Confessions of a Republican Journalist: Crimefighter, Part 2

Like I said in the last installment, Nancy Drew is the coolest ever. Hence she provided perfect inspiration to bring out my inner crimefighter. Crimefighter blended with my natural habitat: shopping. Full-contact shopping.

While in college doing semester-long projects on John Wayne Gacy and the like, I wanted a job that somewhat fit my major. My semester working at the campus police department, though, consisted of parking tickets, little confrontation, and a lot of boredom. That would soon end when, at age 19, I responded to an ad for an “asset protection agent” at what is now RiteAid drugstores. I was quickly hired to work the stores undercover and unarmed, pretending to shop, spotting shoplifters and nabbing them after they walked out the door.

A former military policeman was my trainer. He showed me how to position oneself at the end of an aisle to be able to look down that aisle without being spotted. These drugstores had no cameras at the time, so it was all floor work. Jack had a zillion war stories from years in the loss prevention business. He suggested carrying an item to make it look more like we were shopping -- I noticed he always carried a bottle of VO5 shampoo, even though he was bald.

The arrest rates were high in these stores, so it usually wasn’t a boring eight-hour shift strolling the aisles. For every shoplifter who was spotted, there were about five who got away, as estimated by the trail of wrappers left behind. Asset protection agents had to witness all of these elements to make an arrest: selection, concealment, continuous observation from the point of concealment (because sometimes shoplifters chicken out and dump the product in the store before leaving), passing the registers without paying, exiting the store. Some didn’t bother to conceal, known as the grab-and-runs. Men are generally quicker shoplifters; women can take half an hour or more. My first arrest was an 18-year-old guy stealing condoms. “Bet I ruined your Friday night, huh?” I said as I led him to the back of the store. “Yeah, yeah, you did,” he groaned.

Some of the stores were in heavily minority neighborhoods, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. But I had my tricks to be inconspicuous: while pretending to be a shopper, I would often carry a package of Always maxi pads -- because if a man looks at a woman and sees her carrying those, he gets embarrassed and turns away fast. That way, the shoplifter is less likely to recognize you on the other side of the store and wonder if he's being followed. Always also aren't breakable, so when I ran out the door after a suspect I could fling them to the side and go make the arrest. However, at the end of the day, the store manager would often call me over to the front door, annoyed because there were five packs of Always strewn around the store entrance.

The job was a wee bit hazardous, and not just the time I had to pick 15 stolen fishing lures out of a shoplifter's clothes.

One night I ran after a shoplifter in a dark parking lot. He spun around to confront me and halfway pulled a gun out from under his jacket, but paused and fled as he saw other store employees rush toward us. Another rainy evening I chased a shoplifter out the door and across the street when suddenly he spun around and lunged at me with a hypodermic needle; I jumped out of the way and avoided contact. (And in this humble columnist's opinion, anyone who tries to stab a person with a tainted needle should never get out of prison, no matter what liberals might say -- "Oh, but he's just a poor drug addict... he didn't know what he was doing." Then if he can't control potentially murderous behavior he shouldn't be on the street, should he?)

Then there was the incident that temporarily put my loss prevention career on hold. I spotted a woman stealing a pack of underwear -- her purse was in the top of the shopping cart, she placed the package on top, rounded a few aisles, unzipped the purse and slipped the product in, then abandoned the shopping cart and left the store. By the time I caught up with her, she was to her car and opening the door. She denied stealing, I grabbed her purse, and next thing she was in her car, slamming the door on my arm and backing out of the parking place -- dragging me along, as my arm was still caught in the door. I yelled and fought, got released, and shouted her license plate number to an approaching employee as she drove off.

The woman was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, strong-arm robbery and petty theft with priors. She had four prior felony convictions and had served time in prison. We went to trial on the three felonies she faced in my case. When my day came to testify, I walked into the courtroom and noticed it wasn’t quite a jury of her peers but of my peers -- a lot of college-age jurors.

