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Comment by cmckn | Hacker News Reader

Article kind of bums me out.

One loss prevention officer says:

> He finds the environment of loss prevention thrilling and takes pride in the training he’s received to track down and apprehend shoplifters. “That’s a huge adrenaline rush,” he says. “I think that’s a major factor in why people are in this field.”

But also says:

> “I don’t do this because I think shoplifting is wrong,” he says. “If I’m perfectly honest, I could not care less about that. I just do my job.”

Power is a hell of a drug.

Obviously these officers exercise discretion, because shoplifting happens all day long. Many stores build cases for repeat offenders before attempting to confront them. It's an interesting and complex issue, and one I'm glad I don't have to deal with 8 hours a day.

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One of the best teachers I had in college was a criminal justice counselor. And the job of criminal justice counseling isn't like other jobs in psychology, sure some of your job is to help the convicts, but a lot of the convicts don't want help or are actively hostile to your help, but part of your job is to help the state. Either way someone in the class asked how he can do the job if "helping people" wasn't more core to the work. And the response was that he liked the act of the work.

Summary is, It changed how I see work, because I think the happiest people and probably to some extent the best employees are the ones that are there because they enjoy the day to day, and not as much for the meaning they get out of it. (Obviously exceptions apply)

See Daniel Pink on autonomy, mastery and purpose.

I don't see the problem as long as it's directed toward a prosocial aim.

So busting people who are shoplifting items that they either need to survive or items that they can sell to survive to say, pay rent, because our capitalist system has shit on them and left them with no options

That prosocial goal?

Ever been in a store dealing with significant amounts of shoplifting, such as basically all chain stores in San Francisco these days? The more the shoplifting, the more stuff ends up behind locked cabinets. In some stores it's so bad even candy is locked up.

Now consider what happens when convenience stores stop being convenient. People with money stop patronizing them. They reduce their stock of items. They close. And now people, including poor people, no longer have a convenient place to shop.

Everybody has options. Shoplifting is very rarely, if ever, the best option available to someone on the ropes. It's just often the more convenient option, until it stops being convenient for them and everybody else.

I once saw a guy stealing a Moleskine notebook. Maybe that notebook can be resold, and he uses the money to pay rent?

Or more likely, he uses it to buy drugs.

So preventing the shoplifting might just save his life from a drug overdose.

It's hard to say that stealing is clearly right in almost any scenario. It's almost always anti-social.

What's the law called where you can't tell if someone is being sarcastic or actually thinks the ridiculous things they say aloud?

"Stopping someone from stealing a notebook prevented a drug overdose death".

I hope you and folks like you realize that encountering rhetoric like yours only reinforces the thought that some people are just really out to feel like they have power over others, and some folks are capable of amazing gymnastics to support the cruelty of most Western capital societies rather than confront the notion that maybe you have no god damn idea why someone was stealing a notebook and maybe just maybe it doesn't fucking matter even a tiny little bit.

It's Poe's law.

Yeah if a doctor said “I don’t really care about my patients’ lives. I just like the power of being able to prevent death”

I really think that’s perfectly fine

If they prevent my death, I don't care why.

I would surmise you do care if the doctor lopped off a limb when a couple rounds of antibiotics would have worked.

Motive is tied to the means, not just the ends.

Psychopaths are overrepresented in surgery/EMT work if I'm not mistaken, for better or worse.

So many surgeons with god complexes

That would account for "Stephen Strange" types who take on challenging surgeries just to prove they can do it and deserve their posh surgeon salary.

That would be fine, but what if it is a slightly different "I don’t really care about my patients’ lives. I just like the power of having a hand in whether people live or die."? Doesn't that start to sound a little questionable?

As Dan says "The goal is to protect the business — not to ruin people’s lives." Is Alex getting that "huge adrenaline rush" from protecting Walmart's property? Or is he getting that adrenaline from having power over people? Because his desire "to move back to the field side, where we actually deal with people" seems to imply that it is the power over people that he craves and not the loss prevention.

Not to me. I don't trust peoples' self assessment of their own motivations or goals. Typically they paint themselves in some sort of distorted light and it really has no effect on their actual outcomes or deliverables.

Also, I can't think of a 'better' answer to that question really.

> I just do this to pay the bills

Okay, so he doesn't care at all what happened to me

> I really care about saving peoples' lives

Yeah, that's what I would say if I were an evil guy

All I would really care about is their surgery success rate and track record.

Who and what is defined as prosocial has a long and sordid past and history of death and misery.

as with most important things

Keep in mind the people who will actively post on that subreddit are the people who view loss prevention as something more than just a day job, so I wouldn't view it as representative of the profession. And like every subreddit, it's safe to assume it's 90% fiction and content written to maximize outrage

> Power is a hell of a drug.

I wouldn't necessarily attribute that statement to a power trip. There is joy in doing a job well.

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