SHOPLIFTING

compulsion, crime or misdemeanour ?

Anthony Weir

The Capitalist Doctrine in Three Words

 

 

If you are seen to shoplift in France, or Spain, or Germany or Italy, or any number of European countries, the shop-owner or the security staff will either come up to you before you leave the store and remind you to pay for the items you have concealed about your person, or they will accost you as you leave the store, bring you to an office, and, with very serious faces, make you pay for the goods that you attempted to steal.

There is sometimes a queue of other shoplifters at this busy
'alternative till'.

Sometimes, they will ask you to pay 10% more than their value - to cover the costs of hiring security-staff, or as a little bonus to the diligent shop-assistant. They sell their goods.

In France, Italy etc. shoplifting is regarded as a technical offence (like exceeding a speed-limit), committed by students, the poor, the powerless and depressed - whereas in the more vindictive anglophone countries it is regarded as a moral crime against society.

Insofar as there are local newspapers in France,
shoplifting and other trivial crimes are not gleefully reported.
This marks a striking difference from Anglophone cultures
whose newspapers are based on the principle of lurid and squalid 'revelation'.

Because of this, in anglophone countries the pilferer/thief will be watched, and allowed to leave the store. Then they will apprehend her or him dramatically, frog-march him or her back into the store - and call the police.

Celebrity Courtney Love's youthful theft of a Kiss tee-shirt from a Woolworth's in Eugene, Oregon actually led to a period in reform school!

In many stores there are dummy cameras to fool shoplifters. There are also hidden cameras in different locations designed to entrap shoplifters. This is, of course, illegal. Security firms are hired on their (quantitative) reputation for catching shoplifters, not (qualitatively) for preventing shoplifting (which is incalculable). Entrapment helps to improve the statistics in a competitive market.

techniques of shoplifting

In Germany, many shops quite legally display signs announcing that any shop-lifter must pay a “Fangprämie” or fine for being caught - perhaps Euro 50 - to the store if caught. This would be unthinkable in Britain. The British would rather die than attempt to sell the items to you (thus losing revenue). Nor, if they are watching, do they suggest to you in the store that it might be a good idea to pay for the goods (thus losing revenue).

They actually entrap the 'criminal' and ensure that a crime that has been committed, so that they can call the police, a most expensive service for which they pay nothing. The same attitude applies at a more basic level to motoring: there are cameras and traps on British roads, but rarely any of the elaborate 'slow-down' warnings that are so common in France. Radar in Britain is used mainly to create offenders, whereas radar in France triggers flashing lights to make the motorist slow down. Traffic Wardens are instructed to entrap motorists who, for example, park briefly in a 'Loading Bay', rather than to advise them to park elsewhere. Thus I was once fined half of my weekly income, a sum which a member of the lawnmowing classes would simply regard as a fee.

In Germany, the act of theft is legally committed only if you hide an item. The Bavarian State Supreme Court pronounced on this:
“A person carrying an item openly, leaving a store in which he is not physically prevented from leaving [by way of a barrier etc.], to look at display racks on the footpath in front, does not commit a theft of said item, even when turning his back towards the racks...”

But in the British Isles and the USA, the pilferer is kept in a store-room until the police arrive (which may take a hour or two), he or she is then arrested, cautioned, taken to a police-station, cautioned again, searched, put into a cell to wait, then, after half an hour or an hour, interviewed by detectives (!),fingerprinted, photographed and has a DNA swab taken from his or her mouth.
Many forms are filled in.

A solicitor (attorney, advocate) may of course be requested by the criminal. But if he or she, caught in flagrante, 'admits guilt', this is hardly necessary.

The process and procedure take an hour or two, the thief is given back the property that was taken off him on arrival at the police-station, and is given a piece of paper instructing him or her to attend a Court hearing on a certain date. My own experience of this proceeding (for example after being caught in a Virgin Megastore - what happened to them, ruthless Mr Branson ?) is that the police are themselves embarrassed by the pettiness of it all, and are quite jokey while they do their dreary duty.

In exceptional circumstances, the criminal is kept in the police cell overnight and brought to Court the next day to be sentenced: to pay a fine or go to prison.

All this costs a great deal of money. The shop does not sell its goods.
The police waste their time - most of it on paperwork. The criminal court wastes everyone's time.
The crime-statistics are boosted - and the prison population, too.

