When someone did a dent-and-run into my car in a parking lot, the police didn't investigate. I got an incident report from them, to send to my insurance. In that case the police report gives the insurance company a way to handle possible fraud on my part.
During the night someone went down the street and poked a hole in car tires, including one of mine. I didn't bother calling the police since I didn't think they could do anything. I needed to get going, so put on the spare and left.
You think a police investigation could have done something?
Flipping it around, when I was a kid on a bike I ran into someone's side view mirror and knocked it off. I was so scared about getting punished by my parents that I left. If the police investigated, they never caught me, and more importantly, my parents never found out.
The only time we ever called the cops was when visiting friends in a small town. I came out to find a car window had been shattered, and we found a BB among the broken glass. The cops came for that one. Turns out some bored teens were going around shooting things with a BB gun. That one actually went to trial and I got court-ordered compensation.
But that was car damage plus serial gun crime, and not typical car damage.
They also don’t seem to make an effort to actually stop shoplifting. They take out regular check out lanes and replace them with self check outs that are unbelievably frustrating to use and make it very easy to shoplift accidentally. One time I apparently shoplifted an item by accident while using the self checkout lane, the only reason I realized is because I went back to return the item and it wasn’t on the receipt. The clerk helping me with the return just laughed and said it happens all the time.
If their only response to shoplifting is to just jack up prices and then go on TV and blame democrats for “crime” while doing literally nothing to stop shoplifting then I have little to no sympathy for them.
We accept that some crimes go unpunished, yes? We don't hire enough traffic police to detect and punish all speeders, even though that's a crime, and that's only one of many crimes I can think of which are underprosecuted. Nor is there much of a cry to increase the number of traffic police and bring traffic speed down to the posted limits.
So why must all shoplifting by punished, with the police doing most of the work at the store?
We've long said that if an organization needs a higher level of security they can have their own security force, which may be private guards or a private police force, as with some campus police, transit police, and railroad police forces.
Just like there is no law saying a store must pay more than is legally required, there is also no law saying the government is required to supply a police force for the store.
Nor does it make economic sense for broadly trained police to handle a specialized task like providing security for a store.
One of the biggest crimes is wage theft. The total cost of wage theft is estimated at 100x that of every robbery: https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-bil...
We know Walmart has committed that crime. ("According to a 2018 report by Good Jobs, between January 2000 to 2018, Walmart paid over $1.4bn in fines and settlements over wage theft violations, FedEx paid over $500m during the same period, and Bank of America paid over $380m." - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-u... ).
Will these police officers assigned to Walmart also be charged with investigating and preventing wage theft at those stores?
No, of course that hasn't been part of the general discussion.
What, in your opinion, justifies allowing wage theft by Walmart to go unpunished?
In the US, there are thousands of crimes on the books, which are not enforced and are ridiculous [1]. So no, I do not think that all crimes should be punished.
>So why must all shoplifting by punished, with the police doing most of the work at the store?
This is a loaded question. I don't think the police should be doing most of the work at the store, but I think the police should take the apprehended criminals from the store when called. And DAs should prosecute those, and the judges should try them, that's all. Nothing of this happens right now. This is why stores do not try to apprehend criminals as the same police, DA and judges will happily go after the business and its employees if the criminal is hurt in the process or claims to be hurt[2].
1. https://www.distractify.com/p/ridiculous-laws
2. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/us/new-york-bodega-stabbing-m...
Which should police investigate more - shoplifting from Walmart or wage theft at Walmart, and why?
My question is meant to probe what goes into your decision to prioritize investigating two related types of crime which can both take place at Walmart. It is meant to be more head-to-head than jliptzin's series of questions early in this thread "Someone want to explain to me why my tax dollars should go towards protecting target and Walgreen’s inventory? When they have one security guard in their entire store? When police could instead be spending that time finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away?".
How is your [2] at all related to shoplifting? It feels like you are trying to raise the emotional level by switching to manslaughter.
