Wal-Mart Suspends a Controversial Shoplifting Punishment
msn.com
msn.com
The idea is something good—keeping low-level, non-violent offenders out of the legal system and saving taxpayer dollars. But it does seem to fit the bill for extortion: Wal-Mart protecting the shoplifter from the government in exchange for money.
I wonder if there's a way to get the best of both worlds?
However, Walmart's scale probably means that they're more interested in reducing the instance of shoplifting as a trend, rather than bilking some individual for an amount they've already wasted talking to them.
A non-profit first-offender education program funded by the police department and/or stores that doesn't require payment by participants would not be extortion and would have the same positive effects without the same incentives for abuse.
Later you get a letter from a law firm demanding hundreds of dollars or they'll take you to small claims to recoup their cost for "investigative expenses". With the promise that the amount will go up if you don't settle.
This is completely separate from any criminal charges and paying them doesn't effect any outcome of that at all. But if you don't know that you're likely to pay to get them to "drop the charges".
http://www.cbc.ca/news/retailers-demand-shoplifters-pay-secu...
Jesus. I was just reading about this somewhere else, and the deal is basically that suspected shoplifters are locked in a room, given misleading information, and pressured to sign a confession which will be used against them if they later have second thoughts about paying $500 to the "education" company. These companies make payday lenders look good.
The program certainly has upsides for the for-profit company running the program and for the for-profit store receiving 'restitution' from participants.
However, please, demonstrate the the people being extorted have an up side in this. If this program were truly about helping these people, it would be run by a non-profit and funded by the stores and/or the police departments rather than by extorting people.
Having to go through the legal system as a criminal defendant can easily exceed $300-500. And whether you are convicted or not, your mugshot may be public forever, with long-lasting potential economic impacts.
If there wasn't an upside, people wouldn't pay. 90% of suspects paying shows that the suspects think there is an upside.
Do you have any evidence or data? Or is this just hand waving? The article doesn't even try to show that it is beneficial to participants.
I've been through the legal system exactly once. I pled guilty and got time served. It cost me exactly $0 and about 24hrs of my life.
The article itself says that first-time offenders rarely get prosecuted.
> If there wasn't an upside, people wouldn't pay. 90% of suspects paying shows that the suspects think there is an upside.
No, this just shows that the extortion is effective, not that complying with the extortion is in your best interests.
I don't think it does. We'd have to know what information they are given, and what kind of pressure they are put under to decide if it's coercion or not.
How is it not extortion that a government prosecutor can exercise discretion and power over people based on their political leanings?
The up side in this case is that the shoplifters (who are now somehow the victims in your narrative) are allowed an alternative course of action that does not involve a criminal record or jail time.
Any system, to be viable, needs a viable economic model. In this case, funding the system as they do also has a deterrent and educational use. There's nothing inherently morally superior about a non-profit. In fact, many non-profits are downright despicable.
That government prosecutor is also part of an economic system. That system uses coercion. If you don't pay your taxes - guess what? That same prosecutor may be involved in incarcerating you.
If a prosecutor demands money in exchange for not prosecuting you, that is extortion. Prosecutors having discretion does not make it extortion unless something is demanded in return for not prosecuting. (One might make a case that the current practice of soliciting plea deals are a form of extortion, but that is a whole other discussion.)
> In this case, funding the system as they do also has a deterrent and educational use.
Funding the system as they do creates incentives for abuse. While non-profits can be abused like for profits, there are more legal protections to limit their behavior and ability to generate profit from shady behavior.
> That government prosecutor is also part of an economic system. That system uses coercion. If you don't pay your taxes - guess what? That same prosecutor may be involved in incarcerating you.
I don't get your point. Yes, only the government is allowed to extort you and coerce your actions with force and there are strong legal limits to the ways in which we allow government to do that.
I find this difficult to believe in the case of places like WalMart and Target with phalanxes of lawyers. Goodwill ... I could believe might not be quite so competent.
Target, for example, won't even let their security people so much as touch someone who is literally walking out of the store with something like a stolen TV. The possibility of getting countersued is so high that it isn't worth it. The simply follow them with a camera to their car and record everything and later turn it over to the authorities if they decide to pursue.
I imagine that with facial recognition, what's going to happen is these people will get blacklisted from the stores and flagged if they try to reappear.
And if they don't take the program, they still have the exact same opportunity to plead their case to the court.
The details still need to be hashed out, but this is meant as a compassionate program.
No, this is meant as a business making money off accused petty criminals. Basic human decency suggests that you take the purse back to the shelf, let the lady in the wheelchair roll out the door, and make a note to watch her if she comes back. If she's shopping at a Goodwill, she's hardly wealthy, and if she's stealing $2 purses, taking $500 from her won't solve any problems.