No wonder that the United Kingdom has the highest per-capital prison population in Europe: higher even than Burma/Myanmar or Singapore. It has not yet reached the gargantuan level of the United States, which is less a land of the free than a land of the locked up - with notorious examples of prisoners on Death Row for 23 years, just for having the 'wrong' (i.e. beautiful) skin-colour.

The compulsive shoplifter goes through this procedure every time he or she is seen to steal - whether it is a tin of beans, a book, or a box of candles. The financial wizard, on the other hand, who makes millions of dollars or pounds disappear, is rewarded with a million-dollar bonus. Public servants "fiddle" expenses The British law on theft, therefore, is a cynical mockery of natural justice - as is a great deal of criminal law which allows the Big and/or Important Boys (such a members of the august and obscure Privy Council) to get off 'Scot-free', while the small fry are fried

I have seen a shoplifter taken away from Eason's, an ugly, aggressive stationery chain-store with hidden cameras in Belfast, for stealing a 2003 Diary which by the end of February 2003 had been marked down to half-price and was almost unsaleable.

So much for a 'just and equitable society'!

Inevitably regarding all property as theft, always withdrawing (rather than withdrawn) I was a compulsive shoplifter. That is to say: a white nigger.
I have been in prison for stealing groceries.
Prison opened my eyes like those of the Sleeping Beauty.
I learned that the British actually like (almost as much as the punitive Americans) to have a large 'criminal' population to punish: they live in a feudal culture of revenge and punishment. Anglo-Saxon cultures inculcatee internal anger, which is vicious. Other cultures tend to externalise their anger more - and are despised by the Anglo-Saxon world-rulers.

Prison was a strange and not unkind kind of awakening.

 

I started as a teenager, stealing books: Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Steinbeck, Zola, Camus, Salinger, McCullers, O'Connor, Dante, Homer and Proust. I then graduated to vinyl records, and, living 'below the bread-line' after I left home, to food, household equipment and the occasional small objet d'art.

In the British Isles, shoplifters are regarded with the same smug outrage that is visited on Roma.
In France and Italy it is assumed that many people will steal from shops if they get the chance. In Italy it is a kind of national sport, like driving through red traffic-lights or ogling pretty women.

When scheduled flights to Italy leave large British airports, police are drafted in to arrest Italians who have stolen small items from the very-inviting airport shops - who are then very surprised to miss their flight, spend the night in a police cell, and receive a hefty fine in court the next day. So, if there are groups of Italians at an airport, be very careful - even if you are a blond Finn.

So far as I know, Frank Zappa was not a regular shoplifter.

The Italians and the French, however, recognise that shoplifting is the silliest and highest-risk of all 'crimes'. That it is, in fact, a pseudo-crime.
I am not talking about those people who shoplift, often to order, items worth hundreds or thousands of pounds/dollars/euros.
The chances of an unprofessional being caught are very great, and the return is tiny.
Small-time shoplifting is either a 'crime of opportunity', and thus is undetected, or it is a (largely-female) pseudo-crime of compulsion, whose in-store detection boosts the police success-rates. The police detection-rate of real crime is unbelievably low: less than 20%.

Shoplifting is also a symptom of certain diseases of the brain, especially Herpes simplex encephalitis. Although I suffer from some obscure and minor kind of encephalitis (undiagnosed), my shoplifting probably pre-dates it. In any case, I would not wish to justify shoplifting on medical grounds, for the medicalisation of society has long since exceeded the bounds of sanity. I would justify shoplifting from all but small and specialist shops on the same grounds as the punishers: supermarkets and chain-stores rip off their suppliers (and ultimately the planet) causing the poor to get poorer, themselves and their shareholders and Elected Representatives and rulers to get ever richer.

Neither the police (of course), nor the judiciary, nor the legal profession have raised their voices to prevent the ridiculous waste of money involved in prosecuting people (usually women) who pilfer underwear, food, or marker-pens. If shops insist on doing everything to make their goods tempting, they should do their own dirty work. They happily make a profit of up to 1000% on what they sell - partly, I suppose, to cover the huge costs of CCTV cameras and the staff to operate and maintain them.

