The UK's current attitude to shoplifting
There's currently a spate of stories in the UK media about supermarket staff getting fired for confronting shoplifters.
This has brought forth extraordinary commentary, to the effect that stores should rely on the police and not their own staff, and that individuals should not try to prevent manifest crime unless they've been specifically trained to do so. It has not been clearly stated whether the apparent principle here is supposed to extend to self-defence in relation to physical or sexual assault on staff. The proponents do not explicitly avow that sexually assaulted women should not act in their own self-defence without prior training, but nor do they wish to hear the same denied. Nor, to be sure, does the principle seem to generalise particularly well outside the context of retail stores.
Unpacking the idea a bit: what is supposed to the reason for not trying to prevent crime here?
- Is it some kind of distinction between offences against property versus offences against the person?
- It can't be purely about the training, without going straight back into the outrageous territory of saying employees should be fired for resisting sexual assault by customers without having first been trained how to do so. It's very difficult to run this training argument without being able to make a principled distinction between different types of offences
- Is it supposed to be some kind of question of agency - that it is supposed to turn on the seniority of the employee, or a contractual restriction on conduct in the workplace, that the property being defended isn't personally owned by the staffer defending it? Should someone be fired for stopping a thief stealing her employer's goods from the employer's premises, but not fired when trying to stop a thief stealing her *own* purse while on the employer's premises? Is it really just about trying to stop one person helping another without permission? Doesn't this all fall into the weeds given that a lot of workplaces will be partnerships, employee benefit trusts, and so on? (I'm writing this from a cafe inside just such a business, indeed one of the businesses recently criticsed for this)
- It can't be a matter of PR - the employers are taking a lot of flak for this and facing minor boycotts
- We also know that the retailers do not trust the police or public prosecutors to recover their goods: Fortnum & Mason had a private prosecution quashed by the Director of Public Prosecutions for attempting exactly this over a high-value theft.
What we're left with lurks in the negative space of these stories, a murky situation where:
- retailers know that police and prosecutors won't let them prevent "shrinkage" due to shoplifters, but
- the same retailers feel compelled to take bad publicity in order to stop their staff from impeding shoplifters, but *not* to take the bad publicity for saying "let him rob and assault you" to their staff.
But I think the smokescreen about training is actually a bit of a tell: there's a segment of society that doesn't really accept non-contractual restrictions on individual liberty; basically, crimes should not be punished as such, accidentally harming strangers through negligence should be resolved by the stranger having taken out insurance, and so on.