Caught shoplifting in an Istanbul mall, and what happens in the first 24 hours.

A shopping-centre security officer is not a public authority. What the Code gives them is CMK 90/1-a: where a person is encountered while committing an offence, anyone may make a temporary arrest. Temporary is the operative word. Under CMK 90/5, once you are handed to the police the prosecutor is informed at once about you and about the incident, and the police then act on the prosecutor's instruction. The file leaves the store the moment officers walk in.

Two things usually happen in the security office before that. Staff write up an account of what they say they saw and ask you to sign it. And money is raised: paying for the item at the desk, or a sum described as covering the store loss.

Neither closes anything. Theft is prosecuted by the State, so the shop is not in a position to withdraw it, and a document you signed in a language you cannot read is the document a court will be reading a year later. Note also what does not apply in that room. CMK 90/4 obliges the police to tell you your legal rights immediately on taking you; nobody in a security office is under that duty, and nothing said to you there is a caution.

The one useful thing to do while you are still in the building is to fix in your mind where the cameras were, and at which point you passed the tills. Shop and centre footage is kept for a limited period and then overwritten. Whether an item was in a basket, whether a barcode failed to read, whether you were stopped before the doors — that sequence exists on footage that has to be asked for in the first days, not in the first months.

The period in CMK 91/1 runs from the moment of apprehension, not from arrival at the station. It cannot exceed twenty-four hours, leaving aside the time strictly required to bring you to the nearest judge or court, and that transfer time cannot itself exceed twelve hours.

Shop theft caught in the act also sits inside a narrower provision. CMK 91/4 lists theft under TCK 141 and 142 among the offences where, in cases of being caught in the act, police chiefs designated by the civil authority may themselves order custody of up to twenty-four hours. That changes who signs the order. It does not lengthen the day.

Two lines of that table are the ones routinely given away. The first is the interpreter. CMK 202/3 applies the interpreter rule to a suspect heard during the investigation, appointed by the prosecutor or the judge — not only at trial, and not only where you ask twice. If you cannot express yourself adequately in Turkish, a statement taken without one is worth challenging, and the reasons are set out in the note on interpreters and language in a Turkish criminal file.

The second is the difference between two obligations that arrive in the same breath. CMK 147/1-a makes answering identity questions compulsory. CMK 147/1-e makes saying nothing about the offence a legal right. What is read to you, and in what order, is set out at length in the note on being arrested and held in Türkiye.

By the end of the day a record exists naming an article, and that name does more work than anything else in the file.

TCK 141 sets basic theft at one to three years. TCK 142/2-h, added in 2014, carries five to ten years, and it is drafted more narrowly than the charge sheet suggests: the goods must have been left in a place anyone may enter but locked, or taken into safekeeping — muhafaza altına alınmış — inside a building or its annexes. Goods taken from a shelf inside a shop inside a building are frequently written up under it anyway. That skips the load-bearing words. An item set out openly on a shelf for customers to pick up has not been taken into safekeeping, and without that element the act falls back into TCK 141. The paragraph bites where the item was shut away: a locked display cabinet, a security case, a stockroom. The same act, with a lower limit that moves from one year to five.

A further multiplier sits alongside. TCK 143 increases the sentence by half where the theft is committed at night, and TCK 6/1-e defines night as the period beginning one hour after sunset and continuing until one hour before sunrise. Istanbul centres trade well past that for most of the year, so the hour on the record is not a detail.

Whether the low value of the item or the return of it brings the figure down is decided much later, under TCK 145 and TCK 168. Both are applied to a range the record has already fixed. That is the reason the first twenty-four hours are worth contesting rather than sitting out quietly in the hope that the file will be read properly afterwards.

Three outcomes are available when the period expires.

Release by the prosecutor. The commonest outcome in a low-value shop file with an identified suspect, a seized item and CCTV. It ends the custody, not the investigation.

Judicial control. Where remand is thought disproportionate but the file is not closed, CMK 109/3 allows a set of obligations instead, and the first one listed in 109/3-a is a prohibition on leaving the country. Others include reporting at fixed intervals and lodging a security sum. This is the outcome that quietly ends a holiday.

Remand. People assume a jacket cannot lead to it. Two provisions say otherwise. CMK 100/4 bars remand only where the offence carries a maximum of not more than two years; basic theft carries three, so the bar does not apply at all. And CMK 100/3-a-8 places theft under TCK 141 and 142 on the catalogue where, if strong grounds for suspicion rest on concrete evidence, a ground for remand may be presumed to exist. Read with CMK 100/2-a, which treats concrete facts raising a suspicion of flight as a ground in itself, a visitor with a hotel booking, no registered address in Türkiye and a return flight presents that profile on paper without having done anything further.

The custody decision has its own objection route, on its own timetable, and it is described in the note on remand, judicial control and objecting to detention. What the first twenty-four hours actually produce is the record: the article, the value put on the goods, the hour, and whatever you said before anyone explained the gap between TCK 141 and TCK 142/2-h. The substantive law that record will be measured against — the ranges, the low-value provision and effective remorse — is set out on the page on theft and shoplifting charges in Türkiye.