Even more troubling, a language for catching shoplifters exists, but not an agreed method of identifying them. Many assets protection agents talk about the difference between shopper behavior and shoplifter behavior as though it revealed elemental psychological truths. “Picking up a piece of Baccarat crystal and holding it next to a coat is not behavior typical of people shopping for this type of merchandise. Yet picking up merchandise, holding it next to a coat and inspecting it inside and out is normal shopping behavior in the handbag department,” an ex-vice president of LP at Bloomingdale’s told Stores magazine.
In a white paper of which he declined to share more than a few paragraphs (he charges retailers thousands of dollars for a peek at it), security consultant Read Hayes—who looks young for someone who, by his own account, has been in the business for thirty years—listed what is known in his industry as “shoplifting behaviors,” now thought to be the best predictors of the crime: “Signaling to others, hands-down, concealing items, removing or switching tickers, or attacking tag systems, flushed face, continuous ‘scoping’ or searching for people, moving closely to fixtures, repeated stops in a particular area and inordinate nervousness (stretching, yawning, pacing, etc.) are probably better indicators of possible theft activity than physical cues such as race.”
But Shaun Gabbidon, a professor of criminal justice in the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg, said that loss prevention agents may ultimately pay less attention to these tics than they do to your shoes. “If you walk into Neiman Marcus wearing scruffy shoes, you will be watched more closely.”
HOW TO MAKE A THIEF CONFESS
Along with nineteen male and eight female loss prevention agents, I attended a two-day workshop to learn this skill, sponsored by Wicklander-Zulawski (W-Z), a national firm with offices in a western suburb of Chicago. Before joining W-Z, the instructor, Thomas Masano, was a special agent in the air force, where he conducted felony investigations. With the help of a young woman assistant—the Vanna White of shoplifting prevention—Masano began by describing the challenges retailers face to get shoplifters and other thieves to confess. “This isn’t Guantánamo. You cannot hold a shoplifting suspect in a room for five hours; you have to let them go to the bathroom. If they have heart pains, don’t keep them in there. Lights on table, battery, we don’t want to do that.”
But there are some things LP agents can do: Unplug the phone while interviewing, but hide the handcuffs. The holding room should be neutral. It should not contain any personal artifacts, since a person looking at family photos and thinking about what they’re going to lose will not confess.
Don’t let the suspect have a clicking pen. It will relieve stress and we don’t want that. A drink can be a weapon—a hot cup of coffee. A paper clip can be a weapon. The worst type of chair is one with wheels, which allow the person to swivel. Arms also allow you to relieve stress. You sit in a higher chair and you have authority. Room temperature will change behavior. Don’t give the suspect a drink of water, because that relieves tension. Don’t give them a tissue if they haven’t confessed. Let them wipe their eyes on their sleeve.
Masano asked the LP agents where they conducted interviews: the boiler room, the stock room, the back of the store by the Dumpsters, the ladies’ room, which Masano called the “female bathroom.” He continued, “Depending on the store policy, if you are interviewing a suspected thief, you generally have a forty-five- or fifty-minute time frame to get the person to confess. So you basically have fifteen to twenty minutes to get the confession. How many people have interviewed an innocent person?”
A lot of people raised their hands.
Masano quoted Groucho Marx: “There’s only one way to find out if a man’s honest: Ask him.” But then he elaborated on the W-Z method’s doctrine of body language: 55–65 percent of behavior is nonverbal; 30–40 percent is tone; less than 10 percent are the actual words. Masano said that telling a thief that he is a bad person will not produce a confession. “People want acceptable reasons for doing what they did. So you have to break them down. Everyone is programmed to deny, and 90–95 percent of the time it happens. One of the key elements of getting a confession is to crush the thief’s hope. So, for example, you don’t want to shake their hand.”
Masano shook his pretty assistant’s hand firmly. A damp hand is a sign of guilt. He continued his lecture. “Establish a behavioral norm. This is what you do in the first few minutes of the interview, so that you can tell henceforth when the person is lying. You try to build a rapport.” He paused. “Who’s made people cry?”
