“Oh Shit Syndrome”

CAS, JHC

We knew—in fact, everyone in the security business knew—that the biggest problem on the floor in catching shoplifters was some innocent customer or sales associate coming on the scene and inadvertently “burning” what surely was going to be, if uninterrupted, a theft followed by an arrest. The eye contact was all that was necessary to spoil a shoplifting act in progress. This was the nemesis of the store detective—good work shattered by eye contact.

In the 1970s I labeled this the “Oh Shit Syndrome,” i.e., the emotional and personal reaction on the part of a person engaged in an evil deed because of the inevitable sense of guilt (guilt aura) and belief he or she has been detected by virtue of seeing someone looking at him or her. It wasn’t a “scientifically” proven phenomenon, but rather recognition of reality.

In view of that “reality,” it led to one of your authors taking the lion’s share of the store detective staff and outfitting them in red blazers with a gold-embroidered “security” patch on the pocket, and training them to patrol the floor for the purpose of making eye contact with every customer possible. We pursued this experiment with the firm belief we would prevent more possible acts of shoplifting then ever before imagined. It worked! The agents, amazed at what they were witnessing, reported they would go down one aisle, turn to the left, and find themselves facing a woman who could almost be heard saying (sometimes they did hear) “Oh shit!” and the customer would reverse direction and stash an item under other merchandise and proceed out the store. Other customers would promptly produce an item from their purses or bags, an item the agent knew nothing about, and say words to the effect of “I didn’t want this anyhow.” Numerous “preventions” occurred each day compared to the number of detentions. The “Red Coats,” as they became known, found the work rewarding, with visible and quantitative results.

The cream of the store detective staff, those who were predictably effective (those who could sense the aura of guilt), were left to continue with their detection and apprehension work. That meant, if a person wasn’t deterred by the presence of the Red Coats and opted to shoplift anyhow, he or she risked arrest by the traditional store detectives. Once the detectives were detained, those shoplifters were invariably baffled by our strategy and expressed resentment over being fooled to think we were only preventing thefts.

On-the-Job Training (OJT)

CAS, JHC

There are two basic strategies to training: on-the-job training (OJT) and formal classroom training. OJT can be a totally unstructured, unplanned, ill-advised teaming up of a new employee with whomever is available, or it can be a meaningful and informative process that adequately prepares the novice to perform satisfactorily in a relatively short period of time. The difference lies in properly structuring the experience and the careful selection of the trainer.(1)

Structured OJT is a powerful and effective tool to train the new employee to perform in keeping with the full expectations of management. “Structure” means and includes the following:

Regrettably, more often than not, so-called OJT is unstructured and is but a façade, providing less than a meaningful learning experience, but many retailers see it as an expeditious and inexpensive strategy of transitioning the novice into a “productive” employee. In reality it’s shameful for retailing to subject the public to the risk of being detained by a loss prevention officer who doesn’t even know or understand the state law addressing the crime that the officer is attempting to enforce. Even sales associates get more structured training in learning how to operate a register or POS terminal than many LP agents receive. New hires can be productive, not necessarily efficiently so, in folding or rehanging clothes or restocking goods or loading or unloading trailers with little training, without serious consequences if mistakes are made. Why, then, do many retailers place LP agents in service without even rudimentary training in their obligations under merchant’s detention laws, considering the dire consequences which frequently flow when they exceed their authority or make other errors when detaining shoplifters?

As experienced consultants and expert witnesses involved in many significant lawsuits against retailers, we see that the issue of training, or its absence, tends to be a focal point for plaintiff attorneys representing a “customer” who somehow was injured as a consequence of the LP agents action. The skillful lawyer can chew up and spit out most companies’ claims they adequately trained their agents through OJT. Plaintiffs’ attorneys will have the jury see the agent was assigned to work alongside another agent who was never properly trained and ill prepared to train a new, inexperienced agent. In a significant case, the plaintiffs will require the “trainer” to appear in court and then expose the “trainer” as inadequately trained, with perhaps a history of the same errors of performance that his or her “trainee” committed and that constitute the issues that drive the case being presently litigated.

Bottom line: The new hire learns what the trainer likes and dislikes about the company, what supervisors and mangers the trainer likes and dislikes, the company’s policies and procedures as filtered by the trainer, the “shortcuts” that can be taken, what policies to ignore, where the hot buttons are, whom to avoid, and where to go for lunch. That’s the downstream consequence of unstructured OJT.

