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Walmart’s Crime Problem

130 points by jeo1234 10y ago

lakeborn 10y ago
Even up in Northern Michigan, this has been a MAJOR issue. Our local law refuses to admit it, however if you pay attention to the news and radio one can see a trend.
- fixermark 10y ago
  I would definitely refrain from drawing conclusions on trends gained from news and radio. The positive feedback loops in that ecosystem are large.
digitalsushi 10y ago
What are some other ways we can reduce human workforce that obligate extraneous events into the municipal sector? Daycares could stop watching the children - EMTs could definitely pick up the slack if there is a random health event. Restaurants could stop employing wait staff - eventually the UN would be deployed to feed the starving people.
Someone1234 10y ago
I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that's how poor this article is. They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that. The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish). Walmart seems to have actually extended their reach into the poorest of society, it used to be that stores like Kmart were cheaper than Walmart and the really poor shopped there, now Walmart has been nabbing a lot of their business, it comes with a lot of the problems associated. What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much. It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.
- merpnderp 10y ago
  But poverty in the US is better than it has ever been. As a percentage there are fewer people in poverty than quite some time if ever, the social safety nets have never been this generous, crime is relatively low, especially compared to the 1980's and 1990's. As for criminal justice reform, I'm not sure how we could reform it in a way to stop shoplifting without just throwing more people in jail for petty crimes. Laws can't force people to be civil. Civility is part of culture. And when civil society starts to break down it really can't be fixed by anything other than a cultural change.
  - ircody 10y ago
    I don't think the statement that there are fewer people in poverty is true. Especially if you are counting numbers and not percentages. But going by percentage you can see on this chart [1] that we seem to be at levels similar to the mid-90s and that the current trend is upward. Specifically it seems like ages 18-64 in 2011 are fairly close to the highest rates since 1959 (when the chart starts). Another chart that doesn't separate by ages [2] seems to show that we haven't had significant drop in poverty since the 60s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Poverty_Rates_by_Age_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    Crime is also the lower than ever so...
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    This mantra gets repeated on HN and elsewhere quite often, but it is factually incorrect if only from the fact that poverty guidelines have definitely not kept up with the cost of housing and healthcare. You could argue that people in poverty live in places where housing is dirt cheap, but those places have almost no jobs and especially no jobs for people with criminal records.
post_break 10y ago
The walmart in kemah had the police called 364 days out of the year last year. Sometimes twice a day. They are costing the PD a fortune for it. They even had a bomb threat made there. edit my comment was poorly worded. The seabrook PD is constantly at this walmart instead of doing other things and the revenue isn't offset to hire more officers.
- ones_and_zeros 10y ago
  Is your argument that Walmart causes crime?
  - post_break 10y ago
    I worded my comment poorly. The seabrook PD is tiny and basically all the calls to walmart were causing other places to be policed less. The revenue brought in from the walmart isn't enough to offset the cost of hiring more officers.
    - ones_and_zeros 10y ago
      There have been several reports from the justice department indicating that over policing and a judicial system that penalizes being poor are widespread and ultimately exacerbate the problem. If you have any say when your community does have revenue, it might be worthwhile to support solutions that don't amount to more police making more criminals.
      - greedo 10y ago
        "police making more criminals" That in a nutshell is one of the real problems with crime in the US. It's unpopular to expect people to behave in a civil manner. Instead we tolerate their uncivil behavior by blaming schools, parents, churches, and now police for making them criminals. Forget personal responsibility, that's for suckers.
    - fixermark 10y ago
      Did the crime rate go up in other places as a result of police resources being re-routed? Did the crime rate in the town overall go up?
meira 10y ago
It is not recent anymore, but I don't think that this flood of "mainstream media" links in hackernews suits well with past demographics. Maybe this forum is changing, but I think it is toward a bad direction. EDIT: And the downvotes proves that the demographics changed a lot. Why come here if I can browse CNN, Bloomberg and WSJ by myself? There is a lot of comments there too.
modiho 10y ago
Semi recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11676928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11676928
0xbadf00d 10y ago