The snarky defense attorney badgered me about my age, my experience, and accused me of telling police that the suspect had orange hair. “No,” I calmly corrected him, “I said she had a bad dye job.”

The jury snickered.

The lawyer focused on the stolen underwear. I had put in my report that she had first opened a package, and unfolded and held up a pair of underwear before deciding which ones she wanted to steal. “What color were they?” the lawyer asked about the unfolded pair.

“I don’t remember,” I responded.

“What do you remember about them?” he continued.

“They were big,” I replied. Louder snickers from the jury.

The defense attorney then focused on the arrest itself. I smiled at him measuredly from the witness stand as he quizzed me about what I said to the suspect after she began scuffling with me. “I said, ‘Give me the stuff,’” I responded.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Is that what you really said?”

“No, I said, ‘Give me the f*#@ing stuff.’”

“Do you talk to your mother like that?” the defense attorney snapped.

That was not kosher. I looked over at the prosecutor, whose wife had just had a baby, and saw he was now practically dozing in court. I turned to the judge. “Can he ask me that?”

The judge glared at the prosecutor. “Objection?”

The prosecutor stirred. “Um, yeah... objection... irrelevant, badgering the witness...”

“Sustained,” the judge said.

So with a little of my backseat lawyering, she was convicted on all three counts. But the judge gave her probation despite her priors. At sentencing, her whole trashy family was there, and one said to me “Better luck next time!” as they filed out of the courtroom. The woman even used her 5-year-old grandson as a "character witness," making him plea "Please don't send my grandma to jail" to the judge. Nice.

With my arm injury I was out of commission for a bit, and worked at a job taking severely developmentally disabled adults to the park and such. After one schizo slammed my head into a car window, though, I figured I was much safer with the three-strikers in retail. So at age 21 I went into the loss prevention department at Tower Records.

Tower was a truly cool place to work. My partner was a stocky, streetwise Latino, and with my collegiate ditz hair-twirling routine we were able to work the store perfectly, because shoplifters never thought we were a team. We hid two-way radios in our clothes and had an office with a camera system to assist us. There was even a hidden door that led to a secret platform with a bit of one-way glass above the adult book section, where thefts aplenty occurred. We worked well together, except the time we were pinning a fighting suspect to the wall outside the store entrance and my partner accidentally gave me a black eye with a flying elbow.

Again, this job was unarmed, but at least we got to use handcuffs. Once you got a suspect inside the back office, though, the first task was to check them for weapons. And no one wants to get poked with a needle, so you would ask first if they had any sharp objects.

“Yeah,” one gangbanger shoplifter I’d just caught told me, “I got a knife.” He whipped out a 10-inch hunting knife that had been concealed in his clothes.

Gulp. “OK,” I said. “That’s cool. Let’s just put that over here until we’re done, all right?” I took the knife from him and put the blade as far on the other side of me as possible while we proceeded with his paperwork.

And though there was no distinct profile of shoplifters in terms of gender or race in our arrest records, if one needed a bust one would just watch the rap aisle. One day I was standing in the rap aisle, picked up a 2Pac tape, looked at it and put it back on the shelf.

“Go ahead, take it,” the shopper standing next to me said softly. “I won’t tell no one.”

“Oh, I can’t do that!” I said, adding a bit of hair twirling. “I’d get caught!”

“Naw, man,” he said. “Me and my friends do it here all the time!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, man.”

Dammit. I left the aisle and ran back to the cameras in the loss prevention office. If he shoplifted now and I arrested him, he could claim entrapment because of the conversation we’d had. So I tried to burn him out, so to speak. When he started to pick at a cassette wrapper, I used the store’s intercom: “Security, area three.” Who knows what area three was. But he got a bit nervous and eventually left the store with his friends.

Loss prevention was a cool way to make a living -- getting to satisfy your inner action hero with spying, chases and arrests. And I learned a few things about human nature, as well.

