Walmart employees now wearing body cameras | Hacker News Reader

Walmart employees now wearing body cameras

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30 pointsashitlerferad88 comments

It’s not keeping them safe: it’s recording in order to facilitate an investigation if someone harms them.

That might serve a deterrent effect, but given how much crime is a result of poor impulse control, it may not have as strong an effect as one might like.

Let's not forget unless this is constantly uploading, hostile folks will be even more inclined to attempt assault to 'remove evidence' from the employee.

This sounds incredibly risky - given other employees may be nearby and the stores already have fixed cameras everywhere.

After the first year or two of such incidents spiking it'll go down quickly.

note: I really don't like the idea of a panopticon

The stores already hav3 cameras to provide evidence required for an investigation. Why would Walmart require additional evidence?

Because cameras have blind spots.

And it gives more context to law enforcement when they can see faces, body language and hear words rather than hearsay.

Assuming this is the reason, it seems much less trivial to install more/better cameras in a store than to coordinate this effort.

I think you'd be surprised how hard it is to cover 100% of a store floor. As another commenter pointed out, even if you can angle matters. Getting a shot of the top of someone's head is a let less helpful than getting a good angle of their face.

Or, it really is there to inhibit theft by employees, and safety is just the public rationalization.

That's another benefit of the system from the perspective of Walmart higher ups. No doubt.

> It’s not keeping them safe: it’s recording in order to facilitate an investigation if someone harms them.

It's getting them used to wearing them on a pretext of being about monitoring customers, to ease them into a shift to an always-on policy which will be promoted as a simplification that will reduce the risk of forgetting or turning them on too late, but which will also allow them to be complete records of the employee’s behavior, which is almost certainly the real target.

I wonder how hard it would be for the microphone to listen for the word "union" and send an alert to Walmart Corporate?

Trivial.

real life implementation of Marshall Brain's Manna

> may not have as strong an effect as one might like

You’re forgetting how much crime is motivated by “merciful” judges afraid to give long sentences to people who are incapable of functioning in society.

All you have to do is look at El Salvador for the ultimate proof study. According to CNN, murders fell by 97.7%. The western academic whines about the innocent; but NGOs invited to oversee the project have yet to make a single convincing innocence story.

There’s also the issue that crime is fundamentally, at its very root, a punishment of the innocent. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the harmless.

El Salvador's case is not as clear cut as it might seem - see #3 at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

That’s probably one of the least convincing and anecdotal things I’ve read online. I’m going to remember this for years.

Not saying ACX is a reliable source, but you can totally see the trend they are talking about in publicly available data. Murders had already fallen a lot by the time the imprisonment campaign started.

A. Is that possibly called deterrence?

B. “Fallen a lot” isn’t the same as “Murder rate lower than Canada.”

C. Your bias is by pointing out how much it has fallen since 2015. This is however an outlier bias - in 2015, El Salvador was the world’s most dangerous country. #1 for murders, by over 30% more than #2. The pre-mass-incarceration rate, though lower, would still be considered dangerous anywhere else. Going from “world’s most dangerous country” to “just a dangerous country” isn’t a victory, and it does not follow that following this, the country would naturally transition to “safe country.”

I’m far from an expert on this - but doesn’t it seem like they are just locking up all the people inclined to commit murder, not actually deterring people for the most part? It still seems consistent with the idea that crime is mostly impulse-based and hard to deter.

Additionally, wouldn’t less serious crimes (like shoplifting) be even harder to deter than murder, since they are even more likely to be committed impulsively?

The two are not incompatible. You can lock up the people most likely to murder; before you solve all possible society causes and build perfect deterrence.

I do know though, that your ability to build deterrence, or fix societal causes, will be heavily impaired to the point of impossibility if you don’t fix the marauder problem first. Deterrence is a preventative measure like brushing your teeth - but you can't brush your teeth later out of gingivitis after-the-fact.

It’s like saying fixing corrupt nations need democracy. Maybe - but if the people are starving, that’s the first problem needing fixing, or the attempt at democratic reforms will certainly fail.

That's kinda wild if the NGOs haven't been able to find a single innocently convicted. El Salvador has jailed 8% of young men, many of which based on nothing more than anonymous tips.

NGO's have no authority. The Salvadorian government has to let them in and allow them to do the work. If they say 'fuck off' there isn't much to be done -- and that's what happened.