Britain with its notorious voyeuristic culture is completely besotted by Closed-circuit Television systems. Whole towns are under minute supervision, and many open roads, too. The insane 'War against Terror' is even more disquieting than you think.

shoplifting poem by william carlos williams

While Anglophones love to have criminals to fear and punish, they are amazingly indulgent towards big-time criminals such as Stock-market insider-fraud, tax-evaders, and other 'white-collar' criminals who defraud not only the state but pension funds as well. These are high-status macho criminals. Shoplifting is a female crime of low status - and, of course, the lower the status of the crime the more severe the relative punishment. Fiddling expenses, on the other hand, is almost never prosecuted. It is, more even than 'crimes against humanity', the most common crime of executive Heads of State.
Had Jean Genet been British, he would have been executed before he became one of Europe's greatest and most uncomfortable writers. Genet observed that police depend on criminals for their job-security and thus are bound into a vicious circle. The same is true of the anti-shoplifting industry, which now includes not only 'consultants' but counsellors - richly feeding off and dependent upon petty criminals.
Only in Britain (and, of course, the United States) would the compulsive and foolish Oscar Wilde have been so viciously treated.

According to the Facts About Shoplifting link on the (semi-literate) Shoplifters Alternative website, one out of every 11 people in the United States is a shoplifter.
How denunciatory the other ten people would be is harder to establish. Ethnic/cultural origin and family background would play a part. Probably one or two would regard it as relatively harmless and understandable (given the way goods are displayed in shops where staff congregate talking around a till), while one or two would regard it as more outrageous than sexual harassment, or religious or racial intolerance.

Shoplifters Alternative tells us that now, at last, shoplifting is being looked at as yet another Process Addiction over which some people could be powerless. (A Process Addiction is a compulsive behaviour in which a person becomes dependent on the whole behavioural process for a result, rather than on a chemical. Gambling, sex, collecting things and ambition are just four obvious, different and much-encouraged examples of process addictions.)
An addictive 'rush' can be induced by specific risky behaviours that can alter a person's emotional state through the release of adrenaline. As with jay-walking (or bungee-jumping, rock-climbing or bomb-defusing) the addictive effect of shoplifting is enhanced by success - i.e. by not being apprehended. People continue to do it even after they are caught and shamed and fined or sent to prison.

Shoplifters Alternative defines two categories of shoplifters: professional and non-professional. A professional shoplifter steals to resell merchandise (usually for a fraction of its retail value), perhaps in order to satisfy other addictive behaviour such as drug-taking. Although there are gangs of professionals who steal very expensive items, most professionals are poor.

The non-professional shoplifter is someone who obtains some emotional satisfaction from the process of stealing successfully. This individual is not stealing just for monetary or material gain but (also) to medicate a feeling of injustice or an internal conflict.

Reasons for non-professional shoplifting include the attempt to overcome unresolved issues toward an authority figure; a sense of social injustice; a sense of entitlement to overpriced goods (or due to the aggressive environment of the shop); the relief of stress through the adrenaline rush associated with the process of stealing; the abatement of emotional discomfort linked to feelings of depression, anxiety, anger, grief, powerlessness or boredom.

Walmart (Asda in the BritIsles) is, of course, the greatest robber baron in history.
The world's poorest are forced by supermarkets to subsidise, by disease, starvation and labour,
the underpriced groceries and clothing of the rich.

In an article titled "Shoplifting Can Be Addictive" by Shoplifters Alternative, the authors claim to describe the process that occurs as the shoplifter enters a store until he or she leaves. This alleged dynamic "involves a concurrent continuum of tension and excitement as the shoplifter contrives to conceal an item and eventually or quickly leave the store with it. Tension builds as the shoplifter encounters potential threats to the process and a sensation of excitement each time a possible threat, such as a salesperson or hidden camera, is overcome. The ultimate "high" occurs when the shoplifter's tension turns into excitement as he or she successfully leaves the store without being caught. This "high" temporarily relieves the emotional dilemma, whether positive or negative, that precipitated the theft process."

This wacky analysis has been dreamed up by someone who has never shoplifted. To some (especially poor) shoplifters he whole process is stressful. Leaving a shop without being apprehended does not necessarily produce much of a "high" - it can just as easily produce a feeling of relief. To complicate the complex, a Shoplifters Alternative survey found that 80% of shoplifters said that they didn't even think about getting caught.

