At some point we’re going to have to get serious about retail theft. We all know that it’s a terrible problem, but the news that makes the T.V. on the nightly news is just the tip of the iceberg.
A story last night, on KTVU, broke my heart. It was about consignment stores in Contra Costa County. Thefts, particularly of gold jewelry, are paralyzing them. One owner said he’d lost $2 million to the thieves. Keep in mind, consignment stores are not Bulgari or Hermes luxury parlors. They sell used items, and their customers tend not to be wealthy, but are ordinary folks like you and me. Their owners aren’t getting rich. So the thieves are actually stealing from all of us.
The news story said that owners are taking dramatic new steps to combat the theft. One has armed all her employees with pepper spray. There are surveillance cameras and locked cabinets, and now, some federal enforcement agencies are getting involved.
We’ve all heard stories about innocent workers who try to defend their stores from robbers and end up shot dead. One block away from me is a 7-Eleven where a security guard was shot to death under precisely those circumstances. We’ve all seen so-called security guards in chain stores like CVS and Target, who don’t seem to be doing anything that could be called useful, beyond standing around and looking strapping. There are several things we could do, as a society, to be more effective in stopping retail theft. For one, all security guards should be armed with lethal weapons, and they should be protected by statute if, in the course of their job, they’re forced to shoot a bad guy. By the same token, all employees—cashiers, janitors, shelf stockers, managers—should be equipped with stun guns, pepper spray and other deterrents, and authorized to use them against predators. A shoplifter might think twice before invading a Rite Aid if he knows that eight employees will surround him and start spraying in his face and keep it up until he’s subdued on the ground.
What I’m saying is that we have to militarize our retail spaces. We can’t continue under this fiction that America is a peaceful society that has no business arming workers. That might have been true in the past, but no more. The thugs have declared war on all of us, and we’re all paying the price. Just look at Oakland. Drug stores are practically nonexistent in the downtown/Uptown core, driven out of business by crooks. I live in the center of Oakland, and I have to walk a mile, to Piedmont Avenue, to get a dental prescription filled. Yet we continue to treat these scoundrels as though they’re just pesky youths, who will come around if we’re nice to them.
No, they won’t. By the time someone is psychopathic enough to rob a store, she’s on the highway to hell. If we want to stop the epidemic of crime, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, because believe me, nobody else is going to do it for us. Call it vigilante justice. It’s going to be an uphill fight, because we react viscerally to the idea of arming ordinary workers. But desperate times call for desperate measures. And we are in desperate times. And while we’re at it, how about new laws bringing criminal charges against the parents of these criminal youths? When mom and dad realize they’re looking at a $2,500 fine for every crime committed by their kid, they might have an attitude change and decide to parent responsibly.
Steve Heimoff