(I really don't like this but) I definitely expect the future will involve ubiquitous on-person video & audio recording. People will walk around with devices that constantly record every interaction, which will eventually seem normal. A lot of formerly private conversations will be uploaded to whatever social media we have in the future, some stuff will go viral, etc. Goodbye any semblance of privacy!

Assymetric recording. There will be people recording you, but you'll be either legally barred from recording them or banned from publishing it on the Internet.

(this is likely where the norms around recording will end up - reinforcing the existing power structure)

This is very true, you can film people in public but if you step on to private property and do the same you can be told to stop, and removed if you don't. It will be entirely asymmetric.

The fact that it won't be asymmetric in public is the issue. Anyone can record you because you can't stop them from recording their daughter's birthday party in a public park. If you don't want to be in the frame, you have to leave.

Only you didn't realize that woman was recording her daughter when you walked out of the hotel in front of the park. Now the video is public on social media, and people can use the new fangled "Are We Dating the Same Guy/Gal" facial recognition models to basically run searches that would not have previously been possible on all public videos on a site. Search might even be geo-fenced to make it faster? Who knows? Point is, it allows them to find you coming out of that hotel in the background with your "friend" from work.

Keep in mind, it might not even stop there? Now when you approach a girl or guy you may be interested in, maybe in class, maybe at a party, whatever, his or her new fangled "smart glasses" may now bring up a huge red blinking "DIRT BAG" without you even knowing it.

Maybe ubiquitous tech like these body cams are necessary? I'm just asking everyone to think down the road a bit, (not even very far down the road honestly), and ask yourselves if maybe we can be a little more creative about solving some these problems by means other than ubiquitous gaze?

Hehe, and again another Black Mirror episode comes to mind: The ending to White Christmas where the guy is literally "red flagged" in the eyes of everyone and a social paria for the rest of his life.

Seems like a great market for non-recorded spaces. Or society will eventually just develop strong norms about recording.

This is already kinda starting to happen to a lesser degree with phone-free events or the nightclub phone stickers posted a couple weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352825

The episode of Black Mirror "The Entire History of You" comes to mind.

Yeah this might just be a bunch of suits seizing an opportunity created by cheap technology (and not an indicator of some moral decline, the position I instinctively moved to at first).

At first glance this seems like an indicator of the country's overall moral health. But when I went to look up crime statistics I was told property crime has been declining since the 90s. What gives? Is this an example of misleading statistics, or is there something else?

One hypothesis could be that a reduction in employee/customer engagement within stores creates more opportunities for theft. More self-checkout lines, fewer department representatives roaming around. Maybe?

This is what happens when you have an economy driven by finance, with corporate overlords who see their 2 million employees as numbers in a spreadsheet that can be moved around to squeeze out as much "shareholder value" as possible.

I don’t know man, when I used to work a Walmart deli we would throw out roughly 400 lbs of meat and cheese a day from expiring and were too lazy to mark it as shrink as we were told to.

As far as the store was concerned that was indistinguishable from theft and the managers/supervisors never gave a shit either. Then you’ve got CEOs of retail organizations admitting they they overstated how much theft had increased[1]

I’m pretty sure it’s just C levels lying to justify the changes for other reasons and then pinning it on the brokies as a convienent scapegoat

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...

To be fair, the crime in the 90's is different than the crime today.

In the 90's, there was absolutely more crime than today. No question about that. However, how many Target or Walmart mass shooters were there in 1990? How many hotel shooters mowed down 260 people in the 90's?

Just pointing out that there has been a slow change in the nature of threats in society over time. At the same time, I'm not sure our laws, or even our law enforcement infrastructure, has changed to interdict that kind of crime/(terrorism?).

Now here's the thing however, the answer is not to invade everyone's privacy and make every conversation or action you take available on social media or whatever. I think the answer is to really dig into why interdiction is not happening for some of these new forms of crime. Sure cameras help police and Walmart uppity ups when the inevitable happens, but I think we can be a little more creative and maybe even get better results?

What we learned by reducing crime in the 90's is that interdiction is always better than crime scene investigation. That's not any less true for the type of crime we're seeing today. In fact, it's more true. You definitely want to interdict mass shootings.

This is about monitoring the employees, not the customers.