Fortunately, some retailers understand and agree with the preceding diatribe and have instituted professionally structured OJT programs that ensure the new employee understands what the company wants, why the company wants it, and how the company wants it done, as well as the potential consequences to both the agent and the company when errors are made. Based on that learning experience, the employee can go forward and serve the best interests of the company in productive and constructive fashion.

Organized Retail Theft

King Rogers

A young teenage female is in the cosmetics aisle. She is dressed in a hooded sweatshirt that zips all the way up the front, with half pockets on each side of the zipper. She is wearing it half zipped, and the hood drapes in folds down her back. In her jeans she looks just like any other teenage girl from the high school three blocks away. She is looking over the lip gloss display rack and checking out a few different shades. As you observe her on the video monitor to your upper left front in the loss prevention office, you wonder if she is going to go for it or not. So far, no telltale signs like furtively looking around or picking up a tube of lip gloss and walking away from the display rack and checking to see if anyone is following her.

Movement on the video screen alongside to the right catches your eye. Several aisles over in the razor and razor blade aisle, an older male has just walked up the aisle and turned around to walk back. He is carrying a shopping bag by the handles from a grocery store across the street. Probably nothing, you say to yourself as you turn back to watch the adolescent in cosmetics. If she takes the lip gloss and sticks it in her pocket as she walks away from the display, it will be a quick and easy apprehension, a “stat” for your self-kept records.

You glance back to the screen on the right and, just as you do, you observe the gentleman easily and quickly remove razor blade pack after pack from the peg hooks and drop each one into the grocery bag he is carrying. He swiftly moves from peg hook to peg hook, cleaning off each one with sure, deft movements. In only a third or less of the time that the young woman pondered the lip gloss decision, this man had swept almost all the razor blade packages from the peg hooks and was leaving the aisle.

He turns left onto the “racetrack” and walks briskly toward the front of the store. As you try to follow him by “handing him off from one camera to the next,” he suddenly turns left again into an aisle where there is no camera coverage. That’s the aisle where the bulk paper goods are stocked, and they are not a high-risk category. You momentarily lose sight of him. Some 10 seconds later you spot him again, this time nearing the exit of the store. He is empty handed. There is no grocery bag in sight.

You are working that part of the shift alone. There is no backup to radio for assistance, so you quickly leave the loss prevention office and head for the front exit of the store. As you arrive at the exit, the man has walked out onto the sidewalk in front of the store and headed into the parking lot. Several other customers are also leaving the store: a couple of women pushing shopping carts with bagged merchandise in them and, there she is, the teenager you were watching in cosmetics. Suddenly, the EAS alarm begins to insistently sound, just as the young woman goes through the pedestals. You quickly move into position, identify yourself, and politely and professionally ask her if she has any merchandise that she might have forgotten to pay for. She knows you know. She is very new at this impulsive opportunistic shoplifting, and immediately her eyes well up with tears as she pulls the lip gloss from the right front pocket of her sweatshirt to try to return it to you. Following proper procedures, you direct her to accompany you to the loss prevention office and signal a female store associate to come with you. Once all three of you are in the office, you bring up the case report screen on the desktop and begin to ask her the questions that will provide you with her identity, including her age. As you suspected, she is a sophomore student in the local high school. You call her mother’s work number and tell her mom what has happened and ask her to come to the store to pick up her daughter.

An hour later, the teenager and her mother are gone, and all your paperwork is complete. You then remember the older male and go to the paper goods aisle to see if you can find the bag. It is not there. You return to the razor blade aisle and see that it has been cleaned out. A stocking associate standing there says to you, “I can’t understand it. I just filled this area this morning.” Your heart sinks. While you went after the $6.99 lip gloss and an easy “stat,” $832.00 worth of razor blades left the store unpaid for.

What happened to this loss prevention agent is not that unusual. If he had been able to observe what happened in the paper goods aisle, he would have seen a very quick and surreptitious handoff to a female customer who passed the man in the aisle. They made very little eye contact and did not even slow down as the handoff occurred. She placed the shopping bag, which was full of razor blades, into her shopping cart along with store bags containing a few cheap items she had already purchased. She was one of the two women who exited the store when the EAS alarm sounded. The grocery bag from the store across the street was lined with foil and duct tape, and the tagged merchandise inside the bag did not trigger the EAS alarm. In fact, the alarm was triggered by an item in a bag belonging to the other woman who was exiting the store at the same time. This customer had actually purchased the offending item, but the cashier had failed to deactivate the EAS tag contained inside the package. A series of unfortunate circumstances? Perhaps. But scenes like the one just described happen in retail stores all over the world every day.

