I don’t dispute that at all. My only points were that depending upon how the law is written it may not be necessary for the person to pass the cash register/leave the store to commit a crime and that the store can wait until a person leaves the store even if the law doesn’t require them to.
This very particular situation may have given him excellent reasons to conceal the merchandise for reasons unrelated to shoplifting but change just one variable ( say it was a package of socks, or he concealed a video game at any time other than a Black Friday sale ) and that justification disappears.
As someone who has worked as a security guard/bouncer type, everyone (guards/cops/suspects/bystanders) gets hurt less when you put them down fast. The last thing you want is a drawn out close quarters brawl in a customer packed environment.
I did not work retail and laws involving shoplifting are highly variable in various jurisdictions. Store policies are often more strict than law to minimize chances of grey area or bad busts.
Every once in while there’s a story about some Wallyworld employee getting canned for going after a shoplifter. This is because it’s been the policy since at least about 2007 (probably longer) that going after shoplifters was against store policy.
What I was told, as a store employee for a time staring in 2007, was that somehow we needed to a) see somebody conceal an item and b) keep a constant eye on them and c) somehow alert management to the situation. At the time, accomplishing both b) and c) was impossible unless we got very very lucky because we didn’t have any way on us to contact said people. (I don’t know if such employees have a way now because I haven’t set foot in one of their stores in over four years.) If we took our eyes off them then we couldn’t do a damn thing because, in theory, they could have left said items on a random shelf or something.
We could do nothing. Yet we were constantly assured that employees were the biggest sources of shrink. Suuuuuuure we were. They were allowed to search us if they felt the need, that’s the only reason.
The thiefs story sounds just a little bit unbelievable.
He didn’t think that people would get suspicious if he put something in a shop UNDER HIS SHIRT.
If he really had to watch out for other customers snatching away his item, and also he needed a free arm to pickup his grand kid, and the Easter bunny told him to do it etc.etc. he still wouldn’t have put it there simply because he would KNOW that it looked suspicious.
Regular shoplifters often take their kids, grandkids, and sometimes even borrow friends kids, when they go on their thieving sprees as it makes them seem more innocent, then say a single individual wearing a hoody.
It also in their minds, make store security more reluctant to cause a scene in front of the child, and as a last result if they are caught in the act, they hope that the store owners will take pity on them because of the child and not take further action.
Thieves are scum, but people who take children along with them to cover their activities are the lowest of the low.
He tried it on but didn’t get away with it.
It sounds like the cop went OTT with his behaviour, and shoplifters and their friends and families everywhere will seriously condemn it.
I suspect that many people, who aren’t thieves, rightly or wrongly couldn’t care less if a low life gets his fingers burned.
Might even deter them from stealing again in the future though I doubt it.
Except he didn’t put it under his shirt (according to at least one sourece). He put it in his belt in order to free his hands so he could lift his grandson out of the way of the mob at Walmart (cite) (in description of video). Sounds totally plausible to me.
The guys statement statement isn’t much of a cite.
Did he simply tuck it in a few inches? All the way down with maybe only a fraction of an inch showing? Did he do so then have an untucked shirt flipped over it? People who committ crimes like this love to dance right on the edge of plausible deniability.
and just as a side note…I at 5’11" and 375 lbs and an SCA swordfighter who has shrugged off more than a fair share of beatings, dont like going to BF events because of all of the pushing, shoving, etc. If I wanted to, I could easily plow into the middle of any such crowd if I wanted to be agressive about it.
Who in their right mind brings little kids into that mosh pit that a walmart electronics dept becomes on BF?
Sure a couple guys could lift various small high value items, but an employee often has opportunity to toss a case of product off a dock to a waiting friend.
I have even seen two lovely examples at one of my old employers #1 A shipping employee was taking orders over ebay for product in our warehouse and pulling and shipping them on our UPS system to his customers. When places move hundreds of orders a day one extra stray package every few days is kinda tough to catch unless someone audits the UPS shipping logs, which was rarely done. If he hadn’t been greedy and actually shipped them himself on his own time he probably never would have been caught.
#2 Two truck drivers got together and actually came down to the warehouse on a weekend and loaded about $50K in product onto one of our trucks and took it all to a swap meet in a nearby town. They got caught after being photographed by an off duty employee. We immediately spot checked many of the items they had for sale and could not account for $14K in product.
This is insane. Just because something seems suspicious doesn’t make it criminal. He might have been planning on stealing it so he should be arrested?
In Canada, along with the actual physical carrying something out of the store, there has to be an intent to commit the crime also. So if I walk out of the store with something in my pocket, and get stopped by security, and I say, “Oh, I forgot to pay for it,” and then either give it back or go back and pay, then it’s not theft. Because, well, they can’t prove that I meant to steal it. No intent = no crime.
Even if I say, “Oh shit!” and run, the power of arrest of security guards (which is actually technically the same for anyone) is pretty limited. The person doing the arresting has to either a) have seen me take the item and then not lost line of sight, or b) be assisting someone who did. So if the cashier tells the LP guy that he saw me take a chocolate bar and head for the door, LP can stop me and detain me until the police arrive/I pay. But if I get out the door and out of sight of both of them, even for a second, then all they can do is call the police and watch me walk away, eating my Snickers bar.
I found the relevant law, from the Criminal Code of Canada:
*Theft (bolding mine):
(1) Every one commits theft who fraudulently and without colour of right takes, or fraudulently and without colour of right converts to his use or to the use of another person, anything, whether animate or inanimate, with intent
(a) to deprive, temporarily or absolutely, the owner of it, or a person who has a special property or interest in it, of the thing or of his property or interest in it;
(b) to pledge it or deposit it as security;
(c) to part with it under a condition with respect to its return that the person who parts with it may be unable to perform; or
(d) to deal with it in such a manner that it cannot be restored in the condition in which it was at the time it was taken or converted.
(2) A person commits theft when, with intent to steal anything, he moves it or causes it to move or to be moved, or begins to cause it to become movable.*
What can LP do about it?
494. (1) Any one may arrest without warrant
(a) a person whom he finds committing an indictable offence; or
(b) a person who, on reasonable grounds, he believes
(i) has committed a criminal offence, and
(ii) is escaping from and freshly pursued by persons who have lawful authority to arrest that person.
The interpretation was courtesy of the security course I took some time ago.
Which is a huge variable, jurisdictions in the US have wildly different criteria. Store security policy WRT when to detain is mostly about perfect clean no way in hell will the suspect weasel out of it criteria, they are more strict than the law usually requires. Plenty of people go to jail every day without this “perfect” set of circumstances.
Your interpretation of “intent” also renders the charge of petty theft totally toothless, you can succeed at a crime without intending to. Using your legal interpretation, bullets that miss the guy you are shooting at could lack intent to kill. You leave the store, without paying, good luck talking your way out of it as a “lack of intent.”
Also in this particular incident, they were police officers, not store security/LP.
So a guy puts something under his shirt to protect it from being grabbed out of his hands and he’s arrested…but not the people assaulting him in the first place?
At the WM I was in, the police were called to ward off people fighting over video games. What the hell?