In another piece of tergid jargon, they say that published reports suggest that there are no specific demographics that delineate the profile of the 'typical' shoplifter from others. However, it has been found that adults steal more than teenagers (only a small proportion of offenders caught are under 18), and that one third of those caught find it difficult not to re-offend. (In France I still steal food items from supermarkets, such as cheeses or coffee under my armpits or in underpants. In Northern Ireland I do the same in Asda-Walmart, just to keep my hand in, for there the tag-alarms are often not manned, so printer-cartridges can be stolen even without cutting off the security-tag!)

Shoplifters Alternative sensibly considers shoplifting to be distinct from kleptomania - because 'the stealing-behaviour' of a kleptomaniac is impulsive rather than due to a compulsive psychological/physiological need. Kleptomania is also not premeditative.

What many store-owners refuse to realise is that crude fluorescent lighting, harsh décor, screaming displays of goods (not to mention tinnily-broadcast aggressive music and advertising) encourage - if not actually create - shoplifters.

Shoplifters tend, of course, to regard their (often infrequent) activity as a victimless crime, no matter what background they have. After the first occasion, many people quickly become addicted to the little satisfaction of stealing something and getting away with it. Some, indeed, may not plan to steal when they first go into a mall or hypermarket or store, but they can't help it once they're inside. This suggests that there is, after all, no difference between addictive shoplifting and kleptomania.

Other websites remark that soon as a new anti-shoplifting measure is introduced - whether directed against theft by staff (more than 50% of the loss-value of all store-theft) or by potential customers - people find some way to beat it. Stores, needless to say, spend millions of dollars trying to stop shoplifters: a bit like trying to catch water in a sieve. The cost of prevention and of shrinkage are passed on in the retail price.

In the 'good old days' of the 1960s, before global warming was even dreamt of (though the hideous overpopulation of the planet was a concern for some), I could walk into a record and hi-fi store with a large raffia bag and casually put a big Bang & Olufsen tuner-amplifier into it and walk out. With the same bag I subsequently stole many LPs - classical, of course. My large raincoat, bag and beard were simply ignored in favour of my 'polite' accent and interest in Sibelius symphonies - even though I bought nothing in the store! I am, if anything, ever-anomalous. Today, I would have to be much more subtle and savvy. But today, such items can be obtained so cheaply that I prefer, in the lovely twilight of my life, to buy them through eBay or download them through Torrent sites.

"Experts" say that the most popular stores affected by shoplifters are grocery stores.
Thefts from retail outlets occur mostly in urban main shopping areas. The figures for the city of Sheffield (England) have remained steady over several years at about 3,000 - which is, of course, is an unquantifiable fraction of offences committed.

Apart from the carton of apple-juice, this man is also carrying
2 x 250g packets of coffee in his armpits, two Rocamadour cheeses
in his underwear, and a flat sheep's cheese in each pocket.

 

 

The picture below is criminal in Britain, because one of the photographs involved in this picture was taken in a slaughterhouse. It is criminal even to take photographs inside a meat-market. It is a crime to piss against a wall.
It is a crime for a man to have sexual, especially non-penetrative, fun with two or more other men.
Never mind that abattoirs are crimes against nature.

The same viciousness is apparent in America, where it is also a crime to take photographs in slaughterhouses.
It is interesting that anglophone Britain and America are two of the most moralistic and militaristic Empires in history - and Britain the most criminal empire in history - precisely because of .their moralistic hypocrisy riding upon an obsession with achievement like Pelion on Ossa.
This (and their attitude to shoplifting) may have something to do with the adversarial (rather than investigative) basis of their legal systems.

What a sense of satisfaction I had when I gave away my British Passport.
I have contributed nothing (for example through direct taxation) to the malignant state, enriched by slavery, that invented capitalism and its ingenious machines, and waged war against the world for three hundred years with crimes against humanity and nature, including speciecide all over the planet, genocide in Australia & Tasmania, and attempted or partial genocide in India, Burma, Canada, Southern Africa - and Highland Scotland.

I am a pseudo-criminal in a criminal state - a state which actually celebrates its most monstrous monarch, Henry VIII, the Saddam Hussein of the 16th century. I have gone back to shops which caught and successfully prosecuted me for trivial appropriation-of-goods offences, and I have stolen ten times as much stuff to give away to Charity Shops and the like. As with the 'War on Terror' and the 'War on Drugs', the war on shoplifters cannot be won.