Walmart’s Crime Problem

I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that&#x27;s how poor this article is.<p>They say &quot;There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart.&quot; and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That&#x27;s a nonsensical and isn&#x27;t explained in the article, we&#x27;re just meant to accept that.<p>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&#x27;ve been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).<p>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.<p>What&#x27;s a solution? Walmart&#x27;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&#x27;s a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.<p>It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you&#x27;d just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.

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&#x27;s the breaks.<p>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.<p>In short, rather than having all the crime in one spot, we can spread it around the community! This won&#x27;t help things, but at least we won&#x27;t have a single unsympathetic scapegoat to blame.<p>(Also blame walmart when it does try and stop crime and the inevitable results occur, namely criminals being hurt&#x2F;killed as part of the law enforcement process.)<p>I can&#x27;t think of a better illustration of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics than this article. Poor people steal and hurt people but we can&#x27;t blame them. Walmart is nearby so blame Walmart!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jaibot.com&#x2F;the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jaibot.com&#x2F;the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...</a>

It seems as though this is following a familiar pattern (as in the UK) of:<p>&quot;Privatise the profit, push the risk&#x2F;cost to the local community&quot;

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&#x27;t solve the crime problems, simply move it somewhere else.<p>The state needs to spend money understanding the structural issues of crime in their state and implement interventions with tax money.<p>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.<p>Oklahoma, the state first mentioned in the article, just rejected a cigarette tax increase to $1.50 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kfor.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;democrats-republicans-clash-over-cigarette-tax-in-oklahoma&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kfor.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;democrats-republicans-clash-over-...</a><p>Raise the cigarette taxes to $3 or $4 per pack, the smoking rate declines and healthcare costs from tobacco declines.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;evil empire&quot;, even compared to &quot;friendlier&quot; competitors like Target.

Article only uses the word &quot;tax&quot; once, in a quote from a police officer: &quot;[Walmart] offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense&quot;.<p>But isn&#x27;t the taxpayer in this case the store itself? If the store isn&#x27;t paying enough taxes to support the PD, how is that the store&#x27;s fault?

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.<p>London Met police costs - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.met.police.uk&#x2F;foi&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;disclosure_2014&#x2F;august_2014&#x2F;2013030002515.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.met.police.uk&#x2F;foi&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;disclosure_2014&#x2F;august_201...</a>

One should never blame the victim for sexual assault; victims should be able to dress&#x2F;act how they please without fear.<p>vs.<p>One should blame the victim for theft; victims bear responsibility for securing their possessions.

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

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 <i>did</i> seem easy.<p>Not many stores I would&#x27;ve dreamed of doing that in (&#x27;twas only teenage hijinks anyway), but it&#x27;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&#x27;t give a crap about their crap.

Isn&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.

Semi recent discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11676928" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11676928</a>

<i>In July, three Walmart employees in Florida were charged with manslaughter after a shoplifter they chased and pinned down died of asphyxia.</i><p>No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don&#x27;t get prosecuted for that.<p>This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic &quot;let&#x27;s take a shit on society to save some money&quot; programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t publicly criticize a business that&#x27;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.<p><i>edit</i> my comment was poorly worded. The seabrook PD is constantly at this walmart instead of doing other things and the revenue isn&#x27;t offset to hire more officers.

I&#x27;m curious: does a new Walmart increase crime, or merely concentrate and redistribute it?<p>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.

&quot;<i>[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.</i>&quot;<p>The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.

&quot;Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots&quot;<p>They&#x27;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&#x27;t say the real problem, so, um, it must be the campers, yeah they must be the problem.<p>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.

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.

Here&#x27;s a similar article in the Tampa Bay Times published earlier this year. The graphics department had a fun time with it. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tampabay.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;2016&#x2F;public-safety&#x2F;walmart-police&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tampabay.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;2016&#x2F;public-safety&#x2F;walmart-...</a>

If the economy wasn&#x27;t in a massive slump, this article wouldn&#x27;t have been written. It acts as an apology for predatory business practices, and the exploitation of a working class.

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.

To me this is a great example of why Lean focuses on cutting waste, not cutting costs.<p>I don&#x27;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, &quot;Well, let&#x27;s cut that by a lot.&quot;

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.

It is not recent anymore, but I don&#x27;t think that this flood of &quot;mainstream media&quot; links in hackernews suits well with past demographics. Maybe this forum is changing, but I think it is toward a bad direction.<p>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.