7 ms·

The Burden of Policing Walmart

65 points by subpar 10y ago

rdl 10y ago
If they pay sales tax, that should more than cover policing costs. I find it hard to fault them for calling the police on shoplifting, even of $2 items, since that's the kind of product they sell.
- koolba 10y ago
  > I find it hard to fault them for calling the police on shoplifting, even of $2 items, since that's the kind of product they sell. I'd take it a step further and say good job on actually following through with it. Otherwise what's the alternative? A private police force for Wal-Mart?
  - crazypyro 10y ago
    In my opinion, it seems the police hadn't been able to effectively do their job in the past (for whatever reason), causing other retailers to look into private security options, yet now that Wal-Mart has essentially forced the police uphold the entirety of the laws (such as theft for small items), the police are complaining that nobody else is making them do those things. It likely comes down to a lack of proper resources given to the police departments....
    - monochromatic 10y ago
      > Wal-Mart has essentially forced the police uphold the entirety of the laws Good! That is their job after all.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - tiatia 10y ago
    "Otherwise what's the alternative? A private police force for Wal-Mart?" Yes. I mean, lets assume, I rent a small house bc I am poor. And you are rich and build a palace, a show off of wealth. Then the police shall protect all your wealth 24/7 and the public pay for it? What is the alternative?
- Torgo 10y ago
  Businesses like bars are regulated more stringently because they are particularly burdensome to the community in terms of crime, law enforcement. So, there are precedents.
- stellar678 10y ago
  If Walmart decided they wanted to run an open-air store with no walls, no staff, and self-checkout - would it seem reasonable for them to call the police for every person who walked away without paying for their items? The difference is only in degree. Obviously other stores have figured out how to avoid rampantly abusing community police resources, so Walmart should be expected to step up to the plate and do the same.
  - wang_li 10y ago
    Walmart's sin here isn't lack of policy/procedure/strategy. It's serving poor customers. We're told frequently that poverty and crime go hand in hand, why should we be surprised that people who provide services to those in poverty are also subjected to increased crime victimization. And as they pay property and sales taxes, they're entitled to the same protections as anyone else.
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      > And as they pay property and sales taxes They often fight their local assessment, and argue it down as much as possible. ============= At its retail stores, windowless concrete boxes that carry a low value for property-tax purposes, the company saved an average of $40,000 a store where it filed a challenge, the report found. The distribution center savings averaged $289,000 for each challenge, it said. The report suggested that Wal-Mart saves about $3 million annually from challenging property tax bills, a small sum compared with the company’s revenue, nearly $1 billion a day. ============= http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/business/10prop.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/business/10prop.html?_r=0 Yes, this is 10 years old now, but not sure there's been much of a corporate culture change to stop doing this. $40k would definitely go a long way towards funding a police officer in many areas.
      - whoopdedo 10y ago
        Even so, a Walmart store carries significant economic weight in a community. The relatively lower property tax bill will still be very large. They will often be in the top-5 employers after the government and hospitals. And there won't be any other nearby business that can provide the same quantity of affordable consumer goods, so community leaders will fear losing a Walmart.
- elbigbad 10y ago
  >If they pay sales tax, that should more than cover policing costs. I don't think this logically follows. They may in fact be using more police resources than their sales taxes pay for, but either way you can't just say that because they pay sales tax they cover policing costs.
- ryanobjc 10y ago
