In the year to June 2022, Victoria Police recorded 17,687 thefts from shops. Four years later the figure was 43,124 — up +144%. Over the same four years, Melbourne food prices rose +19%.
This is the story most coverage stops at: prices up, theft up. But the Crime Statistics Agency’s detailed tables let us look closer — at where the theft is happening, what is being taken, which towns have been hit hardest, and what happens next. The answers are less obvious than the headline.
Every chart is interactive: hover for exact figures, click legend items to hide or isolate series, drag to zoom, double-click to reset. Buttons above a chart change its view.
Retail theft didn’t just bounce back after lockdowns. It grew faster than every other kind of theft, and many times faster than prices.
Read it: each line is scaled so the base year equals 100. Switch the base to 2019 to test the “it’s just a post-COVID rebound” explanation — retail theft is still the highest line, though motor vehicle theft is close behind. Theft series: Crime Statistics Agency (CSA) offence subgroups B41–B49 (fare evasion excluded, too small to index). Prices: ABS CPI for Melbourne, averaged over each July–June year.
Thefts at licensed premises (bottle shops, pubs) have tripled since 2022, and supermarket thefts are up by more than 150%. Pharmacies and convenience stores grew far less.
Read it: the hollow dot is the base year, the orange dot is the year ending June 2026; the length of the bar is the growth. Location types with at least 500 retail thefts in 2026 are shown (CSA Table 02, offence subgroup B43). Switch to 2019 to compare against the last pre-pandemic year.
If this were mainly organised crime chasing resale value, we’d expect tools and electronics to lead. Instead food is the fastest-growing item stolen — while power tools, a classic resale target, are barely above their 2022 level.
Read it: hover over any line to spotlight it; double-click to clear. Counts are items recorded stolen at non-residential, non-community locations (CSA location division “Other”, which includes retail, commercial and licensed premises), in the CSA Property Items table; they cover all property offences at those locations, not only shop theft, so they show the mix of goods rather than an exact shoplifting count. The ten largest categories in 2026 are shown (the catch-all “Other” category is excluded).
Inner Melbourne has the highest rates. But Shepparton, Latrobe, Mildura and Campaspe now sit alongside them — and some regional towns have tripled.
Bubble size = offences in 2026. Councils with fewer than 20 offences in 2026 are omitted because their rates are unstable.
Read it: each bubble is a local government area (LGA). Dotted guides mark no change, doubling and tripling — bubbles above the “doubled” line more than doubled their rate. Use the filters to find your council, show only regional or metropolitan councils, or keep only the fastest-growing. Rates are CSA’s offences per 100,000 residents.
Police are clearing a similar share of cases as before. But because the volume has more than doubled, the number of unsolved shop thefts has more than doubled too.
Read it: investigation status as recorded by CSA 30 days after the end of each reference period (CSA Table 04, subgroup B43). Toggle between counts and shares: in shares, the picture looks stable; in counts, the unsolved block keeps growing. Click legend items to isolate an outcome. “Intent to summons” is a newer recording category that appears in volume only from 2025.
Three things stand out once you look beneath the headline figure.
Limits of this data. Recorded offences measure what is reported to and recorded by police, so changes in retailer reporting (for example, new loss-prevention programs or reporting campaigns) can raise counts without any change in behaviour. CPI is a price measure, not a measure of hardship. Associations shown here do not establish cause.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025). Consumer Price Index, Australia, June quarter 2025 (Table 7: CPI: Group, sub-group and expenditure class, index numbers by capital city) [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/jun-quarter-2025
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Consumer Price Index, Australia, September 2026 (Table 9: CPI: Groups, index numbers by capital city) [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release
Crime Statistics Agency. (2026a). Data tables: LGA recorded offences, year ending June 2026 [Data set]. https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statistics/latest-victorian-crime-data/download-data
Crime Statistics Agency. (2026b). Data tables: Property items visualisation, year ending June 2026 [Data set]. https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statistics/latest-victorian-crime-data/download-data
Crime Statistics Agency. (2026c). Data tables: Recorded offences visualisation, year ending June 2026 [Data set]. https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statistics/latest-victorian-crime-data/download-data
Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com
R Core Team. (2024). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 4.3.3) [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
Cheng, J., Sievert, C., Schloerke, B., Chang, W., Xie, Y., & Allen, J. (2023). crosstalk: Inter-widget interactivity for HTML widgets (R package) [Computer software]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=crosstalk
Acknowledgement: data © State of Victoria (Crime Statistics Agency) and © Commonwealth of Australia (ABS), used under CC BY 4.0.