Besides the technology that we had, we have seasonal people and people who come back from school [who work in the stores]," he said. "So, we have more eyes on the floor." 

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.