  not so, often policing is covered by local income tax, and sales taxes goes to the state. For example, in San Francisco, about 0.1% of the sales tax goes to the city & county. The article also noted that policing costs at walmart exceed property tax paid.
  - ryanobjc 10y ago
    i just had a look at the SF budget, on a yearly general fund revenue of 4.1 billion, $133m of that came from sales and use taxes. And what about states without sales tax? So there is no support for local government than just local property tax.
briHass 10y ago
What, exactly, should Walmart's response to shoplifting be? The article seems to make a point of the low dollar-value of some of the items stolen vs. how much the police spend arresting the subjects. I fail to see why the value of the stolen goods matters from a illegality perspective; it's not like Walmart can punish the shoplifters themselves.
- mjevans 10y ago
  In the case of the $0.98 cent drink, CLEARLY, the $1230.00 cost in working the case and holding the accused/guilty is NOT cost effective. Only Walmart and private prisons benefit from this; everyone else is worse off. There must be a more effective solution. Not just a 'better quality of "neighborhood"' at Walmart, but for our society as a whole.
  - rlpb 10y ago
    > CLEARLY I disagree. It's the most cost effective method that we have that prevents stores becoming a free-for-all for shoplifters. This response serves to prevent other, similar crimes. Hidden from the cost of this is the saving society gets by crime not being worse. Higher shoplifting rates would mean higher prices for everyone because stores' security costs would be much higher.
    - zardo 10y ago
      >It's the most cost effective method that we have that prevents stores becoming a free-for-all for shoplifters. We don't have the data to come to that conclusion. What if police responded to a lower percentage of these calls?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > In the case of the $0.98 cent drink, CLEARLY, the $1230.00 cost in working the case and holding the accused/guilty is NOT cost effective. It may not be, but the cost of the drink vs. the cost of enforcement alone is not sufficient to show that. What you'd need to know is the net effect of the enforcement costs -- what future thefts would have happened without them that they prevent by deterrence (general or specific), incapacitation, or rehabilitation (including the particular enforcement actions contribution to the broader deterrent effect of the collective enforcement of similar offenses throughout society.)
FussyZeus 10y ago
Walmart purchases go to sales tax, Walmart no doubt pays property taxes, they generate a ton of income tax, and who knows what else. I'm sure all these figures are true, whenever I stop off at Walmart where I live to grab whatever I would say about 40% of the time there's a squad car out front, but the article plays it out like if the drunk wasn't causing trouble at the Walmart, he wouldn't be causing trouble anywhere. In my experience, those who walk into public intoxicated and yell at others will do so irrespective of their location. Same goes for dumbass kids (of which there was actually a group last time we were there, go figure, watched the manager haul them out by their collars) or shoplifters, if they weren't causing trouble at Walmart, they'd be doing it somewhere else because if you're that kind of person, being disruptive and annoying is how you pass the time.
- athenot 10y ago
  > if you're that kind of person, being disruptive and annoying is how you pass the time So instead, with a few extra layers of abstraction, these kids could be disruptive and have their startup. :) On a tangential note, it's fun to observe how disruption is a good thing if you're the disrupter, but a bad thing if you're the one being disrupted. Personally, I'd rather celebrate innovation, regardless of whether it involves disruption or not.
rustyfe 10y ago
The fact that Walmart generates much more burden than similar competitors, but the same amount of tax revenue, is kind of alarming. This feels like a fairly successful attempt to push private costs onto the public. Of course Walmart doesn't deserve to be robbed, but when they create the kind of environment where theft is easy and common, it also doesn't feel right for the taxpayer to be on the hook. If they had more employees patrolling aisles or more security, there'd be less cause for police to get involved. But that would cost Walmart money instead of the city.