First, I learned that people can be really gross. In the drugstores I manned, I witnessed people uncapping deodorant, sticking their hand up their shirt and swiping the stick in their armpits, then capping the stick and returning it to the shelf. “Never buy the first deodorant on the shelf,'' warned the loss prevention trainer on my first day. I also was warned against the unpackaged hairbrushes -- a warning that became bleak reality when I saw a guy try to pull one through his matted hair, blow it off, and drop it back into the bin.

Second, I learned that how a child who shoplifts is treated once caught can be an important indicator of future criminality. The kids who begged us to send them to jail instead of calling the parents; the parents who were fuming, embarrassed, apologized and made the kid beg the store's forgiveness as they dragged him or her away -- I always felt they had a chance. But the parents who blamed us for framing their kid as the child sat there and smugly smirked, or refused to sign the release -- I always felt like calling county and making an age-18 reservation for little Johnny.

And third, I learned that shoplifters are not as innocuous as one may think. Many are on their second or third strike and will do anything to keep from being caught, including beating a loss prevention agent to within an inch of his or her life. My partner at Tower confronted some young guys who had stolen a rap CD one evening. They pulled a gun on him; he said, “It's yours,'' and went back toward the front door. But the delinquents went after him and rammed his head repeatedly against a metal bicycle rack. Police helicopters were called out to catch the suspects. It was my night off.

I also learned how fun being undercover is. I truly got some sort of Nancy Drew/Jennifer Garner itch out of my system with the occasional flying tackle (except the time I missed the shoplifter and went skidding across the pavement -- when I was wearing shorts) and am glad that about 200 criminals got marks on their records thanks to my snooping. After two years of skinned knees and black eyes, I moved on to journalism, where I had to duck for different reasons.

And what else would newspapers put me on but the crime beat? More in the next segment!

Comments

[Reaps]

This'd make a good book, y'know. I can only hope there is plenty more to come, in that case

[LanceThruster]

You have an interesting writing style but I can't help thinking you do not use the same yardstick in gauging white-collar criminals. Corporate crooks steal far more, kill far more (whether through wars or environmental toxins), than your garden variety street thug. Halliburton may not be pocketing CDs in the Rap aisle, but their hands are in our pockets nonetheless. I guess Ken Lay is a more sympathetic thief because he is not part of the hordes of scary brown people.

[Nelson D. Noel]

Lance, are you on drugs? This piece was about Bridget's experiences and what those experiences taught her. White-collar crime was not a part of her experience and so was not mentioned. Why would it be? When was the last time you saw Halliburton shoplifting?

[LanceThruster]

Nelson,

Drugs? Why, you got some? I acknowledged that her write-up of her experience in loss prevention was entertaining. It's just that on a site called GOP Vixen, one expects certain memes to be propagated by code words. I don't doubt that certain genres are stolen more often than others. I don't doubt that certain socio-economic groups perpetrate a particular type of crime more than others.

But more than that, I got a sense that she took a position that certains groups of people (as opposed to individulas) are to be mocked, reviled, and feared.

Annual losses to shoplifting run around $10 billion. The Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal alone cost US citizens around $150 billion. Halliburton may not be shoplifting, but they're certainly stealing in plain site (such as recent overcharges DOD auditors uncovered, yet were still paid).

True, she did not bring it up but I did. I believe there is a certain percentage of people willing to act unethically, to different degrees, in all sub-groups. There are some amusing stories regarding theft (my friend the grocery manager often catches theives with steaks down their pants), but the endless images of less than competent people on "COPS" is more sad than funny.

The solution is probably something other than more prisons and longer sentences. When the show spotlights the Tom Delays and Ken Lays and George W. Bushes doing perp walks, then I might be a little more inclined to feel that justice is being applied fairly.

Until then, Bridget comes off with a holier-than-thou attitude where she feels, "I am noble and virtuous and the people I deal with are not." Yet she has blinders on when it comes to the crooks and liars she supports politically.

Her GOP theives and scoundrels cost me personally (and the nation) far more than her retail store shoplifters. That's my point. Make of it what you want.