It seems as though this is following a familiar pattern (as in the UK) of: "Privatise the profit, push the risk/cost to the local community"
- tomp 10y ago
  Isn't the point of the police to have a monopoly on violence?! I mean, I'm sure Walmart could create its own army if they had to, but ... do we, as a society, really want that?
  - 0xbadf00d 10y ago
    Not sure about an army, but I think the point is that they are actively consuming a public service more often because they have cut their own costs, instead of paying for a deterrent themselves.
    - tantalor 10y ago
      Surely the stores pay property taxes that go to local PD?
      - randomgyatwork 10y ago
        Walmart at times at least gets tax discounts for "all the jobs they create"
    - randomgyatwork 10y ago
      Sounds like one of Walmart's externalities.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    I don't believe that anybody has suggested that. What people have suggested is having more staff present, like Walmart used to have. Police aren't the only way to stop crime. They aren't even the best way.
- golergka 10y ago
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.
- benten10 10y ago
  I'm curious. How important, on your list of priorities of social values, is the matter of ethics in game journalism? I deduce it's somewhere in the top 3?
- fixermark 10y ago
  They are two different categories of crime, yes. That's why we don't throw people in prison for a decade for petty theft, or put petty thieves on the Petty Theft Offender national registry and require them to notify their neighbors when they move into town.
  - saint_fiasco 10y ago
    I get that more severe crimes get more punishment, but why would the severity of the crime change where the blame is placed?
    - fixermark 10y ago
      Hard to say, but it is. When a person leaves their door unlocked and people walk in and rob the place, the thieves are responsible and guilty but the neighbors will cluck their tongues and wonder why someone with perfectly-functioning locks doesn't use them. That's why a person leaving their house unlocked and getting robbed is used as an (unacceptable) analogy to a person getting sexually assaulted when they walk down the street at night in skimpy clothing. The "Victim could easily have done something more and chose not to" aspect is already taken as a given in the unlocked-door scenario.
      - saint_fiasco 10y ago
        I think I see what is going on. Could you be seeing both wearing skimpy clothing and leaving your door unlocked as very minor crimes? From that point of view, getting robbed would be a minor punishment fit for such a minor crime, while getting raped would be a major punishment, disproportionate for such a minor crime.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
I think that we should crack down on walmart and other large companies who service poor people, blacks, and other population groups that disproportionately commit crime. We should force walmart to behave more like target, catering towards higher income people, with higher prices and better service. And if poor people need to pay higher prices at a non-centralized location, that's the breaks. Similarly, walmart should be prevented from doing things like allowing the homeless to camp in the parking lots. Target is the pioneer here - they force the homeless to illegally park on the streets where the cops can harass them until they leave town. In short, rather than having all the crime in one spot, we can spread it around the community! This won't help things, but at least we won't have a single unsympathetic scapegoat to blame. (Also blame walmart when it does try and stop crime and the inevitable results occur, namely criminals being hurt/killed as part of the law enforcement process.) I can't think of a better illustration of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics than this article. Poor people steal and hurt people but we can't blame them. Walmart is nearby so blame Walmart! https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
- tomp 10y ago
  I like this comment, but it's a bit hard to tell where the sarcasm stops...
  - bluehazed 10y ago
    Judging by this person's comment history, it doesn't start.
    - tomp 10y ago
      I generally like and often agree with yummifajita's comments.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yes, it's obviously a binary issue and there is no possibility whatsoever that Walmart could do things to prevent crime that have a lower net cost for society than calling the police.
wpietri 10y ago
To me this is a great example of why Lean focuses on cutting waste, not cutting costs. I don't expect execs to learn a lesson, though. Cost-cutting fits in much better with our managerialist culture. Decreasing waste mostly has to happen when employees doing or very close to the work spot opportunities for improvement. But any fool can look at a corporate budget, pick out the biggest expense, and say, "Well, let's cut that by a lot."
rlpb 10y ago
I said this the last time this came up, and I feel the same journalistic failure is present in this article: 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.
- randcraw 10y ago