- brandonmenc 10y ago
  > when they create the kind of environment where theft is easy and common, it also doesn't feel right for the taxpayer to be on the hook. This smacks of victim-blaming. Would anyone suggest the company were at fault if we were not discussing Walmart?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Not only would they suggest it, but ISTR that there's plenty of examples (where the crime involved targeted other people on the premises, rather than business owner themselves) were knowingly making business choices that create an environment where crimes are easy and common has been found to be a source of legal responsibility of the business to the victims of the crime (with no reduction in the legal liability of the actual perpetrators.)
    - brandonmenc 10y ago
      > where the crime involved targeted other people on the premises That seems to be a key difference.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > That seems to be a key difference. Well, its key in that people never have tort liability to themselves, so it would never come up otherwise. But, nevertheless, it illustrates that the idea that a property/business owner making conscious decisions that predictably attract crime to their premises bears some responsibility for the resulting harms is not at all foreign to our society.
rlpb 10y ago
Could the troublemakers simply be attracted to Walmart and would go elsewhere if things were different? Walmart might even be doing the police a favor by concentrating them all in one place. I think it's a journalistic failure that this simple explanation has not been addressed in what is a very long, biased article (they didn't even ask Walmart for comment as far as I can see).
bsder 10y ago
Most of the reason is liability transfer. Walmart can be sued for detaining someone wrongfully. The police, not so much. As for the solution: the police simply start showing up at Walmart much more slowly. Once a Walmart gets a bad reputation, its business will slip away. The fact that the police actually hang out at the Walmart tells me that they really don't have something better they should be doing.
- tiatia 10y ago
  "Walmart can be sued for detaining someone wrongfully. The police, not so much." No, you can sue Walmart and the police. No difference. The outcome may be different. But you can sue. Detain someone for drinking a 99cent drink? Have YOUR security personal walk him out and tell him he is off limits on the premise for the next 5 years.
zeveb 10y ago
Were Walmart instead employing more-extensive private security, then I can see people complaining about that instead. Heck, I remember angry articles about how private security guard persuade folks to sign documents admitting guilt &c. Instead, Walmart is handing the problem over to the public authorities. This seems intuitively fair: why shouldn't a poor person accused of shoplifting have access to the same presumption of innocence and procedural safeguards as a rich person? People are going to steal. Theft hurts Walmart, but it also hurts poor people, who will have to pay the increased prices (or decreased service) that Walmart would require in order to offset the cost of theft (or perhaps Walmart will go out of business, and poor people will be stuck paying even higher prices still). The real problem is the amount of crime. Fix that, and none of this is a problem.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Actually you have it somewhat inversed. Fix the poverty and you fix the crime.
- 300bps 10y ago
  The real problem is the amount of crime. Fix that, and none of this is a problem. True, but is that even a problem? It's possible that fines and restitution paid by people causing the police to be called is actually making the local governments money. A handicap parking fine is $300 alone in my area for example. The article seems to only compare calls to arrests. Many fines are summary offenses that don't lead to an arrest so wouldn't show in that statistic.
walmert 10y ago
Am I the only one that's inconsolably disappointed this turned out to not be a text-based adventure about policing Walmart?
fiatmoney 10y ago
