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.
I remember when my brother worked for Best Buy (electronics retailer) in the late 90's. Best Buy gave a large bonus if the shoplifting numbers were low (cannot remember the term they used). The Minneapolis store he worked at never got that bonus, as it had all kinds of thievery going on. They even hired cops as security (nice part time gig with the discount they had). The Fargo ND store always got its bonus ($700 per part timer, I think).
Walmart is Best Buy times 100. Blaming Walmart is just plain dumb as its a sign of something wrong with society. I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people. People can have all manner of things fixed, and yes, its harder than demanding the victim of the crime pay for it. Charging Walmart more is going to up the prices and hurt a lot more people who really cannot afford another tax.
>The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways.
I agree to some extent. There is a term Walmart scale, and it is defined as things that have a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of happening happen 10 times a day at Walmart.
Walmart is targeted, for example, there might be 2x as many Walgreens or CVS locations, but while their revenues are $100-$150B Walmart is closer to $500B and they have 100,000,000 customers enter their stores every week and that is attractive to criminals. Also, I want to note, Walmart shoppers are a much larger cross section than just the poorest of society, in fact you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.
Walmart is a target for all kinds of crimes, from their parking lot to shop lifting to cons. I was recently in Bentonville pitching one of my side projects at their HQ, and this topic came up, one ongoing scheme currently taking place consists of a group going into stores with fake documentation from HQ (complete with fake Bentonville phone numbers and fake voicemail) and they literally set up a photo portrait store inside the Walmart in-store leasing locations. Walmart customers are going in and getting portraits done and the group just closes up shop and disappears (the irony, not a single Walmart customer has complained about their experience).
It's almost absurd not to shop at Walmart or other stores that are "extremely successful in attracting" the poor.
If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods. And I actually find the experience of shopping at Walmart to be better than the experience of shopping somewhere like Trader Joe's because Walmart's large size makes things far less congested than Trader Joe's, where it seems like everyone is constantly in the way of each other.
And this is all for essentially the same produce and meats. In many cases, the discount grocer's produce is actually better quality than the supermarket's.
Walmart would also be the largest state in the US by population. They have 1.4 million US employees alone, and over 100 million weekly visitors. Asking why Walmart can't prevent all crime is kind of like asking why California can't prevent all crime.
The article also said that Wal-Mart needs more employees and private security present and visible in the stores. They said Target and grocery stores have this. They also said that Target uses computer vision analysis to identity shoppers who linger too long in one area, and other theft patterns.
Walmart can do more. Are the legally obligated to do so? Not unless laws are written in a jurisdiction that says stores of that size need to have some minimum security and anti-theft measures.
>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).
Note that this is only true in some geographical regions. In much of not-California, Walmart is one of the only convenient places to shop, so everyone shops there.
These were exactly my thoughts. The section contrasting Target is particularly ridiculous:
> Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. ike Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.
More than half the paragraph is concrete reasons that Target would be expected to have much less crime: smaller stores, more affluent clientele/location, not open 24 hours. All of those aren't arbitrary tweaks that Walmart is refusing to make to cut down on crime; they're parts of the actual service niche that Walmart is providing.
I've got no particular love for Walmart (I've never even been to one), but somehow conversations around it seem to make people completely shut their brain off, as in garbage articles like this one. One of the most pernicious threads running through coverage of Walmart seems to be the idea that you have to prove yourself worthy to receive government services: serving poorer neighborhoods and having flexible hours means that you're asking for crime and are somehow abusing the legal system, just like paying the legal minimum wage gets twisted into "the government is subsidizing Walmart shareholders"[1].
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.
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!
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.
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?
I read a great article describing how Walmart does this. Companies who pay a living wage, like Costco, essentially subsidize Walmart by allowing them to pay low wages. Government Safety Nets like food stamps, medi-cal, etc., make up for the low wages. Thing is, these are paid for by tax dollars from employees at Costco who actually pay into the state treasury. Many Walmart employees are actually a drain on tax dollars. I'm at work and shouldn't be commenting on HN so here's the link to "Confronting the Parasite Economy. Actually read it here on HN, but it seems pertinent to the discussion.
http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems to me that the criminals who commit crimes at Walmart are costing the PD a fortune. Although — surely it's easier for the police to patrol the Walmart and catch criminals there than troll through the entire city hoping to catch them?
