These days, stores defend LP’s occasionally rough practices by saying that shoplifters often carry weapons and wound or kill people and their staff needs to protect themselves. A much-discussed incident was a teenager’s shooting of a store detective at a Shoe Carnival in Tennessee.
Not all LP agents enjoy catching shoplifters. One wrote, “My first time I caught someone . . . I saw him put a couple of record albums under his T-shirt and head for the exit. I stopped him in the vestibule and asked him to step back into the store. He stood motionless and nodded his head that he could not. When I asked again, I followed his eyes to the floor and saw that the poor chap was so scared he had urinated.”
“In reality, your life is not worth a pair of pants or a steak,” Gregor Housdon, an LP agent, told me at a Mexican restaurant near the Walmart where he worked in Baldwin Park, a suburb southwest of Los Angeles. Housdon, one of the few agents who allowed his real name to be used, no longer chases shoplifters into the parking lot, because “too many bad things happened out there.” Also, it’s not worth it to detain people who shoplift little things. “This one guy stole five packs of beef jerky and I said, ‘Look, man, I just want to get my beef jerky back. We’re not going to have a knockdown over the jerky.’ This judge stole batteries for his pager. ‘I didn’t feel like paying for it,’ he said. . . . I let him go. They take underwear, stupid stuff.”
Housdon, who described himself as a “shoplifter catcher who got five to eight a day” has since worked at several Walmarts across the country. He said, “I always say ‘thank you’ to my shoplifters. I say, ‘I just want to say thank you. The reason I have a job is because of you.’ ”
The renaming of LP is not the only change in the industry. Marketing guru Paco Underhill points out that whereas nineteenth-century department stores were designed to entice the customer, big-box stores make it easy to catch shoplifters. They are square, like the boxes they are named for. The “cash wrap,” as the check-out counter is called, is generally five steps from the door; cameras hang above most aisles, although according to Underhill, it doesn’t matter whether these are real or shells, since their mere presence dissuades some shoplifters. Other antishoplifting decorating techniques include placing desirable items on low shelves, staggering aisles, or setting them far apart so that salespeople standing at one end can see shoplifters at the other. Some cash register lanes resemble the TSA.
When the flagship Gimbels store opened in New York in 1910, it attracted consumers with rows of doors opening directly onto the Herald Square subway station, the better to race from straphanging to shopping; by the time the store closed in 1986, the ease of exiting Gimbels had helped give it one of the highest shoplifting rates in the country. It would be unthinkable to construct stores this way. No retail chain could be further from Gimbels than Neiman Marcus, but its design tells much about where we are. The four-story store in Chicago, built in 1982 to resemble, as architect Adrian Smith put it, “a postmodern stage set,” offers but two exits. Inside there are no clocks on the wall, nothing to mark time spent shopping or to indicate that you are being watched.
At any of the discount retailers, an earpiece-wearing guard stands by the only exit checking bags, in case the pedestals made out of white plastic are not up to the job. From time to time the alarm on the pedestals bleeps, but you rarely see the guard give chase. Midrange department stores acknowledge that some people shoplift, but the crime must be kept secret, like an adulterous affair. At Bloomingdale’s, the pedestals at the exits are hooded with fake wood paneling or Plexiglas, as if giving antishoplifting technology prettier “skins,” as the covers are called, makes shoppers forget their purpose.
But the most dangerous element of store surveillance may be the guards. In many states, they are exempt from laws binding the police and protecting individual rights and due process. In general, no authority requires store security to Mirandize detained alleged shoplifters. Some receive training to use handcuffs; others do not. Some stores require all shoplifters to be handcuffed, while others forbid staff from touching them at all. No store condones guns, but I read of some security people carrying them in stores in bad neighborhoods or in states with “open carry” gun laws. Screening for a security position, though stricter than it used to be, is still lax in many states. In a throwback to the seventeenth century, before the appearance of the modern police force, some stores use mystery or secret shoppers—spies who pose as real shoppers to catch shoplifters in the act, to do what loss prevention cannot. Many stores set shoplifting-arrest quotas.
Scott Barefoot, director of security at Richemont, which owns Cartier and many other luxury goods companies, said that Richemont does not use quotas but that “one retailer two blocks south of here had an unwritten quota system.” Barefoot meant Saks Fifth Avenue, where he used to work. The Saks LP staff posted the quotas on a whiteboard, he said. “Your pay was based on apprehension. No one received direct financial compensation for it, but as you were reviewed, your status would come into play in terms of how much money you made.”
I wondered whether these quotas had anything to do with Winona Ryder’s detainment.
SWB
African American shoplifters have been more harshly punished than white ones ever since colonial times. But according to reporting in the Houston Chronicle and other newspapers and court documents, since 1994, six alleged shoplifters, all but one African American, have died in confrontations with LP agents at Dillard’s. Headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, the family-owned store seems even more secretive than others about how it handles shoplifting. Four of the deaths were in Texas. In the most publicized incident, LP agents hog-tied an alleged shoplifter, whom Dillard’s later described in depositions as “psychotic,” to a table. He died. A jury voted to give his family $800,000, plus interest.
