Comment by neilv

What are they supposed to do, just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely?

I’d rather shop at a store that actually prevents theft, deterring future thieves from stealing. It will be a safer place to shop with lower prices.

So I guess you've never frequented Waffle House ;-)

That's gonna depend where the jury is coming from. SF, yes. "Try that in a small town" hicks probably not.

> Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance.

Stores have plenty of incentives to engage in privacy invading surveillance even ignoring shoplifting as a factor. If a store saw zero shoplifting they'd still deploy privacy invading surveillance because it's profitable for them to do it right now and it will only be increasingly profitable for them to do it in the near future.

Also: Local cops spend their time going after speeders and parking violators who they know won't be dangerous and they can safely farm for revenue, instead of looking for violent crime.

> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...

Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?

It’s not ICE’s opinion about who is illegal, it’s congress’s. Didn’t they create the immigration laws that are on the books? I can never understand why people seem to blame the enforcement agencies for the laws they are enforcing.

But I agree with the sentiment that they are selecting the easiest targets.

Security theater. Intimidation. Calling the cops. Insurance requirements.

Neither stores nor the guard want to escalate a situation to a violent situation. The stores don't want bad press or liability for collateral damage. The security guard isn't trying to put their body on the line for some merchandise. Yeah, maybe you have a cowboy looking for trouble, but based on my experience talking/working with some guards, I'd be surprised if they are instructed to get physically involved.

If you want to risk hurting someone whilst restraining him… Otherwise, it’s not worth it. What equipment are you talking about anyway, the nightstick? In my language it is formally called the “defensa”, implying that it can’t be used to attack someone.

There's a reason local rent-a-cops here hire almost exclusively seniors: they're _not_ going to go chasing someone down, they're just going to follow instructions, go for their walk around the site every 30 minutes and generally not cause trouble when they get bored.

They are there to intervene when there is violence against a person, not property.

observe and report. That's it.

At first glance I read this as a troll comment. But with your comment history, I'm not so sure.

"Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with."

That's a value judgement. Here's my value judgement: Violence is not OK to perpetrate and a response of any magnitude to stop that violence is acceptable, up to and including killing the assailant.

Glad I live in a state within the US that supports this value, as well as providing people the means to do what they need to do if they find themselves victimized.

I don't think you'd feel at home here.

This mindset is what perpetually allows the violent to abuse the weak. What a violent person needs is a boot in the mouth. Or as many as necessary until he understands that’s not the way to behave. We are talking about people who generally have a low level of intelligence and do not understand anything else.

It's something I've thought about. It's not totally clear from the police reports. I've read them through several times and the offender had hit about seven stores that day tearing off Rogaine en masse, and the cops seemed to be on their trail already. The hit-n-run certainly would have put a flame up their ass.

When my mom attended the same high school I graduated from, in the 70s, kids who were hunters would leave firearms in racks on the back of their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot. Not only did said firearms never once get stolen or used to shoot anyone, but, such a thing was simply unthinkable.

When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at the other high school all the way across town had inadvertently left his paintball gun in the back seat of his (locked) car—after a weekend of fun in the woods with his friends—in the school parking lot, and a security officer saw it.

Now, today, we get periodic local PSAs urging people to not leave firearms in their locked cars in their own driveways at night, because people are breaking into cars, stealing the guns, and using them to commit crimes.

I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something here has been forsaken. That the way things were a mere ~50 years ago seems unthinkably impossible today clearly speaks volumes.

The last time I forgot to scan something hiding the back of my cart I caught the mistake as I was leaving and ran to another self-checkout to scan the item. The one employee they had watching over at least 7 self checkout stations thanked me personally because apparently if the cameras caught the error the overworked employee would have been responsible and might have lost her job.

Given that Prime now displays itemized orders purchased at Whole Foods, imagine getting your Amazon account flagged/banned for your mistake...

Depending on jurisdiction, they record everything and do nothing until you pass a felony amount. Then, they respond.

Target is well known in doing exactly this. A lot of shoplifters stay away from target past a 1 time hit.

It's funny that you mention CVS. I went to use the human checkout at CVS last time I was there because the line for self-checkout was so long, only to be told "in order to check out at this register, you need to have a CVS extra-care card".

I no longer shop at CVS.

I get this and tend to not name names either, but at the same time I also think the mob like behavior is a symptom of the rampant abuse. What's the old MLK Jr quote? So honestly I've been asking myself if not naming names is actually the best strategy here. I tend to also be willing to give benefit of the doubt. But it is clear that people are taking advantage of this behavior as well. So I guess the question is which failure mode is worse: corporations being caught in the cross-fire or corporations taking advantage of good nature? (There's definitely more complexity than this one question)

I should have specified that I worked LP in the early 2000's but I doubt much has changed, since bigotry and racism do not seem to ever go away, especially when it's woven into the fabric of an institution.