I would love a system where private businesses were responsible & empowered to enforce sovereignty over their own premises. Is that what they're advocating? Oh wait, no. They're advocating a sort of anarcho-tyranny where depending on who you are, you gain all the costs of complying with the law but none of the corresponding benefits. My heart bleeds for the police heartlessly forced to enforce laws against theft etc, instead of kicking down doors at 3AM for the thrill of it & robbing travelers of their cash on the highway.
RangerScience 10y ago
Seems like a question of incentives (Walmart has insufficient incentive to deal with this without the police) that could be solved by looking at how insurance handles things: If I'm in an accident, regardless of whether or not it's my fault, my rates go up. It's like... So corporations are people. But they're a drastically different kind of person than you or I. They're divisible, they come in hugely different sizes, they have no incarnation, etc etc. Dealing with people as mere statistics is dehumanizing. But corporations? Aren't corporations basically just a complex bundle of statistics to begin with? So, a human who calls the police a lot gets a talking to, maybe goes in front of a judge, maybe something else happens. They don't have to pay more taxes to repay society; for the sake of this argument, because they're a human. They're not divisible; they're not a statistic. But, a corporation who calls the police a lot... Well, why not treat them statistically? It's not like they can get a talking to (it's an abstract entity with no emotions or capacity for reason), go in front of a judge (it's an abstract entity with no physical incarnation), it's not like the "something else" can be the usual for humans: jail (it's an abstract entity around which you cannot put a wall). But a corporate IS a set of assets; so work with it on that level. Charge it based on the requirements it makes to society. Pick a cut-off range (like a tax bracket) where it transitions from "not responsible for local crime" to "clearly responsible for local crime". The taco stand down the street is clearly not responsible for local crime. It's a truck. The Walmart super center is clearly responsible for local crime. It, in an of itself, is a locality. Or... Well, I don't know, so I've got to ask: How do large buildings "pay" for other emergency services? Fire, hospital, etc? (I know for fire at least, there's also passing inspection)
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  The problem is that by definition, such bills would be endorsed by people without huge amounts of property and money, while being utterly condemned by the likes of Wal-Mart. That asymmetry only ever ends in one way.
  - codys 10y ago
    And which "one way" is that?
kauffj 10y ago
One should never blame the victim for sexual assault; victims should be able to dress/act how they please without fear. vs. One should blame the victim for theft; victims bear responsibility for securing their possessions.
0xffff2 10y ago
So get rid of all of the WalMarts... Do the shoplifters stop shoplifting? Do the panhandlers stop panhandling? Do the homeless stop sleeping wherever they can? I doubt it.
mahyarm 10y ago
I think the reason why partially walmart has more problems is because they have a poorer client base, and poorer areas in general have more crime. Even if they changed policies, hired more private security and so on and it reduced everything by %50, they would still have about 3x the amount of police calls than more upscale target. It's pretty unfortunate. Like how much police activity does foodmaxx and grocery outlet have compared to safeway and whole foods? Or mcdonalds vs subway?
awinter-py 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite
lloyddobbler 10y ago
Voted this up not for the article, but for the discussion. Lots of stimulating thought here about what the role of police, individuals, and corporations in society should be - and almost all of it very civil (in comparison to the normal Hacker News MO). Glad to see an article generating this level of discourse on HN. Good stuff, people.
areyousure 10y ago
I'm really impressed that the police in Tampa show up for crimes of such small value. The police in Oakland (where I live) explicitly refused to show up for child prostitution.