  Walmart has created a retail model that does not work -- unless a disproportionate number of police implement their security for them. Their stores are unmanageably big. They're understaffed and undermonitored, and they even do stupid things like not routing people with merchandise returns to approach the return counter strictly from outside the store, so the trivial hack mentioned in the article can't occur. Walmart has a 30 year history of offloading the healthcare and social costs of its employees onto local hospitals and county agencies. Of course they offload their security. In perhaps 50% of their market (geographically) they're a retail monopoly. They rig the game because they can.
  - davidf18 10y ago
    The high healthcare costs are systems issues and the reasons they are so high are because of politics which can be fixed at the state and sometimes city level. The high health care costs are externalities created by state and city policy (and sometimes federal policy) that create an additional burden for employers such as Walmart which creates an additional burden for customers and employees. The higher health care costs result in lower wages for employees while resulting in higher prices for customers than in Wal-Marts case, many can ill-afford. For example, most of health care costs are from those with serious chronic disease (the highest category is the 9 million "dual eligibles" -- people with disability that are on both Medicaid and Medicare). These chronic diseases are from smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, air pollution for starters. The fixes are raising the cost of tobacco through taxes, banning smoking in public places, hard hitting anti-smoking TV ads, ....), taxing sugar added beverages as Philadelphia has just done, lowering air pollution by getting the highest polluting coal-powered electric plants shut down, and in the Northeast and Midwest, converting buildings burning #6 and #4 fuel oils to less polluting #2 or natural gas. The more of the healthcare cost externalities that are borne by private firms that are a result of government policy that government must pay for, the better for all of us. Only when the costs to government are high enough, will they implement policies that will reduce the high costs of health care.
mcguire 10y ago
"[Walmart] said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company’s theft-prevention program." The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Presumably the data shows that petty shop lifting is a fact of business for big box stores and that the level of petty shop lifting goes up and down with staffing levels on the store floor. The shoplifters are still the ones to blame for the shoplifting, but it's not entirely unreasonable for the town to demand some level of performance from the store rather than happily providing expensive police to deal with a problem the store could handle with cheap employees.
VLM 10y ago
"Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots" They're refusing to look at the demographics. The criminals have nothing to do with my Dad in his fancy RV. The article is close to understanding the problem is socioeconomic class but for political reasons can't say the real problem, so, um, it must be the campers, yeah they must be the problem. Another peculiar logical and demographic problem is the article implies corporate spending on employees will magically reduce crime, much as hospitals hiring more ER nurses will reduce shootings.
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  Not only that, but WalMart allows overnight camping specifically because their studies have shown that the ongoing presence of trucks and RVs lowers crime in their parking lots.
blackrose 10y ago
Heh, one of the few times I shoplifted as a teenager was from a Walmart. It was from one of the more run-down ones, and it did seem easy. Not many stores I would've dreamed of doing that in ('twas only teenage hijinks anyway), but it's true when you have a big crappy commercial space where crap is just laying around (Walmart, kmart, Ross, etc.), it really gives the impression that the purveyor doesn't give a crap about their crap.
toast0 10y ago
Isn't it more efficient for more crime to be in one place? They can send a van to take arrestees to jail instead of individual trips; the Walmart employees are likely more effective at implementing proper procedure than a store that has one or two incidents a year, etc.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 10y ago
I worked in retail when I was a teenager and something I was taught was that keeping your store in good condition (i.e. fronting and facing the shelves) inhibits shoplifting and other crimes. If you see that the people who work there take pride in their store you might think they are watching and will catch you if you try to shoplift. On a good day, the Wal*Mart in my area looks OK but on a bad day it looks like the aftermath of a frat party. On a day like that it looks like a ghetto store and just doesn't feel like a safe place. The local Target on the other hand could use more people at the checkout lines, but has a lot of staff on the floor to keep the store looking good and help out if you need to find something.
werber 10y ago
The article didn't touch on this, but Walmart is held in such low regard that there is, for many people, zero stigma attached to shoplifting from an "evil empire", even compared to "friendlier" competitors like Target.
ewood 10y ago
I live close to a UK Premier League football stadium. Every match day requires a police riot squad being deployed for crowd control. Given that these teams are privately owned I do wonder about who should ultimately pay the bill for what are public events held for profit. London Met police costs - http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_2014/2013030002515.pdf http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_201...
