Let's be honest hear. If you go to store and steal sack of potato. I doubt either the store or police will even attempt to track you anymore... Retail theft is just left to happen.
I doubt that. "Loss prevention" divisions in larger corporations might allow for some amount of unpunished theft, but once that number gets high enough, they'll implement measures to control it. Sometimes, that takes the form of locking down shelves, but I imagine some take a more reactive approach.
Additionally, the amount of video and audio (and other data) recorded is increasing, not decreasing. As tracking technology gets more sophisticated, systems of identification, location, and retaliation will also get more sophisticated. Even automated.
I don't think it'll be too long before we'll have "arrest-a-thief" as-a-service.
You can't solve capacity or 'caring' problems at 911 by just paying more, or threatening to buy services elsewhere. So there's good reason to think it's not what corporations want.
I've seen some pretty gnarly fights between grocery store security and shoplifters. Back when I worked in one I had to take our security guard to the hospital to have a bite wound treated.
There are more of them nowadays, with guns prominently displayed. It feels like we're not far from a world where they stop bothering to chase them down and just start shooting them in the back.
Loss Prevention in damn near any store are not allowed to even make physical contact with a shoplifter - it's a "you're fired" level policy violation.
LP document, try to get the person to stop by hanging around or chasing them out of the store, try to convince the person to drop stuff, and if the person cooperates, keep them hanging around until law enforcement shows up.
Companies don't want employees or customers to get injured and come after them for damages, which would almost certainly be worth far more than whatever the person is running off with.
There are a slew of cameras covering the parking lots for a reason - with photos and video of the person, the car, etc - it is trivial for cops and courts to handle.
I did. I was working as a cashier for the first one, this was several years ago. I was asked to help put handcuffs on the shoplifter since our LP guy had is hands full restraining him. I should have objected to being asked to stand by as backup when confronting a shoplifter, but I'm a pushover.
But just this year I saw a grocery store security guard beat the shit out of a homeless person that they caught stealing (this was in the receiving area, not the parking lot--no cameras as far as I'm aware). This may not have been within policy, or legal, but it surely happens. It takes a certain sort to opt into a job where your primary function is intimidating people all the time.
We'll absolutely document a theft of a sack of potatoes if we notice it, because it's never just the sack of potatoes. The vast majority of thieves get emboldened and either up their thefts, or continue to repeat offend at a low level.
The one sack of potatoes is likely actually a sack of potatoes every week, and it doesn't really take long to rack up a dollar amount worth prosecuting over. I can get my local detectives hungry to file a warrant at the $100 mark.
Shoplifting is a bad game where the store has every edge, and only has to win once. The shoplifter has to win every time. If they don't, they usually find the line between getting away with it and jailtime is much thinner than they thought.
As multiple of these articles acknowledge, any attempt to debunk shoplifting information from official crime data is on shaky ground, because most thefts are not reported to law enforcement. The guy who strolls out of Target with a bag full of shampoo isn’t in the crime data unless some store employee sees it happen and decides it’s worth calling the police to make a report about. I don’t think this is something where the cops would know better than retailers.
Yet if the large grocery store chain doesn't consider it even worth a phone-call or web-form-submit--knowing they already have the footage of the event--it does kinda blunt the idea that it's a big problem.
Not really, theres a handful of selective enforcement; but as far as crimes go they are prosecuted much more frequently as a percentage of total of infractions than something like price fixing.
