Comment by MisterTea
2 days ago
> yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa?
They do not want to confront trash bag man for good reason. What happened is people who don't give a fuck and have no problem with using violence realized there's nothing stopping them from loading up bags of goods and walking out of the store. "Oh you want to stop me? just try mother fucker." Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that. Never mind these guards are paid very little and are nothing more than security theater. Pull a gun and those guys are going to be no more a guard than the cashier or a person in line.
The stores are left to fend for themselves as cops these days seem to care less and less. So I am not surprised they are employing all sorts of janky tactics to prevent loss.
>Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that.
There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security. (There are many more who don't actively enjoy it, but don't mind engaging in it and consider being competent at violence an important part of being a man.)
The pharmacy gives its security guards instruction not to use violence because they don't want to get sued when a guard seriously injures a thief: it is impossible at the scale of a chain of stores to subdue and detain thieves without some risk of killing some thief or seriously injuring him.
Or maybe they just don’t want any violence in their stores at all? I will avoid shopping somewhere that has regular ass whoopings way more than I would avoid shopping somewhere with regular shoplifting.
What are they supposed to do, just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely?
I’d rather shop at a store that actually prevents theft, deterring future thieves from stealing. It will be a safer place to shop with lower prices.
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So I guess you've never frequented Waffle House ;-)
You will also go to jail. It’s not self-defense:
https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-walgreens-manager-co...
That's gonna depend where the jury is coming from. SF, yes. "Try that in a small town" hicks probably not.
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> There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security.
Bit of an assumption there.
There is no easy answer for this breakdown. The cat is out of the bag and these losers aren't going to stop unless they are stopped and face real consequences. Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance. Of course that doesn't stop anything and quality of life goes down.
> Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance.
Stores have plenty of incentives to engage in privacy invading surveillance even ignoring shoplifting as a factor. If a store saw zero shoplifting they'd still deploy privacy invading surveillance because it's profitable for them to do it right now and it will only be increasingly profitable for them to do it in the near future.
Plus, like everybody in retail, LP’s measured performance indicator is how busy they look when management is around. The best way to do that without getting in a fight is to annoy people who don’t actually have anything to hide.
That can be seen at many levels of society. ICE also prefers to round up harmless immigrants that show up for court hearings, work in fields, wait at bus stations or deliver their children to day care rather than the "dangerous criminals" that they keep on boasting about. And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal in their view anyway, why bother?
Also: Local cops spend their time going after speeders and parking violators who they know won't be dangerous and they can safely farm for revenue, instead of looking for violent crime.
> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...
Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?
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It’s not ICE’s opinion about who is illegal, it’s congress’s. Didn’t they create the immigration laws that are on the books? I can never understand why people seem to blame the enforcement agencies for the laws they are enforcing.
But I agree with the sentiment that they are selecting the easiest targets.
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Don't know how it is in the states but in most places in Europe using violence against a violent person is likely to end up very badly for you, even if you are a guard and have the necessary permits and training. You are not going to risk being fined or jailed to stop some criminal from shoplifting from a store that is not even yours.
What is the role of a security guard if not to wield violence? Their equipment implies a capability for violence. Are they unable to perform their job legally in Europe?
Security theater. Intimidation. Calling the cops. Insurance requirements.
Neither stores nor the guard want to escalate a situation to a violent situation. The stores don't want bad press or liability for collateral damage. The security guard isn't trying to put their body on the line for some merchandise. Yeah, maybe you have a cowboy looking for trouble, but based on my experience talking/working with some guards, I'd be surprised if they are instructed to get physically involved.
If you want to risk hurting someone whilst restraining him… Otherwise, it’s not worth it. What equipment are you talking about anyway, the nightstick? In my language it is formally called the “defensa”, implying that it can’t be used to attack someone.
There's a reason local rent-a-cops here hire almost exclusively seniors: they're _not_ going to go chasing someone down, they're just going to follow instructions, go for their walk around the site every 30 minutes and generally not cause trouble when they get bored.
They are there to intervene when there is violence against a person, not property.
observe and report. That's it.
Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with. A violent person will probably get it out of their system quickly. If you fight them, though, that creates a feedback loop that won't stop until someone is injured or dead. Just let people express themselves and everyone will be fine.
At first glance I read this as a troll comment. But with your comment history, I'm not so sure.
"Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with."
That's a value judgement. Here's my value judgement: Violence is not OK to perpetrate and a response of any magnitude to stop that violence is acceptable, up to and including killing the assailant.
Glad I live in a state within the US that supports this value, as well as providing people the means to do what they need to do if they find themselves victimized.
I don't think you'd feel at home here.
This mindset is what perpetually allows the violent to abuse the weak. What a violent person needs is a boot in the mouth. Or as many as necessary until he understands that’s not the way to behave. We are talking about people who generally have a low level of intelligence and do not understand anything else.
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I know of a Walmart shelf stacker who ran after someone who grabbed a $5 hat on their way out. They had a run-in with the getaway car and ended up in a coma for two months and Walmart had to spend over $2m in medical bills.
(the offenders were caught by police later that day, so it really wasn't worth the trouble to run after them)
If a hit and run hadn't been involved they wouldn't have gotten caught.
It's something I've thought about. It's not totally clear from the police reports. I've read them through several times and the offender had hit about seven stores that day tearing off Rogaine en masse, and the cops seemed to be on their trail already. The hit-n-run certainly would have put a flame up their ass.
Maybe there was something to the high-trust society we once had.
Perhaps it had something going for it that we lost when we decided to forsake it.
The high trust society is "gone" in many segments of society, but I don't see that we've made a decision to forsake it. Forsaking implies renouncing or turning away from it intentionally.
And how did we 'forsake' it?
When my mom attended the same high school I graduated from, in the 70s, kids who were hunters would leave firearms in racks on the back of their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot. Not only did said firearms never once get stolen or used to shoot anyone, but, such a thing was simply unthinkable.
When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at the other high school all the way across town had inadvertently left his paintball gun in the back seat of his (locked) car—after a weekend of fun in the woods with his friends—in the school parking lot, and a security officer saw it.
Now, today, we get periodic local PSAs urging people to not leave firearms in their locked cars in their own driveways at night, because people are breaking into cars, stealing the guns, and using them to commit crimes.
I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something here has been forsaken. That the way things were a mere ~50 years ago seems unthinkably impossible today clearly speaks volumes.
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Someone has never worked retail. They know they can get away with it because pretty much any corporate store has a policy that employees can't try to stop them. An employee at a local REI was fired for trying to stop one of the daily thefts they were having.
Point being, willingness to engage in violence has nothing to do with it.