The Steal (24 page)

The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wanton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come!

—Philip Roth,
American Pastoral

“God is a loss prevention agent,” I was told in 2005, the year I began attending the National Retail Federation Loss Prevention Conference and Exhibition, according to its website “the industry’s leading” annual conference for the men and women who used to be known as store detectives or floorwalkers. Held in June either in San Diego or Minneapolis, the conference hosts almost three thousand people.

The new job titles coined a few decades ago—loss prevention agent or associate, or assets protection agent—represent a schism in the profession. If the word used is “agent,” it is likely that the person talking is old school, invested in connecting LP to private security forces from earlier times. If “associate,” then the person is probably younger and wants to be thought of as a white-collar worker. Confusing matters further, since 9/11, some industry consultants, giving the job a paramilitary twist, call loss prevention staff “shoplifting operatives.” Assets protection suggests that the most important thing about the job is guarding products, while loss prevention implies that you might have to put your hands on an actual shoplifter. But whatever you call these men—the profession is mostly male—the most important thing about their duties is cutting shrink, “solving shrink,” or even “shrinking shrink.”

Thus, although he is responsible for handling all sorts of security and fraud issues, the LP agent is only interested in the Winona-style kleptomaniac as the icing. The cake is the boosters. LP sells the booster story in trade magazines such as
Loss Prevention, Stores
,
Chain Store Age
, and
Drug Store News
, and on
LPInformation.com
and Private Officer News Network. The two major retail lobbying organizations in Washington have staffed loss prevention divisions to advocate for boosters’ prominence to anyone who will listen.

To those in the field, shoplifting is a battleground, LP is a spy versus spy world, and LP agents are soldiers who, though winning the battle, lose the war. Each new piece of antishoplifting technology promises to vanquish the shoplifter, and yet none ever achieves that goal.

Most of all, the new job title signaled a change in who was guarding the store. Store detectives had drawn their ranks primarily from former or off-duty cops and ex-military personnel. Their methods came from their experience in those professions and until the 1990s can be described in five words, “Hook ’em and book ’em.”

But although LP would like to leave violence behind, it follows the profession into the twenty-first century. Between 1995 and 2005, many people detained for shoplifting began to sue stores for coercing confessions and for engaging in racial profiling. As the retail industry became more cutthroat, stores increased pressure on LP departments to justify their financial existence. The industry was asked to become both kinder and gentler
and
more technologically sophisticated—to catch shoplifters, some of whom are armed and high.

These days, stores defend LP’s occasionally rough practices by saying that shoplifters often carry weapons and wound or kill people and their staff needs to protect themselves. A much-discussed incident was a teenager’s shooting of a store detective at a Shoe Carnival in Tennessee.

Not all LP agents enjoy catching shoplifters. One wrote, “My first time I caught someone . . . I saw him put a couple of record albums under his T-shirt and head for the exit. I stopped him in the vestibule and asked him to step back into the store. He stood motionless and nodded his head that he could not. When I asked again, I followed his eyes to the floor and saw that the poor chap was so scared he had urinated.”

“In reality, your life is not worth a pair of pants or a steak,” Gregor Housdon, an LP agent, told me at a Mexican restaurant near the Walmart where he worked in Baldwin Park, a suburb southwest of Los Angeles. Housdon, one of the few agents who allowed his real name to be used, no longer chases shoplifters into the parking lot, because “too many bad things happened out there.” Also, it’s not worth it to detain people who shoplift little things. “This one guy stole five packs of beef jerky and I said, ‘Look, man, I just want to get my beef jerky back. We’re not going to have a knockdown over the jerky.’ This judge stole batteries for his pager. ‘I didn’t feel like paying for it,’ he said. . . . I let him go. They take underwear, stupid stuff.”

