Catching a typical shoplifter or an employee or delivery thief is a little like stalking an overcautious prey animal. They are wary of any signals that someone might be monitoring them. They also attempt to cover their tracks diligently. They also do their best to blend in.
Yet, we often go for the obvious, easy prey, like a predator goes for the weakest of a pack. In so doing, we skew the results and create the appearance that one group or demographic is more likely to steal than another.
In the US, the Black community is monitored much more often than whites, resulting in a much larger proportion of Blacks who are apprehended for crimes. In Canada, First Nations generally are viewed suspiciously by store owners. In both countries, and the world at large, youth are considered high risk to offend. Consequently, these groups get watched more and get caught more.
Canada’s prison population is disproportionately made up of First Nations criminals and, while they all are there because they committed criminal acts, they are also there because the judicial and law enforcement system targets them.
In my early years as an investigator, I worked a few medium-sized grocery operations, some of which were located adjacent to a well-known Canadian discount department store, Zellers. The female who worked at one Zellers was an exceptionally skilled “floorwalker,” with the highest apprehension rate of all the outlets in the city. Yet, she was a tall, Black and very attractive girl.
This is the sort of floorwalker who should not succeed, because she is readily noticed and would be spotted quickly. Yet, she overcame the disadvantage of very good looks to achieve considerable success.
I, on the other hand, was blessed with very average looks, giving me a distinct advantage over her, theoretically. Truthfully, I almost always had more apprehensions than her each month, partly because there are more shoplifters on any day in a grocery store than there are in a department store. I was new to the grocery chain; she had been with Zellers for years.
We loved to tease each other about our relative successes and challenge each other.
Once, Lori asked me if I noticed that women with hair dyed peroxide red hair shoplifted more than regular people. So, I began watching redheads, and she was right! Sort of. I caught a disproportionate number of women with dyed red hair. Six, in one month, out of 43. Fewer than one in a hundred shoppers had dyed red hair.
I suggested that people who bought multiple items of one brand were more likely to steal those brands. Sure enough, the two of us caught a high percentage of shoplifters who followed this pattern.
We even suggested that men, who made up about 30% of her clientele and 15% of mine, were less likely to steal. We caught fewer men. We also watched fewer.
Over the course of a year, we experimented with these theories about eight or ten times, always reinforcing our initial claims.
Shortly after, my company partnered with two psychologists studying theft prone behaviour. We would administer questionnaires randomly to those shoplifters that we apprehended. That meant we needed to find a way to be as impartial as possible in whom we monitored.
In the store adjacent to the Zellers, we set up covert monitoring stations along the rear wall. No one would know we were there and we could monitor customers independently and objectively. For two months, we allocated an equal amount of time to watching each aisle, spread throughout the day. We watched every customer in that aisle for a set period of time.
Still, we ended up with 70 apprehensions and questionnaires administered during that period. We were able to verify age against projected age of customers not shoplifting and found a remarkable parallel. The ages that we estimated also were accurate to within 4.3 years, on average.
The results of the demographic analysis were intriguing. We found that two groups shoplifted more than others, relative to their distribution in the typical shopper mix: those over 55 years of age and those under 25. There was no significant difference in sex, race or perceived wealth status.
Yet, statistics show that theft is skewed toward younger, non-white shoppers. Why? Because, as the informal competition between Lori and myself and the blind psychology study showed, if you watch one group more than another, you will catch more of that group, reinforcing your bias.
A corollary to the study was that seniors actually were more likely to steal in the grocery store than youth, possibly because they also were more frequent customers of the store and familiar with its weaknesses. Of the 70 interviewees, 46 self-identified as regular customers with another four recognized as regulars. All 70 indicated they had never shoplifted before, even though five had been spotted with low-level theft in prior visits but not apprehended.
Being effective at catching thieves requires that you set aside biases, in favour of objective measures. It also requires a specific set of skills and techniques, many of which we will discuss in this section.