This alternative topic has consumed endless discussion over the years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo... and https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-16-860403... from the 1980s as two examples. NYC has had a long time to refine how to handle something like your [2], and there is no way it makes sense to discuss it futher here.
> I don't think the police should be doing most of the work at the store, but I think the police should take the apprehended criminals from the store when called.
Right, but the top-level topic centers more about Target is locking things up, and how shoplifters can grab-and-run, and why Walgreens seems to only have "one security guard in their entire store".
Larger companies already expect "shrink" (theft by employees and customers) and factor it into their calculations of how much staff to have, how much security to have, the effect of locking up particular items, the use of self-checkout vs. cashiers, etc. They have long ago figured out how to maximize profit in the face of shoplifting.
In your terms, Walmart already allows crime to go unpunished because they don't want to spend enough to identify those crimes.
The police response - no matter how good! - is rather useless if over-worked employees don't notice the shoplifting so never contact the police, or if the police physically can't arrive until many minutes after the thieves have left.
Low wage employees of large companies, as a general rule, do not get paid to risk bodily harm to stop thieves. Your [2] is a rare exception, ... and also not an employee of a large company.
In general discussion, the argument is the city should direct the police to do more to help prevent shoplifting. Which means the big companies will go to their spreadsheets and figure out how to spend even less money on security and staff, ending up with more profit as the government ends up subsidizing their security.
> Someone want to explain to me why my tax dollars should go towards protecting target and Walgreen’s inventory? When they have one security guard in their entire store? When police could instead be spending that time finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away?
As saying the police should not prosecute theft in Walmart at all.
That seems an extreme and unjustified reading - a "straw man", if you will.
I read it as a complaint that these stores are not paying enough for their own security, so why should should cops help Walgreen’s inventory when they don't even help "finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away" even after "I gave police the license # of the truck that hit me, but they said it was an out of state plate so they said there was "nothing they could do."" (quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38763356)
jliptzin pays taxes, so should get support from the police for property damage on the order of hundreds of dollars, just like Walgreens/Walmart can get support from the police for shoplifting something which costs a few tens of dollars, right?
I also wanted to focus on the question "probably more than you do?" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759837 . In terms of "taxes per acre", jliptzin almost certainly pays more than Walmart. Choosing to prioritize total tax revenue vs. taxes per acre gives a very different metric about which of those two crimes - car crash or shoplifting - to prioritize.
I don’t run my servers on Windows XP and allow anyone in the world to connect on any port and leave my database open with no authentication controls and then complain when the police aren’t arresting every person who is stealing my data.
As I said in another reply, there is nothing a store can do against theft if the police, DA and courts do not enforce the law. Private business cannot arrest and punish criminals.
The point is, they don’t make a serious attempt to stop shoplifting, because they want it to be as frictionless as possible for their customers. In theory they could lock up every item in the store and require an employee to unlock a cabinet every time a customer wants something, but obviously that creates so much friction that it would greatly reduce sales. So it’s a trade off. They’ve chosen the end of the sliding scale where almost all merchandise is freely available for customers to take off the shelves with very limited oversight, coupled with self check out lanes so they don’t have to hire as many cashiers. They know full well that some people are stuffing merchandise into their pockets and not scanning everything at the check out lanes and that tradeoff is clearly working for them because their annual profit is higher than ever:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-....
So no, I don’t think Walmart and others have any problem with shoplifters whatsoever, and I certainly don’t think that my tax dollars should go towards trying to catch every last person who steals a tooth brush from Walmart when they have little to no interest in making any kind of investment in curtailing shoplifting themselves.
It sounds like you’re in favor of Walmart maximizing their private profits by making it as easy as possible to buy their merchandise (so easy in fact that you can find yourself stealing something accidentally!), making no effort whatsoever in theft prevention in their stores, and then putting the burden of enforcement on the public dime, which is a curious position - are you a large Walmart shareholder?
If there’s a particular store that is having too much stolen from them by shoplifters, they are more than welcome to shut it down and make way for a local business who I can assure you will be way more careful with its merchandise. I am 100% in favor of that.
