Are police doing the job they are paid for while thugs stampede through the Notting Hill Carnival?

IT came as a shock when village bobbies first wore stab-proof vests back in the day when they still patrolled on foot.

But how did it escalate to the point where Tesco, Co-op and Waitrose staff are using body cameras to deter knife-wielding shoppers?

And why is Home Secretary Suella Braverman denounced as a right-wing extremist for telling woke police to get off their backsides and start fighting real crime?

Shopping safely used to be one of the pleasures of daily life. Now, in the anything-goes wake of the Covid lockdown, we are seeing the sort of street-level brutality once unheard of in Britain.

TV images of TikTok-driven thugs smashing their way into household-name stores in London’s Oxford Street made national news headlines last month.

But many of us have witnessed brave supermarket staff trying to stop aggressive shoplifters marching out with bagloads of goods, often sold minutes later at a nearby pub.

Some belong to organised gangs plundering stores for hauls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. Others treat shoplifting as a lucrative hobby.

Last week The Sun talked to grandma-of-five Lou, who earns £500 a day pinching luxury items from posh stores Harvey Nichols and Harrods.

Her clients live in Mayfair and Belgravia and give Lou a shopping list for prime steak, lobster, Champagne and even Egyptian cotton sheets.

“Business is booming,” she told us. “Everyone wants to save a few quid, no matter what they earn.”

Police do nothing and the thieving granny accepts her £70 on-the-spot penalties as an unavoidable business expense.

But Lou is just part of an explosive crimewave costing shops — and customers — a cool £1billion a year.

Physical assaults

Tesco, along with other all-night shopping outlets, has installed exit barriers.

These are unaffordable to our small 24-hour town centre shops terrorised by almost daily attacks, often by the same repeat offenders.

Even with extra security, Tesco boss Ken Murphy says more than 200 Tesco staff a month have to cope with serious physical assaults.

He says: “I’ve seen horrific incidents of brazen and violent theft in our stores, where my colleagues feel scared and threatened.

“Too often, police forces fail to respond to desperate calls by our store teams, and criminals are operating without any fear of consequences.”

The Home Secretary wants cops to stop wasting time on “culture wars” and dropped fag ends — and to start chasing real criminals.

“There has been an unacceptable rise in police partisanship,” she told The Daily Telegraph, urging cops to probe ALL crime — including shoplifting, burglaries and phone or car theft.

She has asked constabulary chief Andy Cooke to investigate the “unacceptable rise” in police taking sides on controversial issues.

“What crystallised my mind is meeting rank-and-file cops who say they’re fed up with the virtue-signalling from some police leaders instead of focusing on back-to-basics crime,” she said.

Leeds police were condemned last month for raiding the home of an autistic 16-year-old girl, who called a woman officer a “lesbian like her nana”, later deemed a meaningless “non-crime hate incident”.

Tough-talking Suella, the daughter of immigrants, is a hate figure on the Left for her campaign to ship illegal immigrants to Rwanda.

She was denounced as “the face of cruel Britannia” by the right-on Guardian and dubbed a “sock puppet” for Tory extremists by one of her own side.

Nationwide scourge

But there is little doubt police chiefs bewitched by the woke agenda are failing to fight the crimes which alarm Sun readers most.

This has gone far beyond the “cracked windows” of petty vandalism. It is a nationwide scourge.

Crime figures are hotly disputed. Many go unreported because police do nothing.

But shoplifting, car and phone theft are rocketing while fatal stabbings are at record levels.

The real question Home Secretary Braverman is asking is: How did Britain reach the point where hoodie-wearing gangs are smashing and grabbing our capital city’s premier high street stores?

And are police really doing the job they are paid for while thugs are able to stampede through the Notting Hill Carnival slashing and slicing with sword-length machetes?