- geodel 10y ago
  Best it would be paid by public who would not even be watching or interested in that event. I think it is just a variant of 'You may not be interested in politics but it does not mean politics is not interested in you.
- makomk 10y ago
  In the UK, the football clubs themselves foot the bill for the large police presence required at their stadiums. Have done for decades. Same with other large-scale commercial events I think.
jessaustin 10y ago
In July, three Walmart employees in Florida were charged with manslaughter after a shoplifter they chased and pinned down died of asphyxia. No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don't get prosecuted for that. This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic "let's take a shit on society to save some money" programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won't cause them to go out of business immediately, and they stop doing it. Even if they eventually have to restart in most locations, they still save money over the interim. If society really wanted to end this practice, society would stop bending over backwards to coddle large corporations, or even to allow them to exist in the first place. TFA describes problems in lower-income urban and suburban settings. Maybe these are the Wal-Mart stereotype, but Wal-Mart has stores in many other communities that don't fit that mold, and which may not have seen the crime wave described here. The mayor in TFA had the right idea: declare problem stores a public nuisance to force Wal-Mart to do something. What Wal-Mart will do, was also identified in TFA: hire a bunch of off-duty cops. It kills three birds: security will actually improve with cops on the premises, police chiefs won't publicly criticize a business that's paying their subordinates lots of money, and the cops they hire will use the resources of the whole department anyway. Again, however, this expenditure will only be required in those special communities that have lots of potential criminals.
egocodedinsol 10y ago
I'm curious: does a new Walmart increase crime, or merely concentrate and redistribute it? Kind of a tough question, because to define concentration you need some notion of area, and you might just redistribute it across the boundaries you draw. Still, this is probably possible at least for smaller towns.
davidf18 10y ago
While blaming Walmart for the crime problems may be emotionally satisfying, the crime is a manifestation of a systems problem which ultimately cannot be solved by Walmart, but must be solved by the government. Adding more staff will simply result in an increase in prices for customers who can not afford increased prices and it doesn't solve the crime problems, simply move it somewhere else. The state needs to spend money understanding the structural issues of crime in their state and implement interventions with tax money. Here is a plan: In NY City where I live there is a state cigarette tax of $4.35 and a city tax of an additional $1.50 for a total of $5.85 per pack of cigarettes. Oklahoma, the state first mentioned in the article, just rejected a cigarette tax increase to $1.50 http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash-over-cigarette-tax-in-oklahoma/ http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash-over-... Raise the cigarette taxes to $3 or $4 per pack, the smoking rate declines and healthcare costs from tobacco declines. The cigarette tax revenues can be put into plans that help to solve the structural problems of crime (unemployment, law enforcement, whatever). The State of Oklahoma should study the crime problem and use the additional revenues from an increased cigarette tax to help solve the problem.
TheBeardKing 10y ago
Here's a similar article in the Tampa Bay Times published earlier this year. The graphics department had a fun time with it. http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/public-safety/walmart-police/ http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/public-safety/walmart-...
tantalor 10y ago
Article only uses the word "tax" once, in a quote from a police officer: "[Walmart] offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense". But isn't the taxpayer in this case the store itself? If the store isn't paying enough taxes to support the PD, how is that the store's fault?
anonbanker 10y ago
If the economy wasn't in a massive slump, this article wouldn't have been written. It acts as an apology for predatory business practices, and the exploitation of a working class.
- gozur88 10y ago
  Employing people at market rates isn't "exploitation".
  - anonbanker 10y ago
    It isn't hard to google examples of Walmart encouraging their employees onto social assistance programs in order to ensure they get a living wage. This has been happening for over a decade now. Also, I could direct you towards the average market rate in Nepal or Shenzhen Province in China, and we could have a fun conversation about Walmart's exploitation of the third world, but we'll stick to the goalposts we have.
jrs235 10y ago
Many keep pointing out the Walmart theft numbers and his they correlate to the local crime stats. I wonder if there is a correlation to theft numbers and distance to nearest bus stop.