When you press, you quickly find out that corporate has zero idea as to what is causing their shrink. They've been pissing and moaning about consumer theft, but the scale seems too large for it to be that.

Of course, the people at the bottom have a pretty solid grasp on what is causing the shrink--and it's all rooted in the fact that they're being paid like shit.

It can be true that crime can be decreasing and that retail thefts can be up.

Crimee trends can change as opportunity shifts.

This seems to be fueled by perceived changes in the legal risk of smash and grabs.

You don't give body cams to counter retail theft. There are better surveillance systems for that. The body cams are for safety vis-a-vis personal offenses not really property offenses.

I understand why the cameras are there, and I still believe it takes society in an ominous direction. Soon, everything you do will be uploaded and processed because everyone is recording every interaction. With "smart* eye glasses, with body cams, with phones and watches, and so on.

Maybe ubiquitous gaze is the only way to be safe, or to ensure you capture violent offenders? But I think we should all take a moment to think about the consequences of establishing ubiquitous gaze long term.

Increased retail theft increases the risk of employee confrontation or employee directed violence.

Increased risk is not the same as increased occurrences (but it wouldn't be surprising for them to both increase.)

Liability wise you still want to respond to the risk.

I think that crime is a fear tactic to sell these and to make excuses for worse customer service. Why hire more employees if you can just put cameras on everyone?

This is disturbing. It's bad enough that one might have to stumble through the cone of some surveillance camera while living life, but even should you have to stay there for several minutes completing an errand, you will have another moment of privacy as soon as you walk away. Even while working a shift at Walmart such will be true. But now, for those who work there, they're in the fishbowl permanently.

Privacy implications depend on how long they retain the footage, and how it's stored in general.

I do not agree that privacy works this way. For me, it's not invaded once the peeping Tom shows up, it was degraded when there was opportunity for him to peek. Footage might be destroyed, but one can never be certain that there aren't copies elsewhere. It may seem secure, but how can I be certain that there won't be some future exploit that exposes it to even more people (never mind those who already have access).

I think the principle here is that my privacy exists not because you and others promise not to invade it, but only when I can secure you from doing so. Once the cameras are policy, no one who works there will be able to do that for themselves.

There may be some safety (e.g. lawsuit defense) justification, but this is also a trojan horse for increased employee behavior/performance surveillance. Pair and always on microphone with text-to-speech and some language model and it becomes even easier to fire employees at the earliest hint of union organizing.

Incoming alert from Wally, the Walmart AI - Hi there! My vision model has detected you're not following the latest TPS protocol. Remember, all TPS reports must have the updated coversheets before they go out. Please comply immediately to maintain operational efficiency. Thanks for your cooperation!

I’ve had paranoid breaks in life where I felt I was being watched or monitored. It truly changed how I behaved, where I walked, stuff I did/say.

That quantum observer principle follows here. Just being observed can influence things, in this case reducing crime.

But think about what I just described, a literal paranoid state. It’s quite uncomfortable.

Kinda insane that this is necessary in some places. I am not super comfortable with these changes of having cameras everywhere, but I am sure some grocery store employees have to deal with a lot of “shady” customers.

It's doesn't seem to be necessary. If they have just 200 violent incidents then that's impressively low, 0.0125% chance of you as a Walmart employee to have a violent encounter at work per year.

Verbal conflicts can be unpleasant as well obviously, and the cameras can help identify those customers as well. I'm not entirely sure that the cameras well work as a deterrent though, they normal don't in other cases. A frustrated or angry customer isn't going to see the camera an change their behavior.

So you still need to have support framework in place for the employees who have these encounters. The cameras are only there to be able to identify customers, but I'm not really sure what they would want to do with that information.

Cameras have been everywhere for quite some time. Every time you use self check out, at the grocery store or even the post office, a camera is watching you. As you walk around stores, cameras are following and recording your movements. ATM machines, traffic cameras, we are being photographed constantly.

We are being told it is necessary. We don't know that it actually is.

> but I am sure some grocery store employees have to deal with a lot of “shady” customers.

I wouldn't just worry about the customers—the lady who recently died in a walk-in oven (at a walmart!) was unlikely to have been locked in by a customer.

9/11 changed the game. Fear is a powerful motivator.

