The Steal (25 page)

Media reports initially alleged that Lord & Taylor security might possess a video showing Finley and his family removing the electronic tags from the bracelet. The insinuation that Finley was a booster proved wrong. On July 5, between five thousand and ten thousand people—including Martin Luther King III, Al Sharpton, and Dick Gregory—gathered in front of Lord & Taylor, demanding a public apology. Sharpton said, “This is part of the racial profiling that goes on across the country.” Local activists demanded that Lord & Taylor provide them with copies of training manuals that they believed would prove the department store engaged in racial profiling. Democratic representative John Conyers Jr., then the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Janet Reno, then the attorney general of the United States, to investigate. But apparently, shoplifting, even when someone died, did not merit federal intervention. The family sued for $600 million, but after a judge threw the manslaughter case against the security guard out of court, Lord & Taylor paid them $6 million, according to news sources at the time.

Six months later, at a Kroger store in Royal Oak Township, another suburb outside of Detroit, a shoplifter died in a similar fashion. After attempting to steal meat, he fell and hit his head, and a guard sat on him until he stopped moving. Some of the witnesses said that the guard, who weighed over three hundred pounds, sat on the shoplifter’s thighs. But one witness provided a different picture: the guard had sat on the man’s back. Paramedics tried to revive the shoplifter in the ambulance, but he died at the hospital, where diabetes and traces of crack cocaine were found in his blood. In this case, the family asked for $750 million and settled for an undisclosed amount.

A few months after that, a security guard at a Rite Aid on the city’s East Side sat on a shoplifter who stole cigars and a hair dryer. She had diabetes. Knee surgery had made it difficult for her to walk. A toxicology report showed several painkillers and opiates in her system. Her husband said they had no money problems. The family filed a billion-dollar lawsuit and also settled.

Security specialists aver that the deaths in most of these cases are due to positional asphyxiation, a medical condition in which the victim’s windpipe shuts. “This can happen when someone is on top of a suspect who’s facedown with hands handcuffed behind their back,” one expert told the
Houston Chronicle
. The obese, those with heart conditions, and drug users are particularly vulnerable to positional asphyxiation. Murder charges against guards tend to be dismissed in court because of the shoplifters’ preexisting health conditions or drug use or, as in the Rite Aid case, because they fought back.

In Michigan, with the help of some security professionals and Philip Hoffman, then a state senator, Senator Hansen Clarke proposed legislation requiring increased training standards, bigger badges on uniforms, increased fees for permits, federal criminal background checks (as opposed to state ones), and a concealed weapons permit for store security to carry firearms. The statute on file, they complained, had not been amended since 1968; security guards, for example, were only required to hold an eighth-grade diploma. (The amendments advised a GED.)

Although not all of the original legislation passed, according to Clarke, the amendment did raise the standard of training. He pointed to the Michigan Contract Security Association’s founding that year and to more stringent background checks for guards as proof of progress. Today, in Michigan, you can no longer be a convicted felon and work as a security guard. But a related problem, Clarke acknowledged, is competition in the private security industry. “Today, many of the legitimate companies are being underbid by companies that provide neither training nor standards.”

Another problem is that 60 percent of all security guards are proprietary—in other words they work directly for stores—and are therefore not required to follow the laws. That was the case in two out of three of the Detroit deaths. But whoever the guards are working for, since 2001, at least thirty shoplifters have died in the parking lots of Walmarts and in the alleys behind CVSes, in the aisles of Kmarts and in Price Chopper and Family Dollar stores.

Joseph LaRocca, the former vice president of loss prevention at the National Retail Federation (NRF), assured me that racial profiling, tackling shoplifters, putting them in choke holds, and sitting on them in the parking lot was not industry “best practice.” “Cowboys” were ancient history, and anyone who profiled was a “bad apple.” Most states require certification and background checks for LP agents and some of these checks are extensive. But ten states—including Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Wyoming—currently have no licensing requirements for LP agents. In some states, like California, a convicted felon can technically become an LP agent. And although many stores have implemented policies forbidding the most aggressive practices,
LPInformation Convention Daily
lamented that “there will always be individuals who go beyond the training format, policies and procedures set by their company.”