130 points by jeo1234 10y ago

Even up in Northern Michigan, this has been a MAJOR issue. Our local law refuses to admit it, however if you pay attention to the news and radio one can see a trend.

fixermark 10y ago
I would definitely refrain from drawing conclusions on trends gained from news and radio. The positive feedback loops in that ecosystem are large.

digitalsushi 10y ago

What are some other ways we can reduce human workforce that obligate extraneous events into the municipal sector? Daycares could stop watching the children - EMTs could definitely pick up the slack if there is a random health event. Restaurants could stop employing wait staff - eventually the UN would be deployed to feed the starving people.

Someone1234 10y ago

I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that's how poor this article is. They say "There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that. The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish). Walmart seems to have actually extended their reach into the poorest of society, it used to be that stores like Kmart were cheaper than Walmart and the really poor shopped there, now Walmart has been nabbing a lot of their business, it comes with a lot of the problems associated. What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much. It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.

merpnderp 10y ago
But poverty in the US is better than it has ever been. As a percentage there are fewer people in poverty than quite some time if ever, the social safety nets have never been this generous, crime is relatively low, especially compared to the 1980's and 1990's. As for criminal justice reform, I'm not sure how we could reform it in a way to stop shoplifting without just throwing more people in jail for petty crimes. Laws can't force people to be civil. Civility is part of culture. And when civil society starts to break down it really can't be fixed by anything other than a cultural change.
- ircody 10y ago
  I don't think the statement that there are fewer people in poverty is true. Especially if you are counting numbers and not percentages. But going by percentage you can see on this chart [1] that we seem to be at levels similar to the mid-90s and that the current trend is upward. Specifically it seems like ages 18-64 in 2011 are fairly close to the highest rates since 1959 (when the chart starts). Another chart that doesn't separate by ages [2] seems to show that we haven't had significant drop in poverty since the 60s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Poverty_Rates_by_Age_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
- Avshalom 10y ago
  Crime is also the lower than ever so...
- antisthenes 10y ago
  This mantra gets repeated on HN and elsewhere quite often, but it is factually incorrect if only from the fact that poverty guidelines have definitely not kept up with the cost of housing and healthcare. You could argue that people in poverty live in places where housing is dirt cheap, but those places have almost no jobs and especially no jobs for people with criminal records.

post_break 10y ago

The walmart in kemah had the police called 364 days out of the year last year. Sometimes twice a day. They are costing the PD a fortune for it. They even had a bomb threat made there. edit my comment was poorly worded. The seabrook PD is constantly at this walmart instead of doing other things and the revenue isn't offset to hire more officers.

ones_and_zeros 10y ago
Is your argument that Walmart causes crime?
- post_break 10y ago
  I worded my comment poorly. The seabrook PD is tiny and basically all the calls to walmart were causing other places to be policed less. The revenue brought in from the walmart isn't enough to offset the cost of hiring more officers.
  - ones_and_zeros 10y ago
    There have been several reports from the justice department indicating that over policing and a judicial system that penalizes being poor are widespread and ultimately exacerbate the problem. If you have any say when your community does have revenue, it might be worthwhile to support solutions that don't amount to more police making more criminals.
    - greedo 10y ago
      "police making more criminals" That in a nutshell is one of the real problems with crime in the US. It's unpopular to expect people to behave in a civil manner. Instead we tolerate their uncivil behavior by blaming schools, parents, churches, and now police for making them criminals. Forget personal responsibility, that's for suckers.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    Did the crime rate go up in other places as a result of police resources being re-routed? Did the crime rate in the town overall go up?

meira 10y ago

It is not recent anymore, but I don't think that this flood of "mainstream media" links in hackernews suits well with past demographics. Maybe this forum is changing, but I think it is toward a bad direction. EDIT: And the downvotes proves that the demographics changed a lot. Why come here if I can browse CNN, Bloomberg and WSJ by myself? There is a lot of comments there too.

modiho 10y ago

Semi recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11676928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11676928

