The Burden of Policing Walmart
tampabay.com
tampabay.com
Only Walmart and private prisons benefit from this; everyone else is worse off.
There must be a more effective solution.
Not just a 'better quality of "neighborhood"' at Walmart, but for our society as a whole.
I disagree. It's the most cost effective method that we have that prevents stores becoming a free-for-all for shoplifters. This response serves to prevent other, similar crimes. Hidden from the cost of this is the saving society gets by crime not being worse. Higher shoplifting rates would mean higher prices for everyone because stores' security costs would be much higher.
We don't have the data to come to that conclusion. What if police responded to a lower percentage of these calls?
It may not be, but the cost of the drink vs. the cost of enforcement alone is not sufficient to show that. What you'd need to know is the net effect of the enforcement costs -- what future thefts would have happened without them that they prevent by deterrence (general or specific), incapacitation, or rehabilitation (including the particular enforcement actions contribution to the broader deterrent effect of the collective enforcement of similar offenses throughout society.)
What if, when presented with video evidence of the crime, there was already a 'plea deal' that was always on the table. Lets say that for 10X the minimum wage cost of the affected items, you could provide community service doing some type of work the community needs and would have otherwise contracted out.
In that case, the offender would literally work off the (retail) 'cost' of the drink (maybe also a fixed 'fine' in money or community service time) to the community, also providing some rehabilitation, while the company in question would be pressed in to only writing off whatever loss isn't covered by insurance as at cost shrinkage on their taxes.
Note that in this case instead of all of that money spent on corrections and the /peace/ officer is not wasted making a mountain out of a pimple.
So your proposal is that it be legal to steal items of less than $1,230 in value? Or is it to deprive those accused of stealing items with no more legal representation than the value of those items? Or … what?
That seems a little hyperbolic. Stealing less than $100 in FL is a 2nd degree misdemeanor, usually just punished by a fine and probation. No private prison is making money from a misdemeanor shoplifting arrest. It would be hard to argue that Walmart is profiting: their loss-prevention staff costs money, they have paperwork, and they do lose some merchandise when the shoplifter isn't caught.
Walmart may have plenty of negative externalities to discuss, but theft is a crime, and I don't see why they should be expected to ignore it.
http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defe...
Fine collection and private probation is just as fucked up. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/04/pr... http://www.npr.org/about-npr/314011043/npr-news-investigatio...
Not to strawman, but for instance, I see no ethical argument that homicide is less serious if you murder a person with a net negative cost to society. Neither murder nor theft are wrong simply because they're expensive. They're wrong without the context of cost.
In both cases, cost effectiveness isn't what I would consider the most important thing. However, I 100% agree with you that Walmart is certainly benefitting from the public police force enforcing private security. It's a sticky issue without a clear solution.
Crimes are crimes, but there's also a reason we install locks and alarm systems in our homes. By maintaining secure systems, we reduce our vulnerability to crime and our cost to everyone else. I feel like Walmart should do the same.
Honestly, shoplifting and other small scale financial crime committed by individuals who are not conspiring, should be largely considered in financial terms.
Flippant answer: Pay Target to train your managers in how to not abuse community resources like police. They obviously figured out something that Walmart can't figure out.
I'm curious if there were less disturbances before Walmart, or if they were just more distributed throughout the city.
Whereas Walmart's genius lay in not only continuing to cater to the lower income demographic... but to keep its valued customers addicted to junk food, junk clothing, junk music, junk kitchenware, and just plain... junk in general (peppered with vindictive, quite possibly career- and/or life-ruining arrests for drinking a $0.98 iced tea before paying, now and then) so that they stay in the lower income demographic.
Or shoving it behind something else on a shelf and not paying at all. When people no longer have any respect for authority, social contract or citizenship AND you can't crack them over the head to teach a lesson in hard knocks, how are loss prevention supposed to deal with it? You let it go, then it's suddenly a widespread thing (YES IT WILL BE) and it costs everyone. And frankly it never ends. Certain people will go so low at the expense of others, it makes for an unworkable culture.