65 points by subpar 10y ago

rdl 10y ago

If they pay sales tax, that should more than cover policing costs. I find it hard to fault them for calling the police on shoplifting, even of $2 items, since that's the kind of product they sell.

koolba 10y ago
> I find it hard to fault them for calling the police on shoplifting, even of $2 items, since that's the kind of product they sell. I'd take it a step further and say good job on actually following through with it. Otherwise what's the alternative? A private police force for Wal-Mart?
- crazypyro 10y ago
  In my opinion, it seems the police hadn't been able to effectively do their job in the past (for whatever reason), causing other retailers to look into private security options, yet now that Wal-Mart has essentially forced the police uphold the entirety of the laws (such as theft for small items), the police are complaining that nobody else is making them do those things. It likely comes down to a lack of proper resources given to the police departments....
  - monochromatic 10y ago
    > Wal-Mart has essentially forced the police uphold the entirety of the laws Good! That is their job after all.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tiatia 10y ago
  "Otherwise what's the alternative? A private police force for Wal-Mart?" Yes. I mean, lets assume, I rent a small house bc I am poor. And you are rich and build a palace, a show off of wealth. Then the police shall protect all your wealth 24/7 and the public pay for it? What is the alternative?
Torgo 10y ago
Businesses like bars are regulated more stringently because they are particularly burdensome to the community in terms of crime, law enforcement. So, there are precedents.
stellar678 10y ago
If Walmart decided they wanted to run an open-air store with no walls, no staff, and self-checkout - would it seem reasonable for them to call the police for every person who walked away without paying for their items? The difference is only in degree. Obviously other stores have figured out how to avoid rampantly abusing community police resources, so Walmart should be expected to step up to the plate and do the same.
- wang_li 10y ago
  Walmart's sin here isn't lack of policy/procedure/strategy. It's serving poor customers. We're told frequently that poverty and crime go hand in hand, why should we be surprised that people who provide services to those in poverty are also subjected to increased crime victimization. And as they pay property and sales taxes, they're entitled to the same protections as anyone else.
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    > And as they pay property and sales taxes They often fight their local assessment, and argue it down as much as possible. ============= At its retail stores, windowless concrete boxes that carry a low value for property-tax purposes, the company saved an average of $40,000 a store where it filed a challenge, the report found. The distribution center savings averaged $289,000 for each challenge, it said. The report suggested that Wal-Mart saves about $3 million annually from challenging property tax bills, a small sum compared with the company’s revenue, nearly $1 billion a day. ============= http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/business/10prop.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/business/10prop.html?_r=0 Yes, this is 10 years old now, but not sure there's been much of a corporate culture change to stop doing this. $40k would definitely go a long way towards funding a police officer in many areas.
    - whoopdedo 10y ago
      Even so, a Walmart store carries significant economic weight in a community. The relatively lower property tax bill will still be very large. They will often be in the top-5 employers after the government and hospitals. And there won't be any other nearby business that can provide the same quantity of affordable consumer goods, so community leaders will fear losing a Walmart.
elbigbad 10y ago
>If they pay sales tax, that should more than cover policing costs. I don't think this logically follows. They may in fact be using more police resources than their sales taxes pay for, but either way you can't just say that because they pay sales tax they cover policing costs.
ryanobjc 10y ago
not so, often policing is covered by local income tax, and sales taxes goes to the state. For example, in San Francisco, about 0.1% of the sales tax goes to the city & county. The article also noted that policing costs at walmart exceed property tax paid.
- ryanobjc 10y ago
  i just had a look at the SF budget, on a yearly general fund revenue of 4.1 billion, $133m of that came from sales and use taxes. And what about states without sales tax? So there is no support for local government than just local property tax.

briHass 10y ago

What, exactly, should Walmart's response to shoplifting be? The article seems to make a point of the low dollar-value of some of the items stolen vs. how much the police spend arresting the subjects. I fail to see why the value of the stolen goods matters from a illegality perspective; it's not like Walmart can punish the shoplifters themselves.

mjevans 10y ago
In the case of the $0.98 cent drink, CLEARLY, the $1230.00 cost in working the case and holding the accused/guilty is NOT cost effective. Only Walmart and private prisons benefit from this; everyone else is worse off. There must be a more effective solution. Not just a 'better quality of "neighborhood"' at Walmart, but for our society as a whole.
- rlpb 10y ago
  > CLEARLY I disagree. It's the most cost effective method that we have that prevents stores becoming a free-for-all for shoplifters. This response serves to prevent other, similar crimes. Hidden from the cost of this is the saving society gets by crime not being worse. Higher shoplifting rates would mean higher prices for everyone because stores' security costs would be much higher.
  - zardo 10y ago
    >It's the most cost effective method that we have that prevents stores becoming a free-for-all for shoplifters. We don't have the data to come to that conclusion. What if police responded to a lower percentage of these calls?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > In the case of the $0.98 cent drink, CLEARLY, the $1230.00 cost in working the case and holding the accused/guilty is NOT cost effective. It may not be, but the cost of the drink vs. the cost of enforcement alone is not sufficient to show that. What you'd need to know is the net effect of the enforcement costs -- what future thefts would have happened without them that they prevent by deterrence (general or specific), incapacitation, or rehabilitation (including the particular enforcement actions contribution to the broader deterrent effect of the collective enforcement of similar offenses throughout society.)