0xbadf00d 10y ago

It seems as though this is following a familiar pattern (as in the UK) of: "Privatise the profit, push the risk/cost to the local community"

tomp 10y ago
Isn't the point of the police to have a monopoly on violence?! I mean, I'm sure Walmart could create its own army if they had to, but ... do we, as a society, really want that?
- 0xbadf00d 10y ago
  Not sure about an army, but I think the point is that they are actively consuming a public service more often because they have cut their own costs, instead of paying for a deterrent themselves.
  - tantalor 10y ago
    Surely the stores pay property taxes that go to local PD?
    - randomgyatwork 10y ago
      Walmart at times at least gets tax discounts for "all the jobs they create"
  - randomgyatwork 10y ago
    Sounds like one of Walmart's externalities.
- wpietri 10y ago
  I don't believe that anybody has suggested that. What people have suggested is having more staff present, like Walmart used to have. Police aren't the only way to stop crime. They aren't even the best way.
golergka 10y ago

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.

benten10 10y ago
I'm curious. How important, on your list of priorities of social values, is the matter of ethics in game journalism? I deduce it's somewhere in the top 3?
fixermark 10y ago
They are two different categories of crime, yes. That's why we don't throw people in prison for a decade for petty theft, or put petty thieves on the Petty Theft Offender national registry and require them to notify their neighbors when they move into town.
- saint_fiasco 10y ago
  I get that more severe crimes get more punishment, but why would the severity of the crime change where the blame is placed?
  - fixermark 10y ago
    Hard to say, but it is. When a person leaves their door unlocked and people walk in and rob the place, the thieves are responsible and guilty but the neighbors will cluck their tongues and wonder why someone with perfectly-functioning locks doesn't use them. That's why a person leaving their house unlocked and getting robbed is used as an (unacceptable) analogy to a person getting sexually assaulted when they walk down the street at night in skimpy clothing. The "Victim could easily have done something more and chose not to" aspect is already taken as a given in the unlocked-door scenario.
    - saint_fiasco 10y ago
      I think I see what is going on. Could you be seeing both wearing skimpy clothing and leaving your door unlocked as very minor crimes? From that point of view, getting robbed would be a minor punishment fit for such a minor crime, while getting raped would be a major punishment, disproportionate for such a minor crime.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

I think that we should crack down on walmart and other large companies who service poor people, blacks, and other population groups that disproportionately commit crime. We should force walmart to behave more like target, catering towards higher income people, with higher prices and better service. And if poor people need to pay higher prices at a non-centralized location, that's the breaks. Similarly, walmart should be prevented from doing things like allowing the homeless to camp in the parking lots. Target is the pioneer here - they force the homeless to illegally park on the streets where the cops can harass them until they leave town. In short, rather than having all the crime in one spot, we can spread it around the community! This won't help things, but at least we won't have a single unsympathetic scapegoat to blame. (Also blame walmart when it does try and stop crime and the inevitable results occur, namely criminals being hurt/killed as part of the law enforcement process.) I can't think of a better illustration of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics than this article. Poor people steal and hurt people but we can't blame them. Walmart is nearby so blame Walmart! https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

tomp 10y ago
I like this comment, but it's a bit hard to tell where the sarcasm stops...
- bluehazed 10y ago
  Judging by this person's comment history, it doesn't start.
  - tomp 10y ago
    I generally like and often agree with yummifajita's comments.
maxerickson 10y ago
Yes, it's obviously a binary issue and there is no possibility whatsoever that Walmart could do things to prevent crime that have a lower net cost for society than calling the police.

wpietri 10y ago

To me this is a great example of why Lean focuses on cutting waste, not cutting costs. I don't expect execs to learn a lesson, though. Cost-cutting fits in much better with our managerialist culture. Decreasing waste mostly has to happen when employees doing or very close to the work spot opportunities for improvement. But any fool can look at a corporate budget, pick out the biggest expense, and say, "Well, let's cut that by a lot."

rlpb 10y ago

I said this the last time this came up, and I feel the same journalistic failure is present in this article: 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.