In the normal, pragmatic way: wait until you actually see them put the opened drink behind something else on the shelf. Which, not all the time but often enough, you surely will. If they're drinking it out in the open -- in the line at the register, say? Most likely they're going to pay for it.
Certain people will go so low at the expense of others, it makes for an unworkable culture.
By the same token, treating people as if they're already "low" (by not giving them the benefit of the doubt for an opening a $0.98 bottle of iced tea before paying) makes for an unworkable culture, also.
They are already trying this, it's mentioned in the article.
"Instead of calling police, the store gives first-time shoplifters the option of paying restitution and completing online courses. Eight Tampa Bay stores are enrolled, he said, and the retailer is assessing whether it will expand the program here and elsewhere."
Urban food deserts are a recognized problem. I suspect that Walmart reduces the number of urban "general items" deserts in a way that Target does not.
I've seen quite a lot of Targets in low-income neighborhoods, often within a few blocks of a Walmart.
And you can stop right there. Remember that the Walmart principle is "we pay less and pass the savings on to the customer". That applies to how they treat their employees as well. Anything that requires the company to spend more money is going to be a no-go.
The problem with Walmart in this instance is that it attracts a different audience. For example, there's a stark difference in the type of shoppers one encounters at the Target and Wal-Mart in Mountain View even though they are across the street from each other. This difference has even gained some cultural credence with sites like People of Walmart (http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/).
> Local Walmarts, on average, generated four times as many calls as nearby Targets, the Times found.
Walmart continues to be the gold standard of reducing prices by increasing externalities.
Aside from the matter of whether drinking a $0.98 iced tea before you buy it really constitutes "shoplifting" (I've seen this quite often enough, in Whole Foods of all places, to conclude that while it's not exactly a classy thing to do, it's most likely a misunderstanding on the part of people who happen to be... very thirsty), the article isn't (at all) suggesting that Walmart ignore shoplifting.
Rather, the basic point it (very clearly) makes is that Walmart's very design and layout attracts criminal and/or nuisance behaviors in the first place:
Walmart stores, with heavy foot traffic and cavernous layouts, are natural targets for shoplifters, panhandlers and other opportunists. Many are located in disadvantaged areas prone to more trouble. The retailer knows all of that, experts said, but doesn’t do enough to address the problems, despite ample resources. Walmart, they said, lays out its stores in a way that invites trouble and often doesn’t have enough uniformed employees to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Oh -- and as to what Walmart's response to the premature $0.98 iced tea drinker be, you ask? How about the natural, human response: "Sir, can you please make sure to pay for drinks at the register before opening them in the store? Thanks!"
Specifically, since Walmart started hiring $8-an-hour loss prevention officers ("48% below national average", according an article that appears to be behind a paywall). And all the common sense, and capacity for independent judgement forbearance that buys you.
The article talks about the walmart store design. Narrow isles, limited sight lines, messy isles, etc. These all significantly contribute to shoplifting.
Make no mistake, walmart is taking a strategic approach to prioritize a certain store design that they know increases shoplifting. The solution of leaning on the local police is also strategic. The PR position of relying on people's moral sense of how they think law-breaking works is also strategic, deliberate and cynical.
The results is comments like yours. Making their argument for them, under the guise of 'what else can they do' and 'dont break laws' kind of middle-class sensibilities that are frequently thrown about.
Crime is entirely an issue of economics and oppertunity. Reduce the economic needs, and reduce the oppertunity.
I'd take it a step further and say good job on actually following through with it. Otherwise what's the alternative? A private police force for Wal-Mart?
It likely comes down to a lack of proper resources given to the police departments....
Good! That is their job after all.
Yes.
I mean, lets assume, I rent a small house bc I am poor. And you are rich and build a palace, a show off of wealth. Then the police shall protect all your wealth 24/7 and the public pay for it? What is the alternative?