On
LPinformation.com
, several LP agents posted about the death of a shoplifter by a guard’s choke hold at a Houston Walmart, worrying that the company would sustain damages from a wrongful death lawsuit. LP agents described sneaking up on a shoplifter from behind or tackling her in the parking lot or running after a getaway car with a bravado and a rage that matched the one shoplifters used to describe their crime. Some voices cautioned against store policies prohibiting them from tackling shoplifters, and others argued that without training to understand what constituted reasonable force, shoplifting would skyrocket.

A forum titled “Shopping While Black” offered a similar range of posts. Some voices deplored racial profiling.

But another poster wrote, “What is wrong with demographic profiling?”

“There’s good profiling and bad profiling,” someone said to me.

Thus the LP agent remains troubling. Although a director of LP can make $100,000 or more, a starting salary for an LP agent can be $24,000 a year or between $8 and $12 an hour. Despite the new name, the position of “floor detective” has changed little since the nineteenth century. Some entry-level positions still do not require a high school diploma, although you need one to move up the ranks, and a BS in criminology helps. There is one university program for retail loss prevention and some specialized advanced certification programs teaching would-be store detectives about how to do certain parts of the job, such as detecting fraud. The best in-house programs that include training future LP agents how to deal with shoplifters last forty days. Some programs advertised on television or the Internet last forty hours.

Even more troubling, a language for catching shoplifters exists, but not an agreed method of identifying them. Many assets protection agents talk about the difference between shopper behavior and shoplifter behavior as though it revealed elemental psychological truths. “Picking up a piece of Baccarat crystal and holding it next to a coat is not behavior typical of people shopping for this type of merchandise. Yet picking up merchandise, holding it next to a coat and inspecting it inside and out is normal shopping behavior in the handbag department,” an ex-vice president of LP at Bloomingdale’s told
Stores
magazine.

In a white paper of which he declined to share more than a few paragraphs (he charges retailers thousands of dollars for a peek at it), security consultant Read Hayes—who looks young for someone who, by his own account, has been in the business for thirty years—listed what is known in his industry as “shoplifting behaviors,” now thought to be the best predictors of the crime: “Signaling to others, hands-down, concealing items, removing or switching tickers, or attacking tag systems, flushed face, continuous ‘scoping’ or searching for people, moving closely to fixtures, repeated stops in a particular area and inordinate nervousness (stretching, yawning, pacing, etc.) are probably better indicators of possible theft activity than physical cues such as race.”

But Shaun Gabbidon, a professor of criminal justice in the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg, said that loss prevention agents may ultimately pay less attention to these tics than they do to your shoes. “If you walk into Neiman Marcus wearing scruffy shoes, you will be watched more closely.”

Along with nineteen male and eight female loss prevention agents, I attended a two-day workshop to learn this skill, sponsored by Wicklander-Zulawski (W-Z), a national firm with offices in a western suburb of Chicago. Before joining W-Z, the instructor, Thomas Masano, was a special agent in the air force, where he conducted felony investigations. With the help of a young woman assistant—the Vanna White of shoplifting prevention—Masano began by describing the challenges retailers face to get shoplifters and other thieves to confess. “This isn’t Guantánamo. You cannot hold a shoplifting suspect in a room for five hours; you have to let them go to the bathroom. If they have heart pains, don’t keep them in there. Lights on table, battery, we don’t want to do that.”

But there are some things LP agents can do: Unplug the phone while interviewing, but hide the handcuffs. The holding room should be neutral. It should not contain any personal artifacts, since a person looking at family photos and thinking about what they’re going to lose will not confess.