A police officer in a small town once told me, "90% of my calls either start or end at Walmart". The places are lightning rods for crime. To the point where "distance from Walmart" correlates with home values. Maybe local police departments should locate their headquarters nearby Walmarts so they can at least use our tax dollars more efficiently.
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.
"[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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] Someone1234|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
Walmart is Best Buy times 100. Blaming Walmart is just plain dumb as its a sign of something wrong with society. I wish we'd get over blaming things and get to being honest and admit the problem is people. People can have all manner of things fixed, and yes, its harder than demanding the victim of the crime pay for it. Charging Walmart more is going to up the prices and hurt a lot more people who really cannot afford another tax.
[+] [-] will_brown|9 years ago|reply
I agree to some extent. There is a term Walmart scale, and it is defined as things that have a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of happening happen 10 times a day at Walmart.
Walmart is targeted, for example, there might be 2x as many Walgreens or CVS locations, but while their revenues are $100-$150B Walmart is closer to $500B and they have 100,000,000 customers enter their stores every week and that is attractive to criminals. Also, I want to note, Walmart shoppers are a much larger cross section than just the poorest of society, in fact you can easily find stores where the average income of their shopper is $80k/year.
Walmart is a target for all kinds of crimes, from their parking lot to shop lifting to cons. I was recently in Bentonville pitching one of my side projects at their HQ, and this topic came up, one ongoing scheme currently taking place consists of a group going into stores with fake documentation from HQ (complete with fake Bentonville phone numbers and fake voicemail) and they literally set up a photo portrait store inside the Walmart in-store leasing locations. Walmart customers are going in and getting portraits done and the group just closes up shop and disappears (the irony, not a single Walmart customer has complained about their experience).
[+] [-] ssharp|9 years ago|reply
If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods. And I actually find the experience of shopping at Walmart to be better than the experience of shopping somewhere like Trader Joe's because Walmart's large size makes things far less congested than Trader Joe's, where it seems like everyone is constantly in the way of each other.
And this is all for essentially the same produce and meats. In many cases, the discount grocer's produce is actually better quality than the supermarket's.
[+] [-] Alex3917|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroclydon|9 years ago|reply
Walmart can do more. Are the legally obligated to do so? Not unless laws are written in a jurisdiction that says stores of that size need to have some minimum security and anti-theft measures.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
Note that this is only true in some geographical regions. In much of not-California, Walmart is one of the only convenient places to shop, so everyone shops there.
[+] [-] wutbrodo|9 years ago|reply
> Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. ike Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.
More than half the paragraph is concrete reasons that Target would be expected to have much less crime: smaller stores, more affluent clientele/location, not open 24 hours. All of those aren't arbitrary tweaks that Walmart is refusing to make to cut down on crime; they're parts of the actual service niche that Walmart is providing.
I've got no particular love for Walmart (I've never even been to one), but somehow conversations around it seem to make people completely shut their brain off, as in garbage articles like this one. One of the most pernicious threads running through coverage of Walmart seems to be the idea that you have to prove yourself worthy to receive government services: serving poorer neighborhoods and having flexible hours means that you're asking for crime and are somehow abusing the legal system, just like paying the legal minimum wage gets twisted into "the government is subsidizing Walmart shareholders"[1].
[+] [-] merpnderp|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|9 years ago|reply
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-eth...
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbadf00d|9 years ago|reply
"Privatise the profit, push the risk/cost to the local community"
[+] [-] tomp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flowersoldier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidf18|9 years ago|reply
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-...
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.
[+] [-] werber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tantalor|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ewood|9 years ago|reply
London Met police costs - http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_201...
[+] [-] geodel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makomk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kauffj|9 years ago|reply
vs.
One should blame the victim for theft; victims bear responsibility for securing their possessions.
[+] [-] fixermark|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benten10|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rlpb|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blackrose|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] modiho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] post_break|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nawtacawp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mason240|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeveb|9 years ago|reply
Seems to me that the criminals who commit crimes at Walmart are costing the PD a fortune. Although — surely it's easier for the police to patrol the Walmart and catch criminals there than troll through the entire city hoping to catch them?
[+] [-] ones_and_zeros|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] egocodedinsol|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcguire|9 years ago|reply
The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] VLM|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakeborn|9 years ago|reply