I lived in a 700k cottage in an insanely desirable historical district with a beautiful private university, but had gangbangers and barios in any direction (santa ana, tustin, anaheim, placentia). The homeless encampments down the street have made national news.
I do not know how this level of inequality is sustainable. It's really easy to see how Goodwill could take advantadge of that situation. They're taking donations froim wealthy folks / college kids and reselling them to thje poor folk, and extorting the odd fellow it seems like.
I wonder of the prosecutor who was talking about using his discretion understood the irony of what he was saying or the hypocrisy of his position.
> Mr. Marquis said his office prosecutes serial shoplifters, but police send him few cases involving first-time offenders. When they do, Mr. Marquis is likely to give the shoplifter a citation and order him or her to perform community service, he said.
What irony? What hypocrisy?
The discretion been referenced in that quote is not the prosecutor's but that of the police who send him cases.
The only irony I see here is that a program designed to help first time offenders actually ends up being worse for them, because first time offenders rarely get prosecuted?
Criminal cases are the state vs. the citizen, whereas civil cases are citizen vs. citizen. (The same action can result in both types of cases.) You're not supposed to profit by inhibiting the state from prosecuting.
So the end result again feels pretty similar.
Walmart won't report you to the police if you agree to
- pay them $5000?
- undertake a voluntary 'community service program' at a Walmart designated location (store cleaner on the shift nobody wants at Walmart) for 20 hours per week for 12 months
Remember, that one conviction for minor shoplifting could permanently impact your life. Eg: limiting job opportunities, places you can live, whether you get to see your children in a custody dispute, whether you are entitled to vote or stand for election.
If Walmart knew someone had virtually no other option, they could press their unfair advantage.
And minor shoplifting is not a felony.
I'm not sure you understand my point. I'm not saying the extortion is a good idea, I'm saying it's not all that different from civil not-extortion tactics.
In fact the only reason it's illegal is because of that. The state doesn't want criminals to get off easier. Or so parent comment was arguing. If you think the justice system is as bad as you claim, you should prefer Walmarts arrangement.
For example, you get a person in the Walmart system, a guard or whatever, that has records on people that have commited crimes in Walmart. Joe Consumer gets caught shoplifting and pays a fee for it to go away, and doesn't get turned in to the police. Now, the security guard with the profiles starts going outside the framework and begins blackmailing people like Joe. These will mostly be poorer people and are very easy to prey upon in such a scenario.
I also find it ironic and somewhat disturbing that prosecutors are mentioned throughout the article essentially saying that the State should have a monopoly on extortion because of the legal protections afforded to criminal defendants. Legal protections in the US are only as good as the lawyer you can afford to hire, and if you're shoplifting from Wal-Mart, the odds that you can afford a decent attorney are about zero. A cynical person might say that perhaps prosecutors are making such a big deal about this because a decrease in shoplifting calls will result in less work, overtime pay, etc. for police, jail/prison guards, probation officers, prosecutors, etc. They don't want to stop feeding the monster.
What article are you reading?
Only one current prosecutor is mentioned who states an opinion on the program, and he says: “The justice system should never be a profit system.”
The second mentioned prosecutor doesn't have any quotes, but did sue Corrective Education for extortion and false imprisonment.
The third mentioned (former) prosecutor is the founder of one of the companies.
Your statement is pretty blatantly false.
The one government official who does (explicitly) say that the State should have a monopoly on extortion is California Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn, who issued the injunction against Corrective Education.
That's not even close to a valid description of what they do.
Given that innocence or guilt doesn’t enter into that equation at all, it sounds very much like textbook extortion.
Whether you call what is done by many prosecutors "extortion" is pointless semantics and doesn't really bear on the article. However the process of offering and negotiating plea deals is in need of a great deal of reform. There are proposals of Judge oversight of the plea process, providing faster bench trials, and more funding for the legal system so that trials can be processed faster.
see: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-ba...
I wonder how much difference this really makes. A stronly implied threat might be just as much a threat as an actal threat.
Law isn't maths, after all.
"Hello, this is LargeISPCo calling to ask you to pay your latest bill. Oh, in an entirely unrelated matter, we found this picture of your son, and we have a link to a discussion board for NAMBLA."
See, perfectly fine. There's no _actual_ threat here.
Extortion is "Pay me ${X} or I do ${Y}".
"Pay me $10,000 or I release these naughty images of you on the internet." is extortion.
"Pay me $1,000, or I will foreclose on your property" is not, because likely you signed a contract agreeing to such a scenario.
