The fashionable theft

LOUISA CLEAVE finds shoplifting is too complex an issue to stick a label on.

Hollywood actress Winona Ryder may be the world's highest-profile shoplifter, but she fits a common mould.

Ryder, 31, was convicted this week for stealing $11,200 worth of designer tops, handbags, glittery rhinestone hair bows and socks from the exclusive Beverly Hills department store Saks Fifth Ave last year.

But in stores throughout New Zealand women and men who, like Ryder, can afford to buy the items they are stealing are among the shoplifters regularly apprehended.

They favour luxury items such as lingerie, perfume, alcohol and tobacco, say security experts on the shop floor.

At the Ryder trial, prosecutor Ann Rundle suggested the actress, who banks millions of dollars a movie, might have shoplifted for thrills.

"I cannot get inside her head. She may have been stealing for the thrill of it, or to see if she could get away with it."

Similarly, why would a 28-year-old Wellington woman with a salary of more than $50,000 and an apartment on The Terrace steal five sets of expensive lingerie from upmarket department store Kirkcaldie & Stains on a Saturday morning?

Store operations manager Rod Spencer says 25- to 40-year-old middle-class women are among the high-profile shoplifters identified alongside professional thieves and offenders supporting alcohol or drug problems.

"[The women] want to keep up with what's happening. Things like lingerie, stockings, perfumes, makeup ... which are a constant drain on their expendable income."

Asked what explanations the women give when they are caught, Spencer says there is usually just one: "They've never done it before in their lives."

Well-off men are just as likely to be caught red-handed, he says.

He profiles a businessman who "held down the same job for 30 years and [was] always beautifully presented and had a wonderful life" but was caught pocketing an $80 bottle of the latest Armani fragrance.

"He might have been doing it for years, and probably has been at that age, and never been caught.

"It's not something he's making a living out of and he's not selling it. He's just taking it and using it, rather than spend $80."

Auckland security expert Judith Birchall says it is hard to define people who steal - and their reasons for doing it.

She highlights a case where a man shoplifted because his wife read his credit card statements, "and he was making a purchase for someone other than his wife".

The former police officer, with 20 years' experience in retail security, believes shoplifting boils down to basic greed.

The "average, run-of-the-mill store thief" caught stealing just does not want to pay for the item even if he or she can afford it, says Birchall.

"We catch people and sometimes you look at them and say, why on earth would you steal?

"You've got money, you've got a position in the community."

Simple greed is not the only explanation. Ryder has shown signs of psychological fragility, and the way she damaged some of the clothes while removing the security tags might suggest there was more to it than an unwillingness to spend money.

Canadian psychologist Will Cupchik, author of Why Honest People Shoplift or Commit Other Acts of Theft, has spent nearly 30 years researching the issue.

He says a generally law-abiding person who commits the crime "almost certainly" has other personal issues driving their behaviour than simply thrill-seeking.

Many people had experienced "unusual, highly stressful or traumatic situations just prior to the acts of shoplifting, as well as unusual, highly stressful or traumatic situations when they were much younger".

He says people who commit apparently nonsensical theft can be wrongly labelled as suffering from kleptomania and not treated for the real, underlying problems.

The Phobic Trust is one of the few services offering treatment for kleptomania in New Zealand. It takes referrals from the courts and the small number of people receiving treatment reach that point only after serious repeat offending.

Trust founder and chief executive Marcia Read says in her experience the stealing is often associated with severe panic disorder.

"I've worked directly with a couple of women and with others and I remember they are wonderful people and did not want to steal. They had no intention of stealing."

One client who could not stop stealing had first approached Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous in a move to find out what was happening to her.

"She didn't need the things she stole. She suffered tremendous depression on and off. It wasn't until we found she had panic attacks and obsessive compulsive disorder that we were able to help her."

At the end of the Ryder trial, Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley said he hoped the court would "address the problems of the defendant that may have led her to engage in the criminal conduct of which she now stands convicted".