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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the thought process here, but the reality is that almost no one wants to be recorded in public, especially knowing that it can easily be posted and shared online, where they will likely look like the bad guy.

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Cashiers that make $10 an hour are under more surveillance and public exposure than cops are. Police are often the highest paid employees on a government's payroll, often making more than software engineers do, and they get to retire with a full pension after only 20 years of working.

Given that they're the strong arm of the state, and that they're paid handsomely to be it, they can at least handle the same amount of accountability that cashiers do, if not more.

How do you prove that cashiers are recorded more than police? I also don’t think there is any indication that police are generally the highest paid government employees.

> How do you prove that cashiers are recorded more than police?

You've never worked as a cashier. If one is behind the till, they have a direct camera on them for their entire shift.

Usually several cameras, all pointed at the cashier and their hands from different angles, with even more cameras littered throughout their workplace.

I have. It depends where you work. I am curious what the point of that is because cameras don’t determine whether cash is improperly removed from the register.

As I understand it, there's a lot more to it than stealing from the till. I used to work for a company that was peripheral to the security industry, so I got a lot of their literature. One was a pamphlet showing more than a dozen fiddles that are possible at the cash register. I've also read that most shoplifting is an inside job, at least involving an inside helper.

There's stuff like having a bar code on the palm of your hand, so you scan a cheap item while passing an expensive item through the scanner.

Shop lifting, even at point of sale, does not occur inside the cash register. To that end you would be monitoring the customer, which can include employees on the customer side of the transaction.

> Shop lifting, even at point of sale, does not occur inside the cash register.

But money-skimming does. I know someone who got fired for that... After being caught on camera.

How much was their till off?

I don't know. I was just a front of house, not a shift lead.

My understanding of what happened is that the till was counted as off, and then it was confirmed that it was them through the cameras.

There are anywhere from 2 - ~6 people who can open the till in the store at any time at that location, thus the need for the cameras.

Edit: Obviously not the best OpSec, but that was the workflow at that point, and hiring enough staff to make that not the case was non-feasible.

As a customer, I’ve simply been given the wrong change and been told that I paid with a $10 and not a $20. Most of the time I take their word for it, but once I was actually paying attention and had a manager come over and count down the til.

True. Granted, the marketing material that I saw was 20+ years ago, and the recording was still done with videotape. One product would superimpose a text feed of the register tape on the video, so they were recorded simultaneously.

> I have. It depends where you work.

Is the company that you worked for, are they still in business? I'd be surprised if they were. If they are, I'm curious how large this business is. B/c I suspect they are able to charge it (the losses) to the owners.

Simply look overhead next time you're paying for something. There's a camera on the cash drawer, a camera watching your face, a camera watching their face, probably a camera watching the whole lane from a wider perspective.

I used to work on point-of-sale equipment, typically fixing scanner-scale or receipt-printer issues, but all the database equipment is in the same back room as the security DVR. The number of cameras in a modern store is staggering, and nowhere are they more concentrated than the checkout area.

That completely depends on where you shop and your geography. There aren’t that many cameras in Texas or Kuwait.

> There aren’t that many cameras in Texas

Yeah no. I worked in a restaurant. There was one camera directly on both tills. One camera indirectly on each till. One camera directly in the main queue area and multiple indirectly on the main queue and otherwise covering the remainder of the lobby from multiple angles.

Edit: This is just the front of house stuff. The back of house had it's own complement which I won't detail here for obvious reasons.

I have worked in restaurants as well. Restaurants are not considered retail points of sale. The primary difference from an accounting perspective is till assignment. Again, your one experience at is not representative of the world as a whole.

You can also look around any time you go inside a Target or Walmart and see plenty of camera's, plus sometimes some displays showing that there are cameras.

Edit: In addition, we had till assignment at that location. However, there were at least 2 people there at all times who could open the till (Shift lead + assignee), and there was usually more (Managers, other shift leads who were still on shift).

Yes, they are looking for shop lifters.

You notice you shift ground when your comments are challenged? I also enjoy how a thread a about police and cameras turns into everybody suddenly becoming an expert on retail, accounting, and security because they have been in a store before or once worked a minimum wage job and yet have absolutely no idea how the money is handled.

> You notice you shift ground when your comments are challenged?

No?

Employees are in the store, and are put under surveillancece along with everyone else.

> yet have absolutely no idea how the money is handled.

No, I definitely know how the money is handled at the restaurant I was at. I don't know the figures for the one individual, but I know how it's handled in general.

If you'd like to email me (it's in my bio) than I can give a run down, but I'm not going to detail something like that in a public forum.