When we’ve solved every murder and violent crime, then we can get to Walmart shoplifters.
For example, they have the capital to build a dedicated store for their needs, then place deed restrictions on resale use to prohibit competition, and to have those former sites - which essentially always pay lower tax rates - included as comparables for tax assessment purposes. Eg, https://ilsr.org/dark-store-tax-tactic-makes-big-box-stores-... .
For another example, a store with the name "PandaMan" may not actually own the trademark to "PandaMan" but instead pay "PM Trademark Holdings", a Delaware LLC, for trademark use. This is a business expense, which reduces the local taxes, and the choice of state LLC can be chosen to reduce overall taxes. Delaware does not charge income tax on royalties. https://troyandschwartzlaw.com/2020/09/holding-companies-str...
These are called "loopholes" and are of course completely legal.
As a result, big box stores pay far than smaller stores in mixed-use areas , when measured in net tax revenue acre. ("Net" is important since it costs the government money to provide the roads, water, sewer, etc.)
For example, from https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2021/02/11/how-mixed-use-de... regarding Carmel, Indiana:
> When left to the market to allow developers to build what they build,” the result is strip centers, he says. “Even nice retail, like the Target on the west side, generates a half million in assessed value per acre.” Stand-alone office buildings generate $1 million to 1.5 million in assessed value per acre, he explains.
> “Then you look at redevelopment projects that the mayor and council have done together,” he says. “Instead of a million or a half million per acre, we are netting $23 million in assessed value per acre, $20 million in assessed value per acre. Twenty times the assessed value from redevelopment projects. That locks us into a positive tax generating position for the next hundred years. This is smart planning.”
This has been true for a long time, like this 2008 summary of a report from 2003, at https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/bbtk-factshe... , which shows a net-negative revenue for big box stores, due to the lower tax revenue per acre and higher infrastructure costs than specialty retailers, which had a net positive tax revenue.
So maybe the government should say the existing costs to subsidize Walmart are high enough, that government-provided police protection is too much, and if Walmart's business model can't afford additional internal security then it's time for Walmart to leave the area, and let the government support other businesses which both need less subsidizes and provide higher tax revenue.
I am fully aware that tax avoidance is legal. My Dad taught me the key part of Gregory v. Helvering when I was about 12 - "the legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted."
1) I described "loopholes" in this context as a completely legal way to reduce the amount of taxes paid, so of course it can mean to pay taxes.
The term as I described it is quite common. Wikipedia uses it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance in "Other multinationals, such as Apple for example, also exploit fiscal loopholes, diverting profits from high tax countries into others with lower corporate tax rates." -- Apple exercised their right to use a loophole to pay lower taxes. Not illegal, and yes, the still paid taxes.
This isn't reddit, I am not a redditor, I don't know reddit vocabulary, so don't use your reddit blinders when you read what I wrote.
2) I said that larger organizations have greater ability to use said completely legal and economically justified loopholes (I gave two such examples).
3) As a result, when measured by tax revenue per acre instead of tax revenue per entity like you suggest, big box stores bring in less than other forms of retail -- and sometimes even negative tax revenue if infrastructure costs are fully included. (I provided sources).
4) Thus, if tax revenue guides where local government should direct tax money, they should give less support to big box stores than, for example, downtown retail shopping.
It should be on tax revenue per acre, which for Carmel resulted in a 10x improvement over big box stores on greenfield sites, for reasons given in that link.
Your "major tax payers" needs further qualifiers. If the major tax payer is a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, that's far different than if it's a big box store.
Why? The evidence is that Walmart "absorb retail sales from nearby stores without significantly expanding the market." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08912424124579...
Lose a Walmart and other stores will make up for it, because the demand is there.
> Not to mention it's illegal: one is still entitled to the protection of law even when not paying any taxes,
Well that's a non sequitur. I don't have a clue what you are talking about. Can you point to a relevant court case?