Last Thursday, a 400-pound man in his early thirties was confronted at a Macy’s in Oakland, California, and accused of shoplifting a hat from the men’s department. According to CBS News in San Francisco, “Security officers at the mall then attempted to arrest and detain Gomes, who allegedly resisted and assaulted security personnel, according to police.” The police were called, but on their way to the mall they received a follow-up report that the man had become unresponsive. He died later that evening at a hospital.
Our question: can security personnel really arrest suspected shoplifters?
Go easy on the fat insults, y’all. The guy’s dead.
“Dead shoplifter identified” [MercuryNews]
“Coroner ID’s Suspect Who Collapsed At E. Bay Mall” [CBS5.com]
(Photo: Gato Azul)
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@oakie: His source isn’t much different than the California Penal Code…
Security personnel can arrest shoplifters but it should be against store policy. It exposes the company to too much liability.
Laws in different states vary widely. In Idaho, there is a two-prong test to determine if a detainment was legal. It is legal for store security to detain you for suspected shoplifting if: 1. They have probable cause to believe that you were shoplifting, and 2. If the amount of time that they detain you was reasonable. In this case, the second clause does not really apply, since the guy died within a few minutes. But if they did have probable cause, they could make a citizen’s arrest.
@ecwis I agree that it exposes you to too much liability. I don’t know of any stores that will do this for a hat…big screen tv maybe….
BTW, Stoneridge Mall, where this happened, is in Pleasanton, not Oakland. A mall with an actual Macy’s in it in Oakland???? Thanks, I’ll be laughing about that one all day.
As mentioned above, this is called the “Shopkeepers Privilege” and allows companies “shopkeepers” to detain an individual who they have a reasonable belief shoplifted something. It has to be more than “he wouldn’t show his receipt”, but if they have a witness who saw him take it and try to leave, they are protected against a claim of false imprisonment. This is pretty well established tort law.
Urban Sprinting- You don’t steal anything, but walk out with a security tag and trigger the alarm:
Urban Sprinting will be the next batch of people throwing coffee on themselves in order to sue.
Macy’s was in the right here, but no doubt they will get sued, and Macy’s should win the suit so long as there isn’t more than meets the eye.
I live in Oakland, and I bemoan my driving times to go to Macy’s. There is no Macy’s in Oakland. A look at the store locator on the website confirms this. Where did they mean? Because I hate it when the San Franciscan news papers try to make our admitedly crime filled city look even worse.
@Claystil: I’m not sure. If he hadn’t been fat, but had had a weak heart or epilepsy or something else that could be affected by stress, I don’t know if the guards could be held liable — after all, you can’t know these things just by looking. You could argue that they should have known he was unhealthy because of his size, but morbid obesity has a different effect on every individual. One 400-pound man won’t have the same potentially lethal problems as another.
I also think that a good defense lawyer could convince a jury that the man had a role in causing his own death, since it was probably his violent physical resistance that caused the most strain.
Years and Years ago, I worked security for an “upscale” discount store. The corporate policy was that in order to detain someone for shoplifting you had to see them remove the item from the shelf and walk out of the store without paying for it. Once the person had picked up the item, they could not be out of your site, even for a second before leaving. If the person met that criteria you could detain them until the police arrived. We were given hand cuffs and allowed to use them if we needed to detain someone. And there were times two of us would literally run at full speed across a large parking lot to try and catch a shoplifter.
In those pre-hi-tech days we only had cameras pointed at the cash registers, not all around the store so we spent a lot of time peeking around corners. It was hard not to get “busted” trying to watch a suspect. And yes, we did have a “quota” of “arrests” to make each month and it was tracked quite closely, both in number and dollar value of the attempted theft.
@AMetamorphosis: The All-you-can-eat buffets in town are breathing a sigh of relief.
This case does bring up the issue of expecting security / law enforcement to make judgements of people’s health before the use of any force. Tasers have killed ~300 people so far. So much for it being non-lethal, not to mention the yet-to-be-studied long-term effects. With regards to this guy, he’s 400 lbs, so he obviously can’t move real quick. I’m not sure of exactly what went down, but they probably could have easily followed him and gotten his license plate #.
Also, why don’t stores in America have remote-locking doors like many in the UK do? Same for banks. I see bank robberies in the news pretty regularly here. In the UK they have security screens to protect the tellers and also have remote locks on the front doors which activate until authorities arrive.
Link to overview on Shopkeeper’s Privilege:
[en.wikipedia.org]
Very interesting, after reading several of these shoplifting threads, I looked up the Virginia law, and quite to my surprise, all you have to do to meet the definition of “shoplift” is conceal an item while you are still in the store! Wow.
Now I don’t know how they can prove intent at the scene, but they don’t seem to particularly care about that part of the law, judging from several recent police reports.
[leg1.state.va.us]
“Shoplift” means any one or more of the following acts committed by a person without the consent of the merchant and with the purpose or intent of appropriating merchandise to that person’s own or another’s use without payment, obtaining merchandise at less than its stated sales price, or otherwise depriving a merchant of all or any part of the value or use of merchandise: (i) removing any merchandise from the premises of the merchant’s establishment; (ii) concealing any merchandise; (iii) substituting, altering, removing, or disfiguring any label or price tag; (iv) transferring any merchandise from a container in which that merchandise is displayed or packaged to any other container; (v) disarming any alarm tag attached to any merchandise; or (vi) obtaining or attempting to obtain possession of any merchandise by charging that merchandise to another person without the authority of that person or by charging that merchandise to a fictitious person.
@CumaeanSibyl: That’s about what I was thinking, too. Maybe Macy’s should put up a sign warning pregnant women, the morbidly obese and people with heart conditions to not resist after being caught shoplifting.
@AnneCA:
I was just about to write what you said. A Macy’s in Oakland is like saying that Oakland is a crime-free town. Ha! Author Chris Walters…please correct this article to say “Pleasanton, CA; approximately 40 miles southeast of San Francisco.”
You could also throw in a piece about the town being a rich white suburb with snooty kids toting daddy’s $100k credit limit Visa card, but that might bias the story.
@dlynch: You really don’t have a clue. Security have the right to arrest someone only if they view a crime. Only if they view a crime. If they saw it on camera, they viewed it and can arrest. Now states are different. If a person conceals an item, that is theft, legally, and they can be arrested for it. Some states they must leave the premises for it to be considered theft. In some stores, regardless of the law, guards are not allowed to arrest someone until the leave the store.
These guys are only open to liability if the guy didn’t have anything on him. If someone is arrested and they didn’t steal, yeah you have false arrest and the company and guard can be held liable.
So to answer the question that you falsely answered, can security personnel really arrest suspected shoplifters? The answer is, only if they have direct knowledge that the person stole something. Beyond that, it’s a lawsuit.
What they thought was shoplifting, was gravitational pull. The guy was innocent.
They killed a guy over a hat?
@seth1066: All right, I think the idea is abominable, but I couldn’t help cracking up when the music from “Raising Arizona” started playing…