The difference is only in degree. Obviously other stores have figured out how to avoid rampantly abusing community police resources, so Walmart should be expected to step up to the plate and do the same.
And as they pay property and sales taxes, they're entitled to the same protections as anyone else.
They often fight their local assessment, and argue it down as much as possible.
=============
At its retail stores, windowless concrete boxes that carry a low value for property-tax purposes, the company saved an average of $40,000 a store where it filed a challenge, the report found. The distribution center savings averaged $289,000 for each challenge, it said.
The report suggested that Wal-Mart saves about $3 million annually from challenging property tax bills, a small sum compared with the company’s revenue, nearly $1 billion a day. =============
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/business/10prop.html?_r=0
Yes, this is 10 years old now, but not sure there's been much of a corporate culture change to stop doing this.
$40k would definitely go a long way towards funding a police officer in many areas.
This is precisely the opposite in my experience. In western Pennsylvania, Walmart drove out other stores (grocery, hardware, appliances, auto service, etc.) that paid far more in both taxes and wages (and thus payroll taxes) and employed more people.
That's the thing about Walmart -- they don't just sell to poor customers. What they literally do -- buy selling products that might have the lowest price point, but also by far the lowest value; and hence are generally the worst investment in the long run -- is sell poverty itself.
I would argue that you should secure your house better, but only because it's going to suck to have so many thefts, not because you're somehow placing an undue burden on the police.
There's no expectation that people need to take precautions against being victims of crime in order to avoid abusing police resources. To the extent that we expect people to do this, it's because we think people don't want to be victims of crime.
I find the tone of this article worrying. Why is private security an expected thing? I thought that the government's function in preventing crime and punishing criminals was one of the few things that nearly all political ideologies agreed on.
Yes, yes there is. Soaking up police resources due to fundamental incompetence makes everyone else less safe.
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1892621,0...
I don't think this logically follows. They may in fact be using more police resources than their sales taxes pay for, but either way you can't just say that because they pay sales tax they cover policing costs.
The article also noted that policing costs at walmart exceed property tax paid.
And what about states without sales tax? So there is no support for local government than just local property tax.
Instead, Walmart is handing the problem over to the public authorities. This seems intuitively fair: why shouldn't a poor person accused of shoplifting have access to the same presumption of innocence and procedural safeguards as a rich person?
People are going to steal. Theft hurts Walmart, but it also hurts poor people, who will have to pay the increased prices (or decreased service) that Walmart would require in order to offset the cost of theft (or perhaps Walmart will go out of business, and poor people will be stuck paying even higher prices still).
The real problem is the amount of crime. Fix that, and none of this is a problem.
True, but is that even a problem? It's possible that fines and restitution paid by people causing the police to be called is actually making the local governments money. A handicap parking fine is $300 alone in my area for example.
The article seems to only compare calls to arrests. Many fines are summary offenses that don't lead to an arrest so wouldn't show in that statistic.
This feels like a fairly successful attempt to push private costs onto the public. Of course Walmart doesn't deserve to be robbed, but when they create the kind of environment where theft is easy and common, it also doesn't feel right for the taxpayer to be on the hook. If they had more employees patrolling aisles or more security, there'd be less cause for police to get involved. But that would cost Walmart money instead of the city.
This smacks of victim-blaming.
Would anyone suggest the company were at fault if we were not discussing Walmart?
That seems to be a key difference.
Well, its key in that people never have tort liability to themselves, so it would never come up otherwise. But, nevertheless, it illustrates that the idea that a property/business owner making conscious decisions that predictably attract crime to their premises bears some responsibility for the resulting harms is not at all foreign to our society.
Still, you're right to bring up the idea that I simply dislike Walmart and so would take whichever position is against them. I don't think that's what I'm doing, but it's an easy mental trap to fall into.
Agree. I should've put scare quotes around "victim blaming."
Not all of this is theft either. Walmart puts their customers in danger by inadequately patrolling their stores.
There is a a difference between at fault and being stupid.