Masano asked the LP agents where they conducted interviews: the boiler room, the stock room, the back of the store by the Dumpsters, the ladies’ room, which Masano called the “female bathroom.” He continued, “Depending on the store policy, if you are interviewing a suspected thief, you generally have a forty-five- or fifty-minute time frame to get the person to confess. So you basically have fifteen to twenty minutes to get the confession. How many people have interviewed an innocent person?”

A lot of people raised their hands.

Masano quoted Groucho Marx: “There’s only one way to find out if a man’s honest: Ask him.” But then he elaborated on the W-Z method’s doctrine of body language: 55–65 percent of behavior is nonverbal; 30–40 percent is tone; less than 10 percent are the actual words. Masano said that telling a thief that he is a bad person will not produce a confession. “People want acceptable reasons for doing what they did. So you have to break them down. Everyone is programmed to deny, and 90–95 percent of the time it happens. One of the key elements of getting a confession is to crush the thief’s hope. So, for example, you don’t want to shake their hand.”

Masano shook his pretty assistant’s hand firmly. A damp hand is a sign of guilt. He continued his lecture. “Establish a behavioral norm. This is what you do in the first few minutes of the interview, so that you can tell henceforth when the person is lying. You try to build a rapport.” He paused. “Who’s made people cry?”

Half of the hands in the room went up. “I like that,” Masano joked. But then he got serious. “The idea is to get them in submissive posture.” He slumped over to demonstrate. To do that, a three- to four-foot distance is the best, chest to chest.

Masano next played a video of a suspected thief about to take a polygraph.

One way to tell if alleged thieves are lying is how they breathe.

On an instructional video, Brett, a six-foot-five W-Z staffer, oozed sincerity. Hunched over, he was speaking softly to console a woman who had stolen from her company. He crooned about protecting the assets of the company. He said the word “dollars,” and her hands jumped. He said, “People make mistakes.”

Masano paused the tape to deliver some editorial commentary: “She doesn’t go into full submission . . . she never tells you why. That’s the most important thing. People are impulsive.”

Brett said to the suspect, “People play blackjack at Tunica.” He told her a story about a good person who just wanted to take her kids to a good Thanksgiving dinner. “We are all good, hardworking people. We like to help people get out of these situations. We would like to talk to the good people,” he said. Masano delivered commentary: “She nods, yes, she sees herself as a good person.” The suspect began to tell some of her sad story, but Brett cut her off. “Time is running short. We need to get this resolved.” He recommenced the hard sell. “We’re past the facts. We need to find out why. Drugs are different than putting food on the table, and I can understand putting food on the table. I don’t care if you’re honest.”

Finally Brett shattered the suspect into confessing. “Good, I’m glad,” he purred. “The important thing is the company wants to know if it would ever happen again.”

“No, sir,” she whined. And then the reasons why she stole the money: “I used it to pay bills. My car got repossessed.”

One of the LP agents in the room interrupted. He had busted the same woman at Walmart. The class laughed. Masano said, “She didn’t learn her lesson.”

Video surveillance cameras have curbed shoplifting less than the retail industry hoped. London is the city with the most cameras in the world—by some counts 1 million. England, as a whole, is said to have 4 million cameras. Yet last year shoplifting rose 34 percent in the United Kingdom. The 2008
Global Retail Theft Barometer
found that the United Kingdom’s shrink rate was 5.4 percent—higher than that of many other European countries. In America, the Winona Ryder trial proved that even sixty cameras monitoring an alleged shoplifter in the store does not necessarily result in a commercial burglary conviction. Some studies suggest that the cameras are only as good as the people watching them, many of whom get tired after ten minutes. One paper, “To CCTV or Not to CCTV,” found that cameras are more effective at stopping theft in parking garages than in stores. More optimistic (from the store’s point of view) results concede that closed-circuit television may “displace” shoplifting—if a shoplifter sees a camera in Bergdorf’s, she will run across the street to Bonwit Teller. The most positive finding (again, according to the store) is that CCTV gives LP staff the courage to confront a possibly dangerous shoplifter.