WASHINGTON—It’s one of the most common complaints by those in the loss prevention profession: Police don’t take retail theft seriously enough. And how could they be expected to? As police departments continue to face serious budgetary shortfalls that often lead to reductions in manpower, they are being forced to concentrate efforts on the most serious of crimes.

And retailers know shoplifting and theft will never be more important to police than murders and assaults.

But retailers need police more than ever. With a growing number of reports involving violent attacks against loss prevention specialists attempting to detain suspected shoplifters, many LP departments have begun advising their staff not to pursue individuals.

So what’s to be done about this $36 billion problem? Well, two of the largest organizations looking to solve the problem think the solution lies in working together and sharing information. The National Retail Federation announced on Jan. 27 it has teamed with the FBI to integrate its database so that law enforcement has immediate and direct access to information about retail crimes.

Through the FBI’s Law Enforcement Online network, federal and local law enforcement agencies will be able to directly connect to the retail industry’s Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network, or LERPnet, a secure national database where retailers track and report retail crimes.

The goal of the system, said Joe LaRocca, senior asset protection advisor with the NRF, is to improve the way retailers and law enforcement share information and prevent and detect major crimes. “The challenge is that a burglary can happen in one city and that same group that commits that burglary goes to a different county and commits the same crime and there’s not always a way to share that information if it’s two different jurisdictions. They’re not connecting the dots,” he said.

With this new partnership, law enforcement officers around the country have access to information regarding retail crime and are able to identify trends involving retail theft as well as other associated crimes happening in that area. Now that police have direct and easy access to this information, hopefully they will be able to solve crimes faster.

“For law enforcement, this gives them a tool to help fight crime and adds more people in the system looking at data,” LaRocca said. “The more and bigger this repository becomes, the more effective it becomes as a tool looking for trends.”