OVER 20 of the biggest retailers have revealed that they use police technology to combat crime – but customers are raising concerns over privacy.

Organized retail theft has been a major blight on companies in the past few years with stores hiring security guards and locking away merchandise behind glass.

Some have installed face and license-plate-recognition software and used shopping carts with wheels that lock automatically when pushed beyond a certain distance.

However, the problem is still getting worse, said experts.

Last year, retailers reported a loss of $112billion from “shrink,” which included stolen merchandise and items that were either damaged or lost from vendor fraud or paperwork errors.

The number is up from $94billion in 2021, according to the National Retail Federation.

To stop the crime, dozens of retailers have explored using law enforcement technology in the stores in the past 18 months, including body cameras on employees.

This has already become a practice in stores like Tesco in the United Kingdom.

“This is one of the top three technologies that retailers are exploring,” David Johnston, vice president of asset protection and retail operations at the National Retail Federation, told Forbes.

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The other two are tech that uses artificial intelligence or radio frequency identification to track the whereabouts of an item.

Stores will likely become the biggest client base for body-cam companies with technology that could transcribe auditor and redact sensitive parts of the video such as a bystander’s face.

The Mall of America, the biggest mall in the US, recently equipped all of its security forces with body cameras in the hopes that it would document and even prevent theft.

“It allows us to go back in time, essentially,” Will Bernhjelm, who runs security for the suburban Minneapolis mall, told the outlet. “To get the entire story.”

Body cameras offer an on-the-ground perspective with audio, rather than silent, distant footage from a traditional camera mounted on a wall or ceiling.

The hope is that the cameras will help diffuse situations while also giving stores more evidence to prosecute shoplifters.

“The minute something pops off in a store, everyone has their iPhone out. Retailers are starting to say we need to have our own side of this,” said James Stark, who is in charge of retail business at Axis Communications.

However, shoppers have already been concerned about privacy with many sharing these frustrations on social media.

“All they’re doing is harrasssing (sic) normal citizens or minor offenses!” wrote one person on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Another person called facial recognition cameras a “waste of taxpayer dollars for crimes they won’t even prosecute on.”