Housdon, who described himself as a “shoplifter catcher who got five to eight a day” has since worked at several Walmarts across the country. He said, “I always say ‘thank you’ to my shoplifters. I say, ‘I just want to say thank you. The reason I have a job is because of you.’ ”

The renaming of LP is not the only change in the industry. Marketing guru Paco Underhill points out that whereas nineteenth-century department stores were designed to entice the customer, big-box stores make it easy to catch shoplifters. They are square, like the boxes they are named for. The “cash wrap,” as the check-out counter is called, is generally five steps from the door; cameras hang above most aisles, although according to Underhill, it doesn’t matter whether these are real or shells, since their mere presence dissuades some shoplifters. Other antishoplifting decorating techniques include placing desirable items on low shelves, staggering aisles, or setting them far apart so that salespeople standing at one end can see shoplifters at the other. Some cash register lanes resemble the TSA.

When the flagship Gimbels store opened in New York in 1910, it attracted consumers with rows of doors opening directly onto the Herald Square subway station, the better to race from straphanging to shopping; by the time the store closed in 1986, the ease of exiting Gimbels had helped give it one of the highest shoplifting rates in the country. It would be unthinkable to construct stores this way. No retail chain could be further from Gimbels than Neiman Marcus, but its design tells much about where we are. The four-story store in Chicago, built in 1982 to resemble, as architect Adrian Smith put it, “a postmodern stage set,” offers but two exits. Inside there are no clocks on the wall, nothing to mark time spent shopping or to indicate that you are being watched.

At any of the discount retailers, an earpiece-wearing guard stands by the only exit checking bags, in case the pedestals made out of white plastic are not up to the job. From time to time the alarm on the pedestals bleeps, but you rarely see the guard give chase. Midrange department stores acknowledge that some people shoplift, but the crime must be kept secret, like an adulterous affair. At Bloomingdale’s, the pedestals at the exits are hooded with fake wood paneling or Plexiglas, as if giving antishoplifting technology prettier “skins,” as the covers are called, makes shoppers forget their purpose.

But the most dangerous element of store surveillance may be the guards. In many states, they are exempt from laws binding the police and protecting individual rights and due process. In general, no authority requires store security to Mirandize detained alleged shoplifters. Some receive training to use handcuffs; others do not. Some stores require all shoplifters to be handcuffed, while others forbid staff from touching them at all. No store condones guns, but I read of some security people carrying them in stores in bad neighborhoods or in states with “open carry” gun laws. Screening for a security position, though stricter than it used to be, is still lax in many states. In a throwback to the seventeenth century, before the appearance of the modern police force, some stores use mystery or secret shoppers—spies who pose as real shoppers to catch shoplifters in the act, to do what loss prevention cannot. Many stores set shoplifting-arrest quotas.

Scott Barefoot, director of security at Richemont, which owns Cartier and many other luxury goods companies, said that Richemont does not use quotas but that “one retailer two blocks south of here had an unwritten quota system.” Barefoot meant Saks Fifth Avenue, where he used to work. The Saks LP staff posted the quotas on a whiteboard, he said. “Your pay was based on apprehension. No one received direct financial compensation for it, but as you were reviewed, your status would come into play in terms of how much money you made.”

I wondered whether these quotas had anything to do with Winona Ryder’s detainment.

African American shoplifters have been more harshly punished than white ones ever since colonial times. But according to reporting in the
Houston Chronicle
and other newspapers and court documents, since 1994, six alleged shoplifters, all but one African American, have died in confrontations with LP agents at Dillard’s. Headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, the family-owned store seems even more secretive than others about how it handles shoplifting. Four of the deaths were in Texas. In the most publicized incident, LP agents hog-tied an alleged shoplifter, whom Dillard’s later described in depositions as “psychotic,” to a table. He died. A jury voted to give his family $800,000, plus interest.

Security experts attribute the deaths at Dillard’s primarily to the fact that the store is the only one in the country that still hires off-duty police officers. “Cops moonlighting as LP agents treat shoplifters like criminals,” one told me, explaining that off-duty police officers tend to use handcuffs and guns more freely than those who have been trained as LP agents. The practice benefits the store: If an off-duty police officer shoots a shoplifter in a store (or in the parking lot), he can say he was acting in his capacity as a peace officer, and in some cases, the store has not been considered liable for the shoplifter’s death or vulnerable to personal lawsuits brought by the families.