Now "Pay me $500, or I'll file a police report..." is extortion (at least according to here: https://criminal-law.freeadvice.com/criminal-law/violent_cri... )
Even though you may have broken the law, the extortion of money to prevent the police report is still illegal.
Would it still be extortion if they said "pay us the exact value of the goods you tried to steal"?
Thus Walmart receiving "restitution" when nothing was actually taken from them doesn't make sense and is still extortion.
The problem is that they aren't involving the courts. Specifically, there's no trial or court proceedings to determine the facts of the case or to ensure that the offender's rights are being protected. The offender doesn't get the right to an attorney. They aren't guaranteed to know all the evidence against themselves. There's no way to know that a given Walmart store isn't blackmailing it's customers.
If Walmart started a nationwide program which provided these services to any shoplifter as an alternative program that a judge could sentence the offender to or that a prosecutor could recommend, it would be perfectly fine and may have the same effect in reducing recidivism for shoplifting at Walmart and other stores. The problem is that it's all taking place behind closed doors, so there's no way to know that it's not blackmail. It's not even necessarily in the best interest of the general pubic. It means that people who shoplift aren't being tracked, meaning when they do re-offend and get caught they appear to be first time offenders to the state.
Furthermore, there's no way to know what criteria Walmart is using for this program. Even ignoring the fact that at $500 it's a get-out-of-jail-free card is only for middle class and upper class individuals, what if Walmart only offers the program to whites or women but always prosecutes blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals?
In reality, if we want first time offenders to get lesser charges or face lesser punishment, then we need to change the actual law and reduce the actual punishment for the crime. If the law is unfair, the answer is to change the law, not to find ways around it. This is the exact same reason the police argument against body cameras -- lack of police discretion -- is bullshit. If the laws are unjust or don't best serve the public, the answer isn't to allow uneven enforcement. That just leads to abuse!
Because what's really at stake here is that this crime is defined by acting against the victim's consent over his property. It's not that Walmart (or the old man) is empowered to dispense criminal justice; it's that the prosecution need the property owner to confirm on record that there was a violation of property in order to have any case at all.
You see that there's a line here that isn't obvious between, "I'll decline to press charges if you do me a small favor," and, "I'm going to blackmail you." That's why the law doesn't make a distinction.
Assuming that the victim of an attempted burglary or attempted shoplifting is going to be magnanimous and reasonable when they've just been victimized is not at all a safe assumption.
California Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn is a lawyer and says it is extortion (at least under California law).
> the fact that Walmart has kept up his policy
Walmart has not maintained the policy. Joe Schrauder, the retailer’s new vice president of asset protection and safety has removed this program from all Walmart stores.
6-to-8 gours sounds ridiculously long / excessive. "Life skills", really? I smell a scam here, some "educational company" partnered with them and sell them pay-per-participant exhorbitant fees for watching their "video course".
I'd prefer if home break-ins don't get handled in a "Pay me $x and watch this video or we'll be forced to prosecute" BC while that may be better for both parties, it's likely worse for the rest of society.
Not sure how I feel about petty theft being handled this way.
Walmart should just get one choice, either a criminal charge or a civil agreement. They can't be allowed to threaten both.
When he isn't busy pushing real-estate bubble investing in Canada and other shady financial ideas. Whatever Robbins was 20 years ago, he isn't that any longer. I suspect he simply acquired the desire to make a lot more money with his platform, which lured him into becoming a financial guru. Lately he has been talking about Bitcoin, because he's now Mr Investing Guru.
You can't ensure that the sell is universally honest, so it's always going to have that risk. Then again, from my understanding it's not as if the police are either, so I guess any public conversation about innovative solutions to deal with common minor crime is good.
Prob the same person who looked at that 0.01% of revenue been squandered away by shoplifters and thought: What if we made that a source of revenue?
Where would this perverse incentive lead? Using commonly stolen goods as lure, maybe in a spot of the store where there's a false sense of privacy then waiting for the perp at the outside and saying: "Surprise, pay us $300 for that $100 dollar thing you were going to stole or you go to jail!"
Boggles the mind
Edit: To Rowdown... Even better HN could charge a fee for throwaways and donate the proceeds to legal aid funds. You’d be doing a lot of good.
We can pay for it by increasing parking tickets and car pool lane violations.
If Walmart's purpose here is indeed to exploit people's ignorance rather than to give them a second chance, then I'm with you 100%. :)
Thank goodness -- the state is supposed to have a monopoly on violence. You can argue as to how effective that is (I believe it's commonly believed to be ineffective, though for reasons that are polar opposites depending on political views).
†(private sector civil resolution --arbitration -- is often a good idea when there is not a huge power imbalance)