North Yorkshire's mayor says some of the region's police work around shop theft began in Scarborough.
David Skaith says the area is a priority for the force:
"There has been a big press on how we can really combat that because it is one of the crimes that is really still going on the up.
"There's been a lot of really good work actually over in Scarborough and Tim Forber the Chief Constable when they were implementing how they were going to combat shop theft.
"Part of the work actually did start from Scarborough and actually some of the work that's been happening over here has actually rolled out across the region because it has been successful. We need to do more, absolutely. But again, because it, it's now that traditionally shop theft was almost have ignored as not as a huge problem.
"But actually we know that it does have a huge knock on impact on businesses, particularly small business owners. But it's a lot of time. It's that gateway crime into other things. So it's organised crime, it's the link into drug and alcohol abuse. But again, it comes back to that why is that person potentially doing that shop theft?"
Mayor Skaith also revealed he'd accompanied North Yorkshire Police on a drugs bust:
" One of my first days out when I came out with the police was over to Scarborough and we were doing some drug raids and we kicked in- I wasn't allowed to kick in the door by the way- but we went through and kicked in this door and we arrested this young couple, early twenties, 22, 23 years old for drug offenses.
"And they spoke to the police officer and they said, "yeah, we've been arresting this lady's mum for the last 15 years", and this woman that we arrested has got a five-year-old daughter. And I was like, what are we doing then? Are we just going to go through the same cycle in 15 years time? We're going to be arresting that 5-year-old child, or are we going to actually start combating it and actually really drawing a line of sand now saying this isn't good enough.
"Which is why we've done a big focus on that early intervention prevention work, where we've doubled the funding into that. But also why is someone involved in say, shop theft?"
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