randcraw 10y ago
Walmart has created a retail model that does not work -- unless a disproportionate number of police implement their security for them. Their stores are unmanageably big. They're understaffed and undermonitored, and they even do stupid things like not routing people with merchandise returns to approach the return counter strictly from outside the store, so the trivial hack mentioned in the article can't occur. Walmart has a 30 year history of offloading the healthcare and social costs of its employees onto local hospitals and county agencies. Of course they offload their security. In perhaps 50% of their market (geographically) they're a retail monopoly. They rig the game because they can.
- davidf18 10y ago
  The high healthcare costs are systems issues and the reasons they are so high are because of politics which can be fixed at the state and sometimes city level. The high health care costs are externalities created by state and city policy (and sometimes federal policy) that create an additional burden for employers such as Walmart which creates an additional burden for customers and employees. The higher health care costs result in lower wages for employees while resulting in higher prices for customers than in Wal-Marts case, many can ill-afford. For example, most of health care costs are from those with serious chronic disease (the highest category is the 9 million "dual eligibles" -- people with disability that are on both Medicaid and Medicare). These chronic diseases are from smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, air pollution for starters. The fixes are raising the cost of tobacco through taxes, banning smoking in public places, hard hitting anti-smoking TV ads, ....), taxing sugar added beverages as Philadelphia has just done, lowering air pollution by getting the highest polluting coal-powered electric plants shut down, and in the Northeast and Midwest, converting buildings burning #6 and #4 fuel oils to less polluting #2 or natural gas. The more of the healthcare cost externalities that are borne by private firms that are a result of government policy that government must pay for, the better for all of us. Only when the costs to government are high enough, will they implement policies that will reduce the high costs of health care.

mcguire 10y ago

"[Walmart] said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company’s theft-prevention program." The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.

maxerickson 10y ago
Presumably the data shows that petty shop lifting is a fact of business for big box stores and that the level of petty shop lifting goes up and down with staffing levels on the store floor. The shoplifters are still the ones to blame for the shoplifting, but it's not entirely unreasonable for the town to demand some level of performance from the store rather than happily providing expensive police to deal with a problem the store could handle with cheap employees.

VLM 10y ago

"Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots" They're refusing to look at the demographics. The criminals have nothing to do with my Dad in his fancy RV. The article is close to understanding the problem is socioeconomic class but for political reasons can't say the real problem, so, um, it must be the campers, yeah they must be the problem. Another peculiar logical and demographic problem is the article implies corporate spending on employees will magically reduce crime, much as hospitals hiring more ER nurses will reduce shootings.

LyndsySimon 10y ago
Not only that, but WalMart allows overnight camping specifically because their studies have shown that the ongoing presence of trucks and RVs lowers crime in their parking lots.

blackrose 10y ago

Heh, one of the few times I shoplifted as a teenager was from a Walmart. It was from one of the more run-down ones, and it did seem easy. Not many stores I would've dreamed of doing that in ('twas only teenage hijinks anyway), but it's true when you have a big crappy commercial space where crap is just laying around (Walmart, kmart, Ross, etc.), it really gives the impression that the purveyor doesn't give a crap about their crap.

toast0 10y ago

Isn't it more efficient for more crime to be in one place? They can send a van to take arrestees to jail instead of individual trips; the Walmart employees are likely more effective at implementing proper procedure than a store that has one or two incidents a year, etc.

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PaulHoule 10y ago

I worked in retail when I was a teenager and something I was taught was that keeping your store in good condition (i.e. fronting and facing the shelves) inhibits shoplifting and other crimes. If you see that the people who work there take pride in their store you might think they are watching and will catch you if you try to shoplift. On a good day, the Wal*Mart in my area looks OK but on a bad day it looks like the aftermath of a frat party. On a day like that it looks like a ghetto store and just doesn't feel like a safe place. The local Target on the other hand could use more people at the checkout lines, but has a lot of staff on the floor to keep the store looking good and help out if you need to find something.

werber 10y ago

The article didn't touch on this, but Walmart is held in such low regard that there is, for many people, zero stigma attached to shoplifting from an "evil empire", even compared to "friendlier" competitors like Target.

ewood 10y ago

I live close to a UK Premier League football stadium. Every match day requires a police riot squad being deployed for crowd control. Given that these teams are privately owned I do wonder about who should ultimately pay the bill for what are public events held for profit. London Met police costs - http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_2014/2013030002515.pdf http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_201...

