Shoplifting gang’s reign of terror in Surrey’s ‘Beverly Hills’ left a designer store worker so traumatised that she quit. So why did police want to let them off scot-free? [Video]

Early last year Paige Mengers began to fear that it was only a matter of time before robbers targeted her designer clothes boutique. Crime gangs, she noted, were systematically raiding stores selling ‘pre-loved’ Chanel and Hermes handbags worth thousands. ‘The same bags we sell,’ says Mrs Mengers. ‘I had a bad feeling we would be next.’

And so with growing unease, she set about fortifying the business she had worked tirelessly to build.

In her flagship boutique, Phoenix Style, in the Surrey town of Cobham, she installed the latest CCTV, along with anti-theft devices, including security cables for the bags, among them a second-hand £16,000 Hermes Birkin.

Like the shop’s priciest vintage wares, beat bobbies are rarities in Cobham, so Mrs Mengers paid for a private security firm to advise staff on crime prevention. Meanwhile a panic alarm linked to a police station was fitted at Phoenix’s sister store 13 miles away in Wimbledon Village, South West London. ‘The safety …