Lasted a mere 6 months at that job before I decided I could no longer turn a blind eye, since by then it had become clear to me that the problem was not isolated to just a few LP associates.

[flagged]

> the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around

Hah, I was in JC Penney and I grabbed a handkerchief for a suit, and I packed it into my fist, to do a magic trick type thing. Went to find my fiancee, felt someone behind me. Except I looked back, and he hurriedly asked a sales associate some benign question about where to find X. I kept walking to my fiancee, who was looking at jewelry, and when I got there he ducked behind the counter, as if he worked there, and was poking at the register and talking to another sales associate. I pulled the handkerchief out of my closed fist, did some lame "ta da" thing to my fiancee, and dude looks disappointed and walks off, no longer pretending to be either an employee or customer.

Amazon still does lockers and other collection points.

There is a whole business model built around being a package receiver for folks who don't want deliveries left on their doorstep. Most private PO box companies will receive packages for you, and there are apps that allow any business with a physical location to act as a package receiver for a fee per delivery. Often it is more convenient than residential delivery since you won't get delivery drivers falsely claiming they attempted delivery. When I used to travel a lot, I had a service that would receive mail and packages, and hold them until I was back in town. I think it was ~$10 month and well worth it.

>You can't, resources are limited.

Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses.

>Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Shoplifting reports to police were down in some cities (albeit up in others), but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data.

https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/shoplifting-inci...

Guessing is a great method of directing criminal justice policy.

According to this for example, the correlation is significant: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.

But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.

The drive for increased penalties is very deeply rooted in the human psyche because it works extremely well in smaller societies on the order of 100 people, so we’re tempted to believe that it works in modern cities with hundreds of thousands to millions of people. In real life the evidence seems to be pretty mixed. As far as I can tell, shoplifting today breaks down into two categories: (1) dumb kids, who don’t much care about your example, and (2) professionals who are monetizing shoplifting by reselling stolen goods on platforms like Amazon. If you want to deal with the large-scale problem, you’d probably focus on (2).

Where do you live where that's the prevailing view? Where I am police funding has increased year after year for decades, and people are routinely prosecuted and jailed for petty offenses. For the most part bmn's position is the prevailing view, they have already gotten what they're asking for and it has failed to achieve those goals. At what point are we going to acknowledge the evidence and try something else.

Is it rich people in the homeless camps?

> People from every socioeconomic level steal

That’s pretty meaningless. Distribution what matters. For example https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.

The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.

It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.

A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.

All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing.

A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.

What you're describing is a police state and has never resulted in a high-trust society.

^ found the fascist.

I don’t think that’s what a high trust society is. In fact, I’m pretty sure the whole point of the thing is that people in a high trust society don’t defect even when they don’t think they’ll get caught, because they understand that not-defecting is part of the bargain everybody is engaging in to keep the good thing going.

You're just plain wrong. You can enforce compliance - a police state - but it inevitably worsens outcomes for both people who commit crimes and their victims.

But that isn't a high-trust society. In fact a high trust society requires minimal formal policing by definition (and a _lot_ of informal policing by parents, families, friends, and communities).

High-trust societies aren't without their problems, too, as trust is regularly abused.

> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people.

Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?

> What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?

What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.

> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.

And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.

> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.

You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.

A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.

[flagged]

>>fellow man

>criminals

Nice bit of dehumanizing language there.

Yes. I presume you’re not capable of empathy, given your comment. Punishments don’t stop people being hungry, and they sure don’t stop people from stealing when they are hungry.

The fact that you’re unable to at least sympathize is pretty pathetic.

We never had that chance because you cannot coordinate 8 million people, much less 8 billion. And nobody was going to shut down all the coordination points of society such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and hospitals.

The CDC knew this at the time. The "flatten the curve" message was "slow things down enough until we know more and can avoid our hospitals from being overwhelmed and more people dying."

A short global lockdown? China pursued the zero COVID policy for two years. Even highly restrictive measures weren't enough to stem it.

COVID is no longer a novel virus and its deadliness has vastly decreased. Yes it is by any reasonable understanding of the phrase, COVID is "less nasty". At its peak, 20,000 people were dying each week due to COVID in the US. Presently that figure sits around 200.

From all accounts, it appears to be "less nasty". Espically with the advent of vaccines.

COVID is also nothing like the plague, that is a major illogical jump. Early pandemics, such that in the Sasanian Empire, had a 25-50 million deaths (depending what century you draw the line). The Black Death was particularly deadly, with an estimated mortality rate of 70%.

How you can suggest COVID is now the plague is just absurd. You also make a very unfounded conclusion that if we "just stayed in doors a little bit more guys!" we would of solved it. Delusional.