This Will Certainly End Well: Retailers Are Equipping Employees With Body Cameras To Limit Theft

Retailers have increased their reliance on cameras over the years to cut down on retail theft. In more recent years, they’ve been adding more tech to their surveillance arsenal, including automatic plate readers in their parking lots and facial recognition capabilities to their existing CCTV networks.

And yet, the nation is inundated with (mostly anomalous and anecdotal) new reports about unprecedented increases in retail theft. Of course, this isn’t indicative of the retail sector as a whole — something that was pointed out by none other than a group that specializes in retail analysis. Its take on the retail theft “spike” was that while there were some isolated areas where this was a problem, in most cases, it was retailers seeking to hide other business failures under the eye-grabbing area rug of “retail crime spree” headlines.

Whether or not the crime wave is real, retailers have always been trying to limit “shrink,” the in-house term used to cover everything from smash-and-grab robberies to employees skimming cash from the tills.

But this cannot possibly be considered a reasonable solution to the retail theft problem:

Retail giant TJX, the parent of TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, said it’s equipping some store employees with body cameras to thwart shoplifting and keep customers and employees safe.

TJX finance chief John Klinger disclosed the body-camera initiative on an earnings call last month. “It’s almost like a de-escalation, where people are less likely to do something when they’re being videotaped,” he said.

Jesus. It’s not even the extra surveillance or the possibility the cameras might be abused by employees to capture footage they definitely should be capturing (like wandering around restrooms or changing rooms). That part of it is only a minor concern.

The biggest concern is the one brushed off so easily by TJX’s “finance chief.” His belief that equipping low-paid hourly workers with body cams will “de-escalate” anything is indicative of his ignorance. These are the words of someone who’s never worked on the floor of a retail outlet at any point in his life.

Do you know what happens when an hourly employee in full uniform starts following a suspected thief? In far too many cases, it escalates things. Sure, there are a few would-be thieves who will abandon their shoplifting plans when it’s apparent they’re being scrutinized. But if people have wandered into a store to commit crimes, the most common response is to go after the person who appears to be trailing them around the store. At best, it will just be verbal attacks. At worst, it will be physical violence.

And it’s not like any of the executives quoted or referred to in this story are suggesting they’ll be paying employees more for providing customer service while also acting as surveillance cameras. Most large retailers have in-house “loss prevention” teams that operate in plain clothes, making it much easier to catch thieves while remaining undetected.

Pinning a camera to the shirt of a uniformed employee just puts them in additional danger and subjects them to additional verbal abuse, because even non-shoplifters are going to get mouthy when they notice their actions are being recording by someone who’s just hourly.

Here’s what the rollout looks like so far:

The job of these security workers “was to just stand there with the tactical vest labeled ‘security,’ and the camera mounted on the vest,” said the employee, who spoke under the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

“It feels like the implementation of this program with the cameras isn’t meant to achieve anything, but rather just something the company can point to” to say it is improving security.

These employees are instructed — as almost all retail employees are — to stay out of actual theft situations. They’re instructed not to stop or pursue suspected thieves.

So, why even bother placing someone at the front of the store with a uniform and a camera if you’re not actually trailing suspected thieves? Well, one has to assume these employees will become much more mobile if the retailer desires it. A Marshalls store in Miami Beach, Florida states that the cameras are designed to record “specific events involving critical incidents for legal, safety, and training purposes.” To accomplish that, the employee — the one wearing the camera — will be expected to be on the scene in incidents like these, which is generally not what hourly employees are expected to do in retail environments.

It’s truly a half-assed rollout and it’s setting everyone up for failure. Either it will make non-loss prevention hourly jobs more dangerous, or it will have zero effect because would-be criminals haven’t been deterred by dozens or hundreds of cameras already present in retail outlets.

Whether it has any effect at all won’t stop companies from buying cameras, so the leader in law enforcement body camera outfitting has already started positioning itself to grab a majority of this new market.

Axon Enterprise, which owns Taser and primarily develops technology and products for police, launched a “Body Workforce” camera this year for retail and health care workers.

These cameras are lighter than ones Axon develops for police offers because they don’t record for as long and require as much a battery life, Axon President Joshua Isner said at an analyst conference last month. They are also a more “inviting product, instead of more of like a militaristic” camera worn by police, he said.

And so it goes. Cops are looking more and more like military personnel. Mall cops are looking more like real cops. And mall personnel are well on their way to looking like mall cops. If nothing else, the body cam industry can expect healthy year-over-year increases, even if their retail customers continue to struggle.