Cameras on:

- public roadways, highways

- streets (nyc, london)

- businesses

- private cars

- public transportation

- interiors of cars

- perimeter of residential homes

- interiors of homes

- civilian law enforcement agencies equipped with body cams

- and of course the audio, video, GPS capable devices a majority of the world carries

- now adding to the list is private businesses equipping employees with body cams

The “selfie” and social media made us accustomed to posting personal information online as well.

The surveillance state is already here and people are barely waking up to this shit.

> 9/11 changed the game.

Almost a quarter century later, I remain amazed that Americans put up with locks the government has the key to (on our luggage). As someone who grew up in the Cold War, that’s the sort of thing we would have expected from the Soviets.

IIRC, it was during Nixon’s term that things started to go awry. I believe it was his administration who responded to security incidents on æroplanes with the un-American approaching of disarming passengers.

>Almost a quarter century later, I remain amazed that Americans put up with locks the government has the key to (on our luggage). As someone who grew up in the Cold War, that’s the sort of thing we would have expected from the Soviets.

Remember, Americans reacted to the drugs and crime of the 80s and 90s by throwing more government invasion of privacy and erosion of due process at that problem too.

Fear is also highly irrational. We have a 9/11 in terms of auto deaths about every month. We watch millions die from a preventable pandemic just to keep the economy going. Neither of these things seems to provoke much desire from the state to protect americans.

I don't think it's just fear, either. I remember the bloodlust and feigned victimhood that spilled out after 9/11 and I never want to live through that again. We got permission to behave in the worst way possible and so much of our culture never recovered from that. We now live under a more despotic government than we ever accused the soviets of. "patriotism" can kiss my ass

> 9/11 changed the game

It did, but not as much as cheap technology did, at least when we're talking about cameras everywhere.

If they put criminals in jail they wouldn't have to have a surveillance state like this.

The US is one of the top jailers of the world.

I suspect that's actually due to an extremely bad false positive rate on the police and court system; jailing a lot of non-violent people for petty incidents and failing to address more serious crimes if they're even slightly hard to investigate.

I am continually surprised how a forum that sees itself as super intelligent and critical also hosts people who appear to lack basic media literacy

How does that follow?

He doesn’t like these people and would like to subject them incarceration and slavery

You can't steal from retail stores when you're in prison.

What makes you think that's related to the surveillance state in any way?

The person you're responding to has a history of not responding thoroughly and specifically to the claims made by others in a conversation. Alternatively, they're often flat-out wrong.

Not true, I just disagree with you. The events in Germany are just the most recent example of my position (and that of the winning candidate and voters in the most recent US election) on opposing immigration and supporting remigration and deportation being the correct and moral position, as opposed to the left wing position of mass immigration and open borders in western countries being immoral.

Well, that hasn't worked thus far...

The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide (per data released in October 2021 by World Prison Brief). This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000—the highest rate in the world.

...maybe it's time to try a different approach like maybe slowing the transfer of wealth to plutocrats and back to the lower and middle classes.

> The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated

El Salvador passed us a couple years ago, but yea your post is right on the nose.

EDIT: only in per-capita.

And their murder rate collapsed. Their policy was great.

I'm not sure most of the murder rate collapse had to do with incarceration. It's probably true for a small part, but from what I've heard the anti-corruption raids against the police and the end of gang wars are had more impact.

Note that those are driven by the policies of the current government, I'm not saying that the Salvadoran government is bad _at all_, I'm saying that the 'imprison everything' part of the set of policies is probably the less effective one.

Also Salvador uses (and probably reinforce) non-salvadoran cartels to help destroy their local gangs, and I'm not sure that this works if every country does the same.

Crazy how most countries manage a lower crime rate without behaving like savages. Not us, though! The entire point seems to be the cruelty.

Perhaps the component parts are different?

Consider what life will be like for the employee once they combine this with vision models. Constant supervision by an all-seeing robo-boss.

Let’s fix the problems causing the devolution to a low trust society instead of just layering on cameras and ubiquitous surveillance.

Maybe the people making grocery store clerks feel afraid at work shouldn’t be free to walk around causing trauma.

Freedom is not anarchy.

> Maybe the people making grocery store clerks feel afraid at work shouldn’t be free to walk around causing trauma.

Have you ever been on NextDoor? A bunch of people are terrified of completely normal interactions because people look & sound different.