FussyZeus 10y ago

Walmart purchases go to sales tax, Walmart no doubt pays property taxes, they generate a ton of income tax, and who knows what else. I'm sure all these figures are true, whenever I stop off at Walmart where I live to grab whatever I would say about 40% of the time there's a squad car out front, but the article plays it out like if the drunk wasn't causing trouble at the Walmart, he wouldn't be causing trouble anywhere. In my experience, those who walk into public intoxicated and yell at others will do so irrespective of their location. Same goes for dumbass kids (of which there was actually a group last time we were there, go figure, watched the manager haul them out by their collars) or shoplifters, if they weren't causing trouble at Walmart, they'd be doing it somewhere else because if you're that kind of person, being disruptive and annoying is how you pass the time.

athenot 10y ago
> if you're that kind of person, being disruptive and annoying is how you pass the time So instead, with a few extra layers of abstraction, these kids could be disruptive and have their startup. :) On a tangential note, it's fun to observe how disruption is a good thing if you're the disrupter, but a bad thing if you're the one being disrupted. Personally, I'd rather celebrate innovation, regardless of whether it involves disruption or not.

rustyfe 10y ago

The fact that Walmart generates much more burden than similar competitors, but the same amount of tax revenue, is kind of alarming. This feels like a fairly successful attempt to push private costs onto the public. Of course Walmart doesn't deserve to be robbed, but when they create the kind of environment where theft is easy and common, it also doesn't feel right for the taxpayer to be on the hook. If they had more employees patrolling aisles or more security, there'd be less cause for police to get involved. But that would cost Walmart money instead of the city.

brandonmenc 10y ago
> when they create the kind of environment where theft is easy and common, it also doesn't feel right for the taxpayer to be on the hook. This smacks of victim-blaming. Would anyone suggest the company were at fault if we were not discussing Walmart?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Not only would they suggest it, but ISTR that there's plenty of examples (where the crime involved targeted other people on the premises, rather than business owner themselves) were knowingly making business choices that create an environment where crimes are easy and common has been found to be a source of legal responsibility of the business to the victims of the crime (with no reduction in the legal liability of the actual perpetrators.)
  - brandonmenc 10y ago
    > where the crime involved targeted other people on the premises That seems to be a key difference.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > That seems to be a key difference. Well, its key in that people never have tort liability to themselves, so it would never come up otherwise. But, nevertheless, it illustrates that the idea that a property/business owner making conscious decisions that predictably attract crime to their premises bears some responsibility for the resulting harms is not at all foreign to our society.

rlpb 10y ago

Could the troublemakers simply be attracted to Walmart and would go elsewhere if things were different? Walmart might even be doing the police a favor by concentrating them all in one place. I think it's a journalistic failure that this simple explanation has not been addressed in what is a very long, biased article (they didn't even ask Walmart for comment as far as I can see).

bsder 10y ago

Most of the reason is liability transfer. Walmart can be sued for detaining someone wrongfully. The police, not so much. As for the solution: the police simply start showing up at Walmart much more slowly. Once a Walmart gets a bad reputation, its business will slip away. The fact that the police actually hang out at the Walmart tells me that they really don't have something better they should be doing.

tiatia 10y ago
"Walmart can be sued for detaining someone wrongfully. The police, not so much." No, you can sue Walmart and the police. No difference. The outcome may be different. But you can sue. Detain someone for drinking a 99cent drink? Have YOUR security personal walk him out and tell him he is off limits on the premise for the next 5 years.

zeveb 10y ago

Were Walmart instead employing more-extensive private security, then I can see people complaining about that instead. Heck, I remember angry articles about how private security guard persuade folks to sign documents admitting guilt &c. Instead, Walmart is handing the problem over to the public authorities. This seems intuitively fair: why shouldn't a poor person accused of shoplifting have access to the same presumption of innocence and procedural safeguards as a rich person? People are going to steal. Theft hurts Walmart, but it also hurts poor people, who will have to pay the increased prices (or decreased service) that Walmart would require in order to offset the cost of theft (or perhaps Walmart will go out of business, and poor people will be stuck paying even higher prices still). The real problem is the amount of crime. Fix that, and none of this is a problem.