geodel 10y ago
Best it would be paid by public who would not even be watching or interested in that event. I think it is just a variant of 'You may not be interested in politics but it does not mean politics is not interested in you.
makomk 10y ago
In the UK, the football clubs themselves foot the bill for the large police presence required at their stadiums. Have done for decades. Same with other large-scale commercial events I think.

jessaustin 10y ago

In July, three Walmart employees in Florida were charged with manslaughter after a shoplifter they chased and pinned down died of asphyxia. No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don't get prosecuted for that. This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic "let's take a shit on society to save some money" programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won't cause them to go out of business immediately, and they stop doing it. Even if they eventually have to restart in most locations, they still save money over the interim. If society really wanted to end this practice, society would stop bending over backwards to coddle large corporations, or even to allow them to exist in the first place. TFA describes problems in lower-income urban and suburban settings. Maybe these are the Wal-Mart stereotype, but Wal-Mart has stores in many other communities that don't fit that mold, and which may not have seen the crime wave described here. The mayor in TFA had the right idea: declare problem stores a public nuisance to force Wal-Mart to do something. What Wal-Mart will do, was also identified in TFA: hire a bunch of off-duty cops. It kills three birds: security will actually improve with cops on the premises, police chiefs won't publicly criticize a business that's paying their subordinates lots of money, and the cops they hire will use the resources of the whole department anyway. Again, however, this expenditure will only be required in those special communities that have lots of potential criminals.

egocodedinsol 10y ago

I'm curious: does a new Walmart increase crime, or merely concentrate and redistribute it? Kind of a tough question, because to define concentration you need some notion of area, and you might just redistribute it across the boundaries you draw. Still, this is probably possible at least for smaller towns.

davidf18 10y ago

While blaming Walmart for the crime problems may be emotionally satisfying, the crime is a manifestation of a systems problem which ultimately cannot be solved by Walmart, but must be solved by the government. Adding more staff will simply result in an increase in prices for customers who can not afford increased prices and it doesn't solve the crime problems, simply move it somewhere else. The state needs to spend money understanding the structural issues of crime in their state and implement interventions with tax money. Here is a plan: In NY City where I live there is a state cigarette tax of $4.35 and a city tax of an additional $1.50 for a total of $5.85 per pack of cigarettes. Oklahoma, the state first mentioned in the article, just rejected a cigarette tax increase to $1.50 http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash-over-cigarette-tax-in-oklahoma/ http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash-over-... Raise the cigarette taxes to $3 or $4 per pack, the smoking rate declines and healthcare costs from tobacco declines. The cigarette tax revenues can be put into plans that help to solve the structural problems of crime (unemployment, law enforcement, whatever). The State of Oklahoma should study the crime problem and use the additional revenues from an increased cigarette tax to help solve the problem.

TheBeardKing 10y ago

Here's a similar article in the Tampa Bay Times published earlier this year. The graphics department had a fun time with it. http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/public-safety/walmart-police/ http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/public-safety/walmart-...

tantalor 10y ago

Article only uses the word "tax" once, in a quote from a police officer: "[Walmart] offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense". But isn't the taxpayer in this case the store itself? If the store isn't paying enough taxes to support the PD, how is that the store's fault?

anonbanker 10y ago

If the economy wasn't in a massive slump, this article wouldn't have been written. It acts as an apology for predatory business practices, and the exploitation of a working class.

gozur88 10y ago
Employing people at market rates isn't "exploitation".
- anonbanker 10y ago
  It isn't hard to google examples of Walmart encouraging their employees onto social assistance programs in order to ensure they get a living wage. This has been happening for over a decade now. Also, I could direct you towards the average market rate in Nepal or Shenzhen Province in China, and we could have a fun conversation about Walmart's exploitation of the third world, but we'll stick to the goalposts we have.

jrs235 10y ago

Many keep pointing out the Walmart theft numbers and his they correlate to the local crime stats. I wonder if there is a correlation to theft numbers and distance to nearest bus stop.