Half of the hands in the room went up. “I like that,” Masano joked. But then he got serious. “The idea is to get them in submissive posture.” He slumped over to demonstrate. To do that, a three- to four-foot distance is the best, chest to chest.
Masano next played a video of a suspected thief about to take a polygraph.
One way to tell if alleged thieves are lying is how they breathe.
On an instructional video, Brett, a six-foot-five W-Z staffer, oozed sincerity. Hunched over, he was speaking softly to console a woman who had stolen from her company. He crooned about protecting the assets of the company. He said the word “dollars,” and her hands jumped. He said, “People make mistakes.”
Masano paused the tape to deliver some editorial commentary: “She doesn’t go into full submission . . . she never tells you why. That’s the most important thing. People are impulsive.”
Brett said to the suspect, “People play blackjack at Tunica.” He told her a story about a good person who just wanted to take her kids to a good Thanksgiving dinner. “We are all good, hardworking people. We like to help people get out of these situations. We would like to talk to the good people,” he said. Masano delivered commentary: “She nods, yes, she sees herself as a good person.” The suspect began to tell some of her sad story, but Brett cut her off. “Time is running short. We need to get this resolved.” He recommenced the hard sell. “We’re past the facts. We need to find out why. Drugs are different than putting food on the table, and I can understand putting food on the table. I don’t care if you’re honest.”
Finally Brett shattered the suspect into confessing. “Good, I’m glad,” he purred. “The important thing is the company wants to know if it would ever happen again.”
“No, sir,” she whined. And then the reasons why she stole the money: “I used it to pay bills. My car got repossessed.”
One of the LP agents in the room interrupted. He had busted the same woman at Walmart. The class laughed. Masano said, “She didn’t learn her lesson.”
12. THE FUTURE OF LP
Video surveillance cameras have curbed shoplifting less than the retail industry hoped. London is the city with the most cameras in the world—by some counts 1 million. England, as a whole, is said to have 4 million cameras. Yet last year shoplifting rose 34 percent in the United Kingdom. The 2008 Global Retail Theft Barometer found that the United Kingdom’s shrink rate was 5.4 percent—higher than that of many other European countries. In America, the Winona Ryder trial proved that even sixty cameras monitoring an alleged shoplifter in the store does not necessarily result in a commercial burglary conviction. Some studies suggest that the cameras are only as good as the people watching them, many of whom get tired after ten minutes. One paper, “To CCTV or Not to CCTV,” found that cameras are more effective at stopping theft in parking garages than in stores. More optimistic (from the store’s point of view) results concede that closed-circuit television may “displace” shoplifting—if a shoplifter sees a camera in Bergdorf’s, she will run across the street to Bonwit Teller. The most positive finding (again, according to the store) is that CCTV gives LP staff the courage to confront a possibly dangerous shoplifter.
But stores keep installing more and more powerful cameras. Remote feeds connected to camera networks allow security cells, sometimes located hundreds of miles away from the stores, to monitor what is going on, and if appropriate, to initiate ac
tion. I visited a busy one in west Des Moines that resembled Batman’s cave, complete with a metal roll-down screen installed in the event of a terrorist attack.
Jay Stanley, the director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union, predicted that as stores train more and more cameras on shoppers and shoplifters, the result will “lead to a Wild West environment legal system.”
Cameras initially became necessary because in 1982, Earlest J. Carter, a mostly self-taught engineer from Chicago, figured out a way to beat electronic article surveillance. Carter designed a booster bag—a shopping bag lined with material to resist radio waves and foil sensor tags. Carter lined his bag with tritium, a mildly active isotope used in nuclear fuels and illuminated watch faces, and advertised it in a local alternative weekly for $110. The ad caught the attention of the police. The alternative weekly declined to run a second ad; the retail industry defamed Carter, and the national media cast him as a criminal. According to Carter, the FBI and the Department of Energy investigated him. Tritium is a controlled substance.
