Coop Reports Little Student Shoplifting

The Harvard Cooperative Society has been nabbing one shoplifter a day on the average, for the past few months, but not a single one has been a student from Harvard or Radcliffe.

"The shoplifting problem is getting worse, but college students aren't behind it," John G. Merrill, Coop general manager, said yesterday. "Most of it's by professionals or troubled people or teenagers. We caught five to seven Harvard of Radcliffe students in the past year, and that's about average."

Only Harvard students are believed to have been involved during recent years. "I haven't heard of any Radcliffe girl being accused of shoplifting in more than six years as a dean," Dean Kathleen O. Elliot said last night.

According to Merrill, the Coop plans nothing like the recent crackdown at the Yale Cooperative Society -- in which the store caught a Yalie a day red-handed for more than three weeks straight.

But Charles G. Willoughby, general manager of the Cooperative, said in a telephone interview that college stores which report less student shoplifting than Yale are probably using less stringent security measures. "We had been using off-duty city detectives, like many stores, but decided to substitute a full-time, five-man guard," he explained.

Yale also asks police to arrest students caught for shoplifting, Willoughby said. The Coop refers students to College authorities but does not call in the police.

"I doubt very much that our arrests would rise sharply if we changed our policies," Merrill commented yesterday. Although the Coop lost $113,000 last year in unaccounted inventory -- most of which was probably due to shoplifting -- this is well within the national retail store average, Merrill said.

The Yale Cooperative's losses from shoplifting are above the national average and have been rising steadily since 1962, when it moved into a new building.