Security experts attribute the deaths at Dillard’s primarily to the fact that the store is the only one in the country that still hires off-duty police officers. “Cops moonlighting as LP agents treat shoplifters like criminals,” one told me, explaining that off-duty police officers tend to use handcuffs and guns more freely than those who have been trained as LP agents. The practice benefits the store: If an off-duty police officer shoots a shoplifter in a store (or in the parking lot), he can say he was acting in his capacity as a peace officer, and in some cases, the store has not been considered liable for the shoplifter’s death or vulnerable to personal lawsuits brought by the families.
Dillard’s has said that it hires off-duty police officers to protect customers from armed robberies and that it does not do background checks or (until recently) provide training because those provided by law enforcement agencies where the police officers work are superior to anything the store could offer. But according to a 2004 investigative article in the Houston Press, Dillard’s stifled negative publicity about these issues by canceling—or threatening to cancel—advertising from newspapers and television stations reporting on the deaths.
Jerome Williams, a professor of business at Rutgers University, who studies racial profiling in stores, also known as shopping while black (SWB), said that since about 1990, more than one hundred alleged shoplifters have sued Dillard’s for this offense. “There is a persistent misperception that minorities account for most of the shoplifting. . . . The reality is that nonminority shoppers account for most of the criminal activity,” he said, adding that SWB may have risen in the past twenty years.
Rewarding quotas may lead to SWB. In a deposition from a 1997 hearing in Kansas, Byron Pierce, a police officer and former LP agent at Dillard’s, testified about the rewards stores give to those who make large numbers of shoplifting arrests. “Officers get more hours based on the arrests that they make. . . . If you arrest X amount of violators, you kind of move up the list from No. 1 to, say, No. 25 if that’s how many officers are there. If you don’t arrest that many violators, you kind of get bumped down to the bottom of the list.”
Dillard’s is hardly the only offender. In 2003,
after the New York State attorney general’s office found Macy’s LP agents guilty of SWB, the company allowed a New York Times reporter an unusually frank look at what is, according to Robert McCrie—a professor of criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice—the “most extensive” LP agent training program in the country. The Macy’s coverage in the Times contained three revelations. First: If you are caught shoplifting, your civil rights as they are understood by public law enforcement are irrelevant. Some Macy’s stores allowed LP agents to handcuff any shoplifters it considers dangerous, “not simply ones who showed violence,” said Brian Kreiswirth, the assistant attorney general handling the case.
Second: Macy’s is flooded with shoplifters. Macy’s LP detained more than twelve thousand people for shoplifting nationally in 2002, and while only 56 percent of the detained were ultimately arrested, over 95 percent of them confessed. The relatively small percentage of arrests is due to a combination of factors: Many shoplifters pay a fine before leaving; the police are often too busy to deal with them. Of the detained shoplifters, a tiny fraction comprises what the industry calls “nonproductive stops”—stops that fail to find shoplifted merchandise. These are litigable and can be fireable.
Third: Shoplifters cost Macy’s a lot of money. In 2002, nationwide, the chain spent over $20 million on security. But $15 million was stolen from the Manhattan flagship store at Herald Square.
Kreiswirth said that Macy’s was “remarkably” cooperative with the investigation. One of the attorney general’s sanctions was that Macy’s had to report any instance of security surveilling, for longer than five minutes, of African Americans not “exhibiting suspicious behavior.” Among Kreiswirth’s jobs was to monitor the store, and although from January 1 to June 30, 2005, only one such incident occurred, in-store apprehensions of African Americans remained slightly higher than those of white people, at around 10 percent. Kreiswirth added, “You shouldn’t be prosecuting black people more than white people. That makes it as though black people are stealing more.”
To critics of LP, lack of training leads to the most lethal tragedies. After three African American shoplifters were killed in Detroit in 2000 and 2001, it emerged that Michigan was among the thirty-two states that then did not require unarmed contract security guards to undergo any state training at all. The first death took place at Lord & Taylor at the Fairlane Town Center, a mall in Dearborn, Michigan, where half of the customers are African American, but only .04 percent of the population is. Five security guards—some in plainclothes—followed Frederick Finley into the parking lot after his eleven-year-old daughter had allegedly shoplifted a $4 bracelet. Several of them confronted him, he punched them, they ganged up on him, and one of the guards, a firefighter moonlighting at Lord & Taylor, held him in a headlock until he lost consciousness. He yelled, “Get off me,” before passing out.
Media reports initially alleged that Lord & Taylor security might possess a video showing Finley and his family removing the electronic tags from the bracelet. The insinuation that Finley was a booster proved wrong. On July 5, between five thousand and ten thousand people—including Martin Luther King III, Al Sharpton, and Dick Gregory—gathered in front of Lord & Taylor, demanding a public apology. Sharpton said, “This is part of the racial profiling that goes on across the country.” Local activists demanded that Lord & Taylor provide them with copies of training manuals that they believed would prove the department store engaged in racial profiling. Democratic representative John Conyers Jr., then the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Janet Reno, then the attorney general of the United States, to investigate. But apparently, shoplifting, even when someone died, did not merit federal intervention. The family sued for $600 million, but after a judge threw the manslaughter case against the security guard out of court, Lord & Taylor paid them $6 million, according to news sources at the time.