After that retail stores diversified their antishoplifting strategies. “Benefit denial devices” “demotivated” shoplifters before they stole as opposed to catching them afterward and gave stores legal relief from false-arrest lawsuits after multitudes of people were caught with EAS. The most successful of these, the ink tag, threatened to spurt ink all over shoplifters if removed. Department stores across the country piped in sentences like “I am honest. I will not steal. If I do steal I will be caught and sent to jail” through teenybopper lyrics and Muzak. An academic named David Riccio tried to sell his version of a subliminal antishoplifting tool based on sounds. “Which is more impactful—the words ‘a baby is crying’ or a baby crying?” he asked, adding, à la The Manchurian Candidate, that he aimed to turn a store into “an environment that people are apt to not have an immoral thought in,” by interpolating church bell chimes and choirs.
Civil restitution, whereby shoplifters paid stores in lieu of being prosecuted, caught on. As did closed-circuit television (CCTV), which would shortly upgrade from analog cameras to digital ones, allowing loss prevention agents to sweep a wider footage. In some stores, so-called mystery, honesty, or secret shoppers pretended to browse while waiting to catch thieves, whereas in others uniformed—and sometimes armed—store detectives stood by. Nearly every retail company switched from the onerous (and often unsuccessful) process of training salespeople to attach antitheft tags in the store to “source tagging”—attaching the tags to products at factories in Asia and Mexico where they were manufactured.
“Aggressive hospitality,” a phrase used to describe sales associates chirping “hello,” supposedly thwarts shoplifters’ attempts to steal. “If you see a young lady in Department 46 stealing or trying to steal some lip gloss, use ‘aggressive hospitality’ to help drive her someplace else,” said J. P. Suarez, the former director of Assets Protection at Walmart, on a 2006 staff training video. But as Gregor Housdon, the Walmart LP agent, noted, aggressive hospitality isn’t appropriate for all employees. “Senior citizens, they don’t get paid for hassling with the dude,” he said, referring to his company’s practice of relying on septuagenarian cashiers to double as loss prevention agents.
The retail industry justified these enhanced measures by saying that legally, it is harder to prove shoplifting than other types of theft: The burglar never has the right to be in anyone’s home but her own, the bank robber should never be in the bank, but the shoplifter strolls through the store, a private building, passing as a customer. Yet like capital punishment, transportation, psychoanalysis, shame, civil restitution, the ink tag, subliminal messaging, and CCTV, aggressive hospitality has failed to stop shoplifting.
Since the advent of the Internet, it is easier for ordinary people to see how much shoplifting is going on. When I plugged the word “shoplifting” and the time frame “one week, 1988” into the LexisNexis newspaper database, two or three hundred newspaper stories came up—from a policeman shoplifting nutrition bars in a New Jersey convenience store to a kleptomaniac shoplifting designer purses from a luxury mall in Singapore. But the tsunami of shoplifters was not just a mirage created by technology. According to the Department of Commerce, between 1980 and 1994, an era of unprecedented financial growth (the go-go years), shoplifting offenses swelled 50 percent.
I spent many hours in online news archives reading about shoplifting in the 1980s and 1990s. Shoplifters who got a lot of attention in this era captured the tension between the personal drama they relived while stealing and their larger-than-life criminal exploits. Since then, as the economy has foundered, and as Americans scramble to get into the middle class, some shoplifters resell enormous quantities of LEGOs or Star Wars paraphernalia. Others shoplift and hoard tiny, unusable items. The financial boat that lifted many Americans left a lot of people behind, stealing.
Pressed for the secrets of distinguishing between shoppers and shoplifters, LP agents retreated to fatalism. Some cited the “80-10-10 rule”: 10 percent of the people will never steal from you, 10 percent always will, and 80 percent will if given the chance. Or they slid into banalities: Shoplifters carried shopping bags from other stores, wore sunglasses, hats, or dirty shoes. “You can tell they’re about to steal if they have shifty eyes,” one LP agent said. Or, as it is known in the lexicon, “thrown eyes.”