Dillard’s has said that it hires off-duty police officers to protect customers from armed robberies and that it does not do background checks or (until recently) provide training because those provided by law enforcement agencies where the police officers work are superior to anything the store could offer. But according to a 2004 investigative article in the
Houston Press
, Dillard’s stifled negative publicity about these issues by canceling—or threatening to cancel—advertising from newspapers and television stations reporting on the deaths.

Jerome Williams, a professor of business at Rutgers University, who studies racial profiling in stores, also known as shopping while black (SWB), said that since about 1990, more than one hundred alleged shoplifters have sued Dillard’s for this offense. “There is a persistent misperception that minorities account for most of the shoplifting. . . . The reality is that nonminority shoppers account for most of the criminal activity,” he said, adding that SWB may have risen in the past twenty years.

Rewarding quotas may lead to SWB. In a deposition from a 1997 hearing in Kansas, Byron Pierce, a police officer and former LP agent at Dillard’s, testified about the rewards stores give to those who make large numbers of shoplifting arrests. “Officers get more hours based on the arrests that they make. . . . If you arrest X amount of violators, you kind of move up the list from No. 1 to, say, No. 25 if that’s how many officers are there. If you don’t arrest that many violators, you kind of get bumped down to the bottom of the list.”

Dillard’s is hardly the only offender. In 2003, after the New York State attorney general’s office found Macy’s LP agents guilty of SWB, the company allowed a
New York Times
reporter an unusually frank look at what is, according to Robert McCrie—a professor of criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice—the “most extensive” LP agent training program in the country. The Macy’s coverage in the
Times
contained three revelations. First: If you are caught shoplifting, your civil rights as they are understood by public law enforcement are irrelevant. Some Macy’s stores allowed LP agents to handcuff any shoplifters it considers dangerous, “not simply ones who showed violence,” said Brian Kreiswirth, the assistant attorney general handling the case.

Second: Macy’s is flooded with shoplifters. Macy’s LP detained more than twelve thousand people for shoplifting nationally in 2002, and while only 56 percent of the detained were ultimately arrested, over 95 percent of them confessed. The relatively small percentage of arrests is due to a combination of factors: Many shoplifters pay a fine before leaving; the police are often too busy to deal with them. Of the detained shoplifters, a tiny fraction comprises what the industry calls “nonproductive stops”—stops that fail to find shoplifted merchandise. These are litigable and can be fireable.

Third: Shoplifters cost Macy’s a lot of money. In 2002, nationwide, the chain spent over $20 million on security. But $15 million was stolen from the Manhattan flagship store at Herald Square.

Kreiswirth said that Macy’s was “remarkably” cooperative with the investigation. One of the attorney general’s sanctions was that Macy’s had to report any instance of security surveilling, for longer than five minutes, of African Americans not “exhibiting suspicious behavior.” Among Kreiswirth’s jobs was to monitor the store, and although from January 1 to June 30, 2005, only one such incident occurred, in-store apprehensions of African Americans remained slightly higher than those of white people, at around 10 percent. Kreiswirth added, “You shouldn’t be prosecuting black people more than white people. That makes it as though black people are stealing more.”

To critics of LP, lack of training leads to the most lethal tragedies. After three African American shoplifters were killed in Detroit in 2000 and 2001, it emerged that Michigan was among the thirty-two states that then did not require unarmed contract security guards to undergo any state training at all. The first death took place at Lord & Taylor at the Fairlane Town Center, a mall in Dearborn, Michigan, where half of the customers are African American, but only .04 percent of the population is. Five security guards—some in plainclothes—followed Frederick Finley into the parking lot after his eleven-year-old daughter had allegedly shoplifted a $4 bracelet. Several of them confronted him, he punched them, they ganged up on him, and one of the guards, a firefighter moonlighting at Lord & Taylor, held him in a headlock until he lost consciousness. He yelled, “Get off me,” before passing out.