Six months later, at a Kroger store in Royal Oak Township, another suburb outside of Detroit, a shoplifter died in a similar fashion. After attempting to steal meat, he fell and hit his head, and a guard sat on him until he stopped moving. Some of the witnesses said that the guard, who weighed over three hundred pounds, sat on the shoplifter’s thighs. But one witness provided a different picture: the guard had sat on the man’s back. Paramedics tried to revive the shoplifter in the ambulance, but he died at the hospital, where diabetes and traces of crack cocaine were found in his blood. In this case, the family asked for $750 million and settled for an undisclosed amount.
A few months after that, a security guard at a Rite Aid on the city’s East Side sat on a shoplifter who stole cigars and a hair dryer. She had diabetes. Knee surgery had made it difficult for her to walk. A toxicology report showed several painkillers and opiates in her system. Her husband said they had no money problems. The family filed a billion-dollar lawsuit and also settled.
Security specialists aver that the deaths in most of these cases are due to positional asphyxiation, a medical condition in which the victim’s windpipe shuts. “This can happen when someone is on top of a suspect who’s facedown with hands handcuffed behind their back,” one expert told the Houston Chronicle. The obese, those with heart conditions, and drug users are particularly vulnerable to positional asphyxiation. Murder charges against guards tend to be dismissed in court because of the shoplifters’ preexisting health conditions or drug use or, as in the Rite Aid case, because they fought back.
In Michigan, with the help of some security professionals and Philip Hoffman, then a state senator, Senator Hansen Clarke proposed legislation requiring increased training standards, bigger badges on uniforms, increased fees for permits, federal criminal background checks (as opposed to state ones), and a concealed weapons permit for store security to carry firearms. The statute on file, they complained, had not been amended since 1968; security guards, for example, were only required to hold an eighth-grade diploma. (The amendments advised a GED.)
Although not all of the original legislation passed, according to Clarke, the amendment did raise the standard of training. He pointed to the Michigan Contract Security Association’s founding that year and to more stringent background checks for guards as proof of progress. Today, in Michigan, you can no longer be a convicted felon and work as a security guard. But a related problem, Clarke acknowledged, is competition in the private security industry. “Today, many of the legitimate companies are being underbid by companies that provide neither training nor standards.”
Another problem is that 60 percent of all security guards are proprietary—in other words they work directly for stores—and are therefore not required to follow the laws. That was the case in two out of three of the Detroit deaths. But whoever the guards are working for, since 2001, at least thirty shoplifters have died in the parking lots of Walmarts and in the alleys behind CVSes, in the aisles of Kmarts and in Price Chopper and Family Dollar stores.
“NECESSARY FORCE”
Joseph LaRocca, the former vice president of loss prevention at the National Retail Federation (NRF), assured me that racial profiling, tackling shoplifters, putting them in choke holds, and sitting on them in the parking lot was not industry “best practice.” “Cowboys” were ancient history, and anyone who profiled was a “bad apple.” Most states require certification and background checks for LP agents and some of these checks are extensive. But ten states—including Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Wyoming—currently have no licensing requirements for LP agents. In some states, like California, a convicted felon can technically become an LP agent. And although many stores have implemented policies forbidding the most aggressive practices, LPInformation Convention Daily lamented that “there will always be individuals who go beyond the training format, policies and procedures set by their company.”
On LPinformation.com, several LP agents posted about the death of a shoplifter by a guard’s choke hold at a Houston Walmart, worrying that the company would sustain damages from a wrongful death la
wsuit. LP agents described sneaking up on a shoplifter from behind or tackling her in the parking lot or running after a getaway car with a bravado and a rage that matched the one shoplifters used to describe their crime. Some voices cautioned against store policies prohibiting them from tackling shoplifters, and others argued that without training to understand what constituted reasonable force, shoplifting would skyrocket.
A forum titled “Shopping While Black” offered a similar range of posts. Some voices deplored racial profiling.
I see what the agents see on cameras and follow certain customers. And it seems its always the same race most of the time and of course which bugs me also is the young customers that come in with hats backwards, pants and shorts half way down. . . . And I catch myself doing that every now and then. And have to say, HEY!!! The ones that are nicely dressed and dont even look like they would shoplift do shoplift.
But another poster wrote, “What is wrong with demographic profiling?”
“There’s good profiling and bad profiling,” someone said to me.
Thus the LP agent remains troubling. Although a director of LP can make $100,000 or more, a starting salary for an LP agent can be $24,000 a year or between $8 and $12 an hour. Despite the new name, the position of “floor detective” has changed little since the nineteenth century. Some entry-level positions still do not require a high school diploma, although you need one to move up the ranks, and a BS in criminology helps. There is one university program for retail loss prevention and some specialized advanced certification programs teaching would-be store detectives about how to do certain parts of the job, such as detecting fraud. The best in-house programs that include training future LP agents how to deal with shoplifters last forty days. Some programs advertised on television or the Internet last forty hours.
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