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Is publicly shaming shoplifters a real deterrent?

Is publicly shaming shoplifters a real deterrent?

They call it shrinkage in the retail sales business. The rest of us call it shoplifting.

It’s costly and aggravating for many merchants who know dealing with shoplifting complaints is pretty low on the police’s list of priorities.

Toronto grocery store owner David Chen created legal tremors when he and some employees chased down a repeat shoplifter and trussed him up. But when the cops finally arrived, Chen was charged, too, with assault.

The case got international attention and ultimately ended with Chen being acquitted, and the Conservative government amending legislation to strengthen citizen’s arrest rules.

Now a convenience store chain in Hamilton, Ont., has raised eyebrows by posting photos of alleged shoplifters on its front windows.

The suspected thieves, supposedly caught by store surveillance cameras, presumably have not been caught or charged. But the photos are plastered on all Big Bee’s Hamilton locations as a warning for them not to come back.

"It’s more of a community message," Ziad Reda, manager of the corporate stores, told the Hamilton Spectator this week.

It’s not a new strategy; it’s been done by retailers in the United States. Public shaming even has judicial sanction in some quarters there says Barbara Staib, director of communications for the U.S. National Association of Shoplifting Prevention.

“There’ve been judges who make people stand on street-corners with billboards and signs and sandwich boards saying ‘I shoplifted from such-and-such a store,’” she told Yahoo Canada News.

Last year, the operator of the Smart Shopper convenience store in Penticton, B.C., posted video surveillance footage on Facebook purporting to show shoplifters in the act. There’s been no activity on the site recently, though.

Posting photos sign of store owners’ frustration

Putting up pictures of alleged shoplifters is evidence of the frustration store owners feel, says Alex Scholten, president of the Canadian Convenience Stores Association.

Scholten, who’s been in the convenience-store business for 15 years, told Yahoo Canada News the association, whose members operate 14,000 outlets, takes no official position on this practice.

“We empathize with retailers, knowing that shoplifting or even drive-offs at the [gas] pump is a very low priority crime for police to chase down,” he said in an interview.

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Store operators understand law enforcement resources are limited, yet police still encourage them to report the thefts, even when they know they’ll take a back seat to more serious crimes.

“At the end of the day retailers are really left to their own devices either to chase down these customers themselves or put up a public campaign, if you will, that would discourage customers from doing this kind of activity in their stores,” he said.

Scholten said average shrinkage rate in Canadian convenience stores – the amount of a store’s inventory that walks out the door without benefit of payment – is about four per cent.

“Our margins are so slight in this industry that if this kind of thing happens on a regular basis you’re out of business,” he said.

Scholten said that at his gas station and convenience store he used to keep a binder on the counter with face and vehicle images of customers who gas-and-dashed after fill-ups worth up to $100. He was told police would not act unless there was a crisp image of the licence plate.

There’s a double standard at work, Scholten adds.

“Somebody’s stealing a hundred bucks at convenience store you think that it would get the attention it deserves,” said Scholten. “But if you’re stealing 100 bucks at a bank, they jump all over that stuff.”

Low-priced, high-quality cameras and digital recorders have put the cost of effective security tools into the hands of small-business operators, he said, adding he believes it’s helping cut the rate of shoplifting.

Still, Scholten’s stores and gas pumps were covered by up to 32 cameras but he said police refused to pursue complaints of gas theft if the perpetrator came back to the counter and bought some other item. The customer could simply claim he forgot about the gas fill-up. Hard to prove it wasn’t an honest mistake.

Posting photos ‘absolutely’ a deterrent, store owner believes

Does posting photos actually work as a deterrent?

“It absolutely does,” said Scholten, who used to post bounced cheques by his cash register if a customer had initially refused to make good. Angry demands to take down the rubber cheque were ignored until the amount was covered.

Lawyers in Canada and the United States have warned that posting photos of alleged shoplifters leaves store owners vulnerable to a defamation lawsuit if they can’t prove it definitively.

“My first thought is the liability that if you don’t have proof, if you don’t have solid evidence that that person did steal from the store, that’s a risky practice,” said Staib, whose non-profit group works with offenders to deter them from shoplifting through education.

Scholten brushed aside the concern, saying stores are not attaching names to the photos and ensuring there was in fact a theft before posting them.

Staib conceded the strategy might deter some would-be thieves.

“Anonymity is of course a key component of their success or failure,” she said. “If their face is there and they know the store’s looking for them, it may deter them from shoplifting in that store. Will it deter them from shoplifting altogether? Don’t know.”

Scholten is not fazed by that.

“I look after my business and if others aren’t responsible or doing things that they should be doing to protect themselves, I have no control over that,” he said.

“These types of customers who are shoplifting are going to look for the path of least resistance. They’re going to find a place that is not doing their due diligence in making sure they’re watching for shoplifting, that they have security measures in place.”

But Staib said while the strategy of publicly shaming alleged shoplifters might cause some temporary embarrassment it doesn’t solve the problem.

"In a lot of cases people shoplift for emotional reasons already, so putting them in a situation like that is only going to exacerbate the situation," she said.