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Home Office Criminal Statistics show a substantial decrease (of more than one-third) in the number of recorded shoplifters between 1985 and 1989. The largest decrease was for juveniles. In trying to explain why this decrease had occurred, a survey of shop theft was carried out with sixteen retail chains, totalling 7,873 retail outlets, which accounted for a quarter of total retail sales in Great Britain in 1990. The number of shoplifters apprehended by these retailers remained tolerably constant between 1985 and 1989, and their probability of reporting shoplifters to the police also remained constant. The number of apprehended shoplifters tended to increase with the number of store detectives employed by each retail chain, but the retailers reported that their use of store detectives had not changed since 1985. It is concluded from this research that the true number of shoplifters probably remained tolerably constant between 1985 and 1989, and that the number of recorded shoplifters decreased because an increasing fraction of shoplifters reported to the police were dealt with informally, and hence did not appear in the official statistics of shoplifting offenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Carbon monoxide (CO) is an important air pollutant whose emissions and atmospheric concentrations need to be monitored. The measurements of the SCIAMACHY instrument on ENVISAT are sensitive to CO concentration changes at all atmospheric altitude levels including the boundary layer. The SCIAMACHY CO measurements therefore contain information on CO emissions. Until now no studies have been published where the SCIAMACHY CO measurements have been used to quantify CO emissions by applying, for example, inverse modelling approaches. Here we report about a step in this direction. We have analysed three years of CO columns to investigate if spatial gradients resulting from United Kingdom (UK) CO emissions can be observed from space. The UK is an interesting target area because the UK is a relatively well isolated CO source region. On the other hand, the UK is not the easiest target as its emissions are only moderate and because the surrounding water has low reflectivity in the 2.3μm spectral region used for CO retrieval. We determined horizontal CO gradients from seasonally and yearly averaged CO during 2003–2005 over the UK taking into account daily wind fields. We show that the measured CO longitudinal (downwind) gradients have the expected order of magnitude. The estimated 2σ error of the gradients depends on time period and applied filtering criteria (e.g., land only, cloud free) and is typically 10–20% of the total column. The gradients are barely statistically significant within the 2σ error margin. This is mainly because of the relatively high noise of the SCIAMACHY CO measurements in combination with a quite low number of measurements (∼100) mainly due to cloud cover. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]