Edit: > everybody suddenly becoming an expert on retail, accounting, and security

I'm not claiming to be an expert. You claimed "There aren’t that many cameras in Texas"

I provided evidence you were wrong. That is all I've done in this thread.

Edit 2: Edit 1 not quite accurate. I also provided an anecdote about what happened to/with a coworker.

Well, this was a surprise to me. I had been under the impression that police had better salaries than what appears to be the case. A quick web search suggests that the average salary is roughly $60-65k. I had thought they were more around $80-120k, depending on position and seniority. I don’t recall where I got that impression.

As mentioned by others, cashiers are monitored by security cameras constantly. It’s just that footage of them stealing from the till doesn’t go viral. Police brutality does.

I have observed others with a similar impression so I suspect it is a common misconception. Good on you for having the courage to acknowledge it.

You don’t monitor theft from the till with cameras but by counting the cash in the till against a reported balance. This is determinate down to the penny without any camera.

You wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a genuine mistake and theft without a camera. The same applies to police.

? It’s an accounting balance. The numbers match or they don’t.

If they don’t match, then what? Is ot a mistake or was it intentional?

It doesn't matter. It is reciprocated against the employee either way.

Damages from common/reasonable mistakes cannot just be shifted onto employees in sane juridictions.

In sane jurisdictions employees are naturally motivated to make fewer mistakes without need from cameras.

Oh, but you do! Not all till shortages are due to theft, and not all theft at cash registers happens in ways that the till is off. Folks do lots of tricks to try to make sure the till count is correct: For example, scanning cheap items, not scanning things, charging more than the register total (and pocketing the rest)... and so on. Occasionally, it gets you out of being in trouble (some dude took goods and walked out of a place I worked at, after I scanned it but obviously before he paid, for example). Most places have variance built in as well - no one is perfect, after all. Some are stricter than others, and many places share the till between people because it takes more labor to do otherwise.

The till not being able to catch everything is a reason for the cameras, and the reason they aren't just around the till. (cosmetics often have cameras as do receiving areas). Bag checks are really common as well. Sure, you could just have an inventory management system, but again, these aren't foolproof nor do these systems give you a clue about who is stealing or if it is a simple mistake.

Police work a _lot_ of overtime in most jurisdictions.

So the base salary may be misleadingly low. Especially since many police contracts have a 2x or even 3x payout for overtime under some conditions.

As with many statistics around policing there is a deliberate and calculated intent to muddy the waters and prevent effective policy discussion.

Does that count overtime? That's a significant piece of comp for many police officers.

Median salary for cops is $105k[1] in states where the median salary for software engineers is $96k. They can surpass $250k a year with overtime[2].

[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...

[2] https://www.nj.com/somerset/2019/11/4-cops-in-this-nj-town-e...

Comparing compensation of cashiers and police officers is unfair in my opinion. Police officers risk dying in line of duty. Would you play Russian Roulette for say $100k? I wouldn't.

Its not even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs.

It is still riskier job than a cashier or software developer. OP's comment about police compensation is irrelevant, IMO.

Talking about risk, would you play a Russian roulette for $100? If you win, you will make $100 in less than a minute, far better hourly pay-rate than a police officer or a pilot.

But not a riskier job, than say a delivery driver, I doubt you hold them in the same esteem.

Risk is determined by actuaries. I say let the money do that talking.

You mean let the police be privately funded ? Well, the rich can then rest in peace.

Police departments have insurance.

Farm work is more dangerous than being a cop, and the federal government lets children younger than twelve work on a farm unless a state sets its own rules. Age, hour, overtime and minimum wage provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act that protect young workers in other fields don't apply. Seventeen states have exempted farm work from most or all their child labor laws: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Actually, retail workers and cashiers have similar murder rates as cops do[1].

[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/12/2/7313827/workplace-homicide-mur...

They're not really comparing compensation outside of the context of surveillance. They're saying that $10/hr cashiers are more heavily watched than police officers. It seems to me that we should maybe have more oversight over individuals whom we decide to present with lethal weapons as tools?

Kinda makes one feel like money is treated as more important than human life, when you look at it from that perspective.

As the parent comment says, police are tax payer funded and hold extra power over citizens. I think that trumps them being worried about "looking like the bad guy".

Then maybe people who don't like that shouldn't take jobs working for the public in public while enforcing public laws to uphold public standards of public safety and public order.

Just a thought.

This is quite well put

I can't edit now, but I'm addressing the point that it "seems wrong" for cops to not want to be recorded. It seems completely natural. I'm not saying they shouldn't be filmed or should attempt to stop it, just that it's not surprising that they might not like it.

the right to record isn't necessarily the right to publish.

Yes, of course, but the police are not just anybody.

Not being a cop is free. =)

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