SEJeff 10y ago
Actually you have it somewhat inversed. Fix the poverty and you fix the crime.
300bps 10y ago
The real problem is the amount of crime. Fix that, and none of this is a problem. True, but is that even a problem? It's possible that fines and restitution paid by people causing the police to be called is actually making the local governments money. A handicap parking fine is $300 alone in my area for example. The article seems to only compare calls to arrests. Many fines are summary offenses that don't lead to an arrest so wouldn't show in that statistic.

walmert 10y ago

Am I the only one that's inconsolably disappointed this turned out to not be a text-based adventure about policing Walmart?

fiatmoney 10y ago

I would love a system where private businesses were responsible & empowered to enforce sovereignty over their own premises. Is that what they're advocating? Oh wait, no. They're advocating a sort of anarcho-tyranny where depending on who you are, you gain all the costs of complying with the law but none of the corresponding benefits. My heart bleeds for the police heartlessly forced to enforce laws against theft etc, instead of kicking down doors at 3AM for the thrill of it & robbing travelers of their cash on the highway.

RangerScience 10y ago

Seems like a question of incentives (Walmart has insufficient incentive to deal with this without the police) that could be solved by looking at how insurance handles things: If I'm in an accident, regardless of whether or not it's my fault, my rates go up. It's like... So corporations are people. But they're a drastically different kind of person than you or I. They're divisible, they come in hugely different sizes, they have no incarnation, etc etc. Dealing with people as mere statistics is dehumanizing. But corporations? Aren't corporations basically just a complex bundle of statistics to begin with? So, a human who calls the police a lot gets a talking to, maybe goes in front of a judge, maybe something else happens. They don't have to pay more taxes to repay society; for the sake of this argument, because they're a human. They're not divisible; they're not a statistic. But, a corporation who calls the police a lot... Well, why not treat them statistically? It's not like they can get a talking to (it's an abstract entity with no emotions or capacity for reason), go in front of a judge (it's an abstract entity with no physical incarnation), it's not like the "something else" can be the usual for humans: jail (it's an abstract entity around which you cannot put a wall). But a corporate IS a set of assets; so work with it on that level. Charge it based on the requirements it makes to society. Pick a cut-off range (like a tax bracket) where it transitions from "not responsible for local crime" to "clearly responsible for local crime". The taco stand down the street is clearly not responsible for local crime. It's a truck. The Walmart super center is clearly responsible for local crime. It, in an of itself, is a locality. Or... Well, I don't know, so I've got to ask: How do large buildings "pay" for other emergency services? Fire, hospital, etc? (I know for fire at least, there's also passing inspection)

Aelinsaar 10y ago
The problem is that by definition, such bills would be endorsed by people without huge amounts of property and money, while being utterly condemned by the likes of Wal-Mart. That asymmetry only ever ends in one way.
- codys 10y ago
  And which "one way" is that?

kauffj 10y ago

One should never blame the victim for sexual assault; victims should be able to dress/act how they please without fear. vs. One should blame the victim for theft; victims bear responsibility for securing their possessions.

0xffff2 10y ago

So get rid of all of the WalMarts... Do the shoplifters stop shoplifting? Do the panhandlers stop panhandling? Do the homeless stop sleeping wherever they can? I doubt it.

mahyarm 10y ago

I think the reason why partially walmart has more problems is because they have a poorer client base, and poorer areas in general have more crime. Even if they changed policies, hired more private security and so on and it reduced everything by %50, they would still have about 3x the amount of police calls than more upscale target. It's pretty unfortunate. Like how much police activity does foodmaxx and grocery outlet have compared to safeway and whole foods? Or mcdonalds vs subway?

awinter-py 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite

lloyddobbler 10y ago

Voted this up not for the article, but for the discussion. Lots of stimulating thought here about what the role of police, individuals, and corporations in society should be - and almost all of it very civil (in comparison to the normal Hacker News MO). Glad to see an article generating this level of discourse on HN. Good stuff, people.

areyousure 10y ago

I'm really impressed that the police in Tampa show up for crimes of such small value. The police in Oakland (where I live) explicitly refused to show up for child prostitution.