Social media is a skewed perspective.

I go outside, and make my opinions on people based on how the general public interacts. I don't make my opinions based on (crazy) outliers (online).

By global standards, the US is not a low trust society, and very few countries could really be considered high trust (https://ourworldindata.org/trust).

Many western nations (I'm in Canada) seem to be doing a speed run towards low trust society.

Is the USA now a low trust society? Probably not (although in places, likely) but the social trust has certainly eroded in recent years.

>Let's just fix society by locking up everyone who causes problems

is right up there with

>Let's just print more money until we have enough

and

>Let's just make the rest of the airplane out of the same stuff they use to make the black box

Many of things that have contributed to this becoming a low trust society are our most highly held social values. There's no sign that those values are going to change so we just have to accept that there are things we must do to protect ourselves in the permanent low trust society.

We’re very much not headed in the direction of fixing that… so things like this. And who or how or..?

We already imprison more people than any other country on earth.

hey now, that's not fair

*more people than any nation in human history

Wrong statement.

The question is: Do they deserve it?

Do not assume that heterogenous countries should be compared with homogenous countries.

EDIT: For the person strawmanning me as a racist:

Consider a nation like Japan, or Finland. Everyone is of similar genetic background, similar wealth, similar living conditions, similar strengths, similar weaknesses, similar struggles, similar educational opportunities, similar transportation requirements, similar family background.

Compare that to the US: Wildly different genetic backgrounds, massive wealth gaps, massive differences in living conditions, massive differences in strengths and weaknesses, massively different struggles, massively different opportunities, different transportation requirements, different family backgrounds.

In Finland or Japan, the amount of empathy you naturally have for other people is very strong, because you can see how most people are just like you, and are inherently less likely to be violent to people you see as similar to yourself. In the US, developing hate for the "outsider" is much easier, no matter who it may be - take last week with the shooting of the healthcare CEO. Diversity is great for people who benefit from diversity; but there will (in my opinion) always be a subset for whom diversity is a temptation to engage in tribalism.

It would stand to reason then, that a heterogeneous country is going to be inherently more violent, and have a higher incarceration rate, than a homogenous one, and therefore comparing violence between the two is like comparing apples-to-oranges.

EDIT 2: For the secondary "racist" complainant:

You're making the assumption that me pointing out "genetic differences" implies superiority/inferiority. I'm merely saying that it affects whether Random Normal Person A views Random Normal Person B as being similar to themselves. Even if Random Normal Person A is not deliberately racist, it does follow that violence is more likely between people who don't see themselves in each other.

Even if we are not deliberately racist, humans are inherently tribal. Heck, we're tribal over blue bubbles versus green bubbles, and letting something that stupid control interaction. There's no way skin color does not also have an effect, consciously or not, maliciously or not, causing an estrangement between the two groups, without implying that blue is better than green or vice versa.

The point is: I'm saying we have differences. Differences (as seen even on smartphones) cause tribal behavior. Tribal behavior (I am theorizing) causes increased violence between tribes inherently. Because of this, a nation with many differences, should not be compared to nations with few.

Could you please reply to peoples comments instead of just editing your statement which gives no indication that a reply was made?

As to your second edit. I can understand the point made about tribalism and could even mostly agree that I’d expect to see some increased amount of friction between multiple groups of ethnicities based on some dark human instincts. But that isn’t what you started this thread on.

You asked if they deserved it. You’ve made a moral statement and then started bringing race into it as an argument for whether or not they did. That’s racism.

Also inb4 you claim that “genetic differences” that people will have tribal reactions to isn’t a 1:1 analogue for race, like people can tell if you have some mutation in a subtle gene different from their own

You can ask someone their zip code and you can figure out from that their chance of being in prison during their life compared to others. Crime is almost entirely an economic issue. There's no reason to bring genetics into this.

Whether anyone deserves it, vengeance has never been an effective deterrent to crime. This is why most countries focus on rehabilitation rather than just torturing people. The US will never learn this lesson.

Wow that’s as close to outright racism as I’ve seen on this site without being blasted into oblivion

> EDIT: For the person strawmanning me as a racist:

Claiming it’s a strawmen and then opening up with “genetic differences” when you were suggesting that people “deserved it”. How is that proving that this isn’t a racist belief?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com