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The National Association For Shoplifting Prevention (NASP) was originally founded under the name Shoplifters Anonymous by Peter Berlin. He founded Shoplifters Anonymous out of his belief that by understanding and addressing the “root causes” of shoplifting, millions of individual lives and families could be improved and a significant reduction in shoplifting could be achieved.
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Peter Berlin
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Early in his career as a director of retail security and loss prevention for department and specialty stores, Mr. Berlin was responsible for apprehending, interviewing, and prosecuting individuals who shoplifted. Through his many interviews with shoplifters he realized that the majority of the people he apprehended were not career criminals but otherwise law-abiding citizens… juveniles, mothers, fathers, grandparents, business and professional people. Most of them had the money in their pockets to pay for the items they had stolen, were humiliated and remorseful when caught and had no idea why they shoplifted. He saw, over and over, how the apprehensions devastated them. The fear, shame, embarrassment and guilt were often too much for them to bear.
Mr. Berlin questioned why people would engage in such self-destructive behavior when it was clearly out of their character. After conducting further research he concluded that for the non-professional shoplifter, shoplifting was rarely about greed, poverty or values but rather about individuals struggling with their own personal conflicts and needs, their feelings of entitlement and/or other underlying issues in their life.
Realizing that there was little public understanding of the shoplifting problem and nowhere for these people to turn, Mr. Berlin decided to establish and fund a nonprofit organization which would conduct ongoing research, provide educational rehabilitation programs, facilitate self-help groups and become the first national organization dedicated to helping these people turn their lives around and ultimately reduce a serious and costly retail industry problem.
To date, NASP has conducted research with and provided rehabilitation programs to over 250,000 adult and juvenile shoplifting offenders. Mr. Berlin retired in 2005.
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In 2006, Caroline Kochman was appointed Executive Director.
With the foundation for the organization already laid with the research and rehabilitation programs, Ms. Kochman’s vision was now on the “bigger picture”. She saw a fundamental need to shift the organizations focus to addressing shoplifting as a community issue – both social and economic. As such, Ms. Kochman initiated and guided NASP to the achievement of a fundamental redesign and refocus of NASP’s mission, programs and services from solely research and rehabilitation to include public education, prevention initiatives and paths for community action; with the new organization to be known as the National Association For Shoplifting Prevention or NASP.
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Caroline Kochman
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©2010 National Association for Shoplifting Prevention
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