No one deserves to be mugged, but one does not walk through a slum, drunk, while waving a wallet around.
As for WalMart, it can do many things. Identifying known shoplifters and escorting them out. Following shoplifters back to their car and identifying license plates and then reporting THAT to the police (which often has the advantage of catching a lot of shoplifted merchandise). Designing customer flows so that people don't feel they can shoplift easily. Note that a lot of this falls into PREVENTION rather than APPREHENSION.
Walmart has lots of options, but no incentive to use them as long as they can pass the cost onto the police.
I think it's a journalistic failure that this simple explanation has not been addressed in what is a very long, biased article (they didn't even ask Walmart for comment as far as I can see).
I'm sure all these figures are true, whenever I stop off at Walmart where I live to grab whatever I would say about 40% of the time there's a squad car out front, but the article plays it out like if the drunk wasn't causing trouble at the Walmart, he wouldn't be causing trouble anywhere. In my experience, those who walk into public intoxicated and yell at others will do so irrespective of their location. Same goes for dumbass kids (of which there was actually a group last time we were there, go figure, watched the manager haul them out by their collars) or shoplifters, if they weren't causing trouble at Walmart, they'd be doing it somewhere else because if you're that kind of person, being disruptive and annoying is how you pass the time.
So instead, with a few extra layers of abstraction, these kids could be disruptive and have their startup. :)
On a tangential note, it's fun to observe how disruption is a good thing if you're the disrupter, but a bad thing if you're the one being disrupted. Personally, I'd rather celebrate innovation, regardless of whether it involves disruption or not.
It's like... So corporations are people. But they're a drastically different kind of person than you or I. They're divisible, they come in hugely different sizes, they have no incarnation, etc etc.
Dealing with people as mere statistics is dehumanizing. But corporations? Aren't corporations basically just a complex bundle of statistics to begin with?
So, a human who calls the police a lot gets a talking to, maybe goes in front of a judge, maybe something else happens. They don't have to pay more taxes to repay society; for the sake of this argument, because they're a human. They're not divisible; they're not a statistic.
But, a corporation who calls the police a lot... Well, why not treat them statistically? It's not like they can get a talking to (it's an abstract entity with no emotions or capacity for reason), go in front of a judge (it's an abstract entity with no physical incarnation), it's not like the "something else" can be the usual for humans: jail (it's an abstract entity around which you cannot put a wall).
But a corporate IS a set of assets; so work with it on that level. Charge it based on the requirements it makes to society. Pick a cut-off range (like a tax bracket) where it transitions from "not responsible for local crime" to "clearly responsible for local crime".
The taco stand down the street is clearly not responsible for local crime. It's a truck.
The Walmart super center is clearly responsible for local crime. It, in an of itself, is a locality.
Or... Well, I don't know, so I've got to ask: How do large buildings "pay" for other emergency services? Fire, hospital, etc? (I know for fire at least, there's also passing inspection)
It's pretty unfortunate. Like how much police activity does foodmaxx and grocery outlet have compared to safeway and whole foods? Or mcdonalds vs subway?
Oh wait, no. They're advocating a sort of anarcho-tyranny where depending on who you are, you gain all the costs of complying with the law but none of the corresponding benefits.
My heart bleeds for the police heartlessly forced to enforce laws against theft etc, instead of kicking down doors at 3AM for the thrill of it & robbing travelers of their cash on the highway.
Walmart can be sued for detaining someone wrongfully. The police, not so much.
As for the solution: the police simply start showing up at Walmart much more slowly. Once a Walmart gets a bad reputation, its business will slip away.
The fact that the police actually hang out at the Walmart tells me that they really don't have something better they should be doing.
Detain someone for drinking a 99cent drink? Have YOUR security personal walk him out and tell him he is off limits on the premise for the next 5 years.
Glad to see an article generating this level of discourse on HN. Good stuff, people.
The police in Oakland (where I live) explicitly refused to show up for child prostitution.