Mismatching of knockoffs and luxury clothing might also be a warning sign for shoplifting, LP agents told me: bad shoes and a blue pinstripe suit; a Chanel-swathed woman in costume jewelry. And then there is the sixth sense. “A lotta academic stuff doesn’t prepare you for that,” said an LP agent who sneered at a college education as a prerequisite for the job. “Sometimes people who are too good in school are not good defenders of evil,” he said, recalling one colleague who “was working part time and he aspired to be a police officer and he only bagged two shoplifters a month, whereas the rest of us were in the double digits.” He said of another colleague, “If you gave her an SAT, she’d flunk, but she had this radar.”
The closest thing LP agents have to a method is the “six-step rule,” first popularized in 1992. Here are the six “tells” an LP agent should witness before detaining a shoplifter.
1. You must see the suspect approach the merchandise.
2. You must see the suspect take possession of the merchandise.
3. You must see where the suspect conceals it.
4. You must maintain an uninterrupted surveillance to ensure that the suspect doesn’t dispose of the merchandise.
5. You must see the suspect fail to pay for the merchandise.
6. You should approach the suspect outside.
The six steps exceed what retail statutes require in most states for a shoplifter to be detained. In Virginia, all you have to do is observe someone concealing something and you can stop her. Retail stores apply the steps unevenly. Sears and Macy’s use five steps. Walmart uses four steps, which may be why there are so many shoplifting stops there.
THE EXHIBIT HALL
The NRF conference’s most popular sessions focused on boosters, which generated a new openness and aggression in an industry traditionally loath to talk openly about shoplifting. The Gap could announce it had recovered $830 million in shoplifted goods and arrested “101 habitual offenders” the previous year without offending its middle-class customer base. Gap managers rarely detained shoplifters and stores did not have dedicated LP staff: Boosters changed that.
But the real action was in the exhibit hall. Each year I attended the conference, I saw creepier antishoplifting devices there. The Smoke-Cloak, when attached to a security system, can fill a room with dense smoke in seconds. The brochure promises a “remarkable, unforgettable experience,” although I wondered who was going to be doing the unforgetting. Other vendors sold all shapes and sizes of fish-eye mirrors—convex mirrors and smoky orbs for the ceiling or the wall—just the thing to turn the store into a surveillance funhouse. There was a �
��roundtangular” one for those hard-to-surveil spaces, and shiny oculi hanging everywhere.
Thick and thin metal alarm cables of varying lengths can be snaked up the sleeves of minks or inside It Bags and iPods, locking them to metal racks, or “fixtures,” as they are known in the trade. I recalled seeing these at Best Buy, where it was impossible to examine the cell phones because, as in a slapstick comedy, when you pulled them to your ear, the cables snapped back into the fixtures. For those with Superman fantasies, infrared thermal cameras measure heat in dimly lit areas. “Intelligent” shopping carts’ wheels lock when shoplifters push them out of the parking lot. A metal detector supposedly stops those dressed in booster clothing, or “steal wear,” from exiting the store with boosted property. “The secure store,” a model store outfitted with the latest in antishoplifting technology, featured floor mats implanted with sensors to detect booster bags and mirrors that can “understand” the clothes the shopper brings into the dressing room, as well as those the shoplifter is stealing.
The most charming antishoplifting device I saw—though maybe not the most effective—was in a high-end consignment store in Chicago. The store sold pre-worn Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses from the 1970s and pre-worn Jil Sander sheaths from the 1980s. On the wall of the dressing room, someone had hung a typed poem in a small silver frame:
DEBS IN JAIL
It’s not a pretty story, to say the least
Bread and water, group showers
And worst of all no designer clothes
If you’re tempted to grab our items all we can say is
The Steal Page 20