If a person is a crook, thief, or someone who just wants to make a quick, easy buck, participating in organized retail theft may just be the perfect crime. As a “booster,” this person doesn’t work too hard or too long, there is relatively minimum risk, the payoffs can be huge (and tax-free), and usually no one gets hurt. Plus, even if this person gets caught, the consequences are little more than a slap on the wrist. But the retailers and the consuming public are the ones who suffer because organized retail theft (ORT) is not a victimless crime.

The victims in organized retail theft are many. First, the direct victim is the retailer whose bottom line is negatively affected. Retailers lose millions of dollars in merchandise each year to ORT. Their plundered shelves remain empty until the losses are discovered and are restocked, and their stores become less safe for their employees and their customers as the professional thieves, the “boosters,” become more and more brazen. The second victim is the consumer; every person in America is victimized as prices are increased to cover the losses generated by ORT. The consumer is also the victim because, when those stolen goods reenter the marketplace after being tampered with, their safety is possibly compromised. Local, state, and federal governments are victimized, as the tax revenue base is eroded because the sales tax on the stolen merchandise was not realized, and the booster certainly does not claim the proceeds from selling boosted merchandise to the IRS.

ORT has been connected to some of the major issues facing the United States today: terrorism, illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and other homeland security issues. Some tentacles of ORT are connected to funding terrorism and impacting homeland security, but this issue is more of an economic problem for retailers and our communities than it is anything else. There are crimes associated with organized criminal enterprises woven throughout ORT. Money laundering, gangs, illegal immigration, and black marketing are just some of the legal challenges associated with ORT.

In typical shoplifting incidents, the perpetrator is someone who works alone and steals either for thrills or to get something that he or she will use. This person sometimes shoplifts while selecting items for which he or she intends to pay. The typical shoplifter steals one, two, or a few items generally for personal use. The typical shoplifter is very different from a booster, a thief who is involved in organized retail theft. A booster is part of a large, sometimes loosely, sometimes formally arranged network of thieves, “fences” (who buy from the boosters) and dishonest wholesalers and retailers who, in an organized hierarchical structure, steal from retail stores and eventually sell those items back to the public. Boosters often work together with other boosters. They will enter the store separately, and one may take the items and then later give them to the other booster, as in the scenario described earlier. Or one booster may intentionally take an item or two and then walk away from the targeted items, causing assets protection personnel to pursue that decoy booster while one or two others then go in and steal multiple items. In fact, in the earlier scenario, the young woman, if she was involved in the larger theft, could easily have been a decoy if she had “ditched” the lip gloss before leaving the store. The number of items stolen is another way in which boosters differ from the typical shoplifter. Whereas the typical shoplifter steals only a few items, a booster will go in and steal armfuls of targeted merchandise. They know they have an outlet for the merchandise they are stealing. Clearly, these items are not intended for personal use, but rather for reselling to a fence; ultimately, the items find their way back to the public. Stealing is often a booster’s full-time job and sole means of income. Some boosters make several hundred thousand dollars per year, tax free, own their homes, pay for their children’s educations, and look like a typical suburban family. The booster will hit a number of stores on a typical day of stealing, going from one retailer to another to get all the products he or she intends to steal and then sell. Boosters steal hundreds of dollars of merchandise from one store and then repeat the same activity in four or five more stores that same day. Multiply the $832 in our previous scene by the five or six stores that hit that day, and we are talking about serious money—in this case, almost $5,000 for a day’s “work.” The booster may only receive 20% of the retail value, but any way you look at this scenario, $1,000 a day, tax free, is a pretty good income.

So, to whom do boosters sell the stolen merchandise? Who buys it from them?

Well, the next person in our illicit supply chain could be a “fence,” or it could even be another retailer, usually one that is small and is generally a neighborhood store. The fence is not a retailer, but the person in an organization who buys all the things that the booster steals. The fence typically works with a number of boosters. The fence also works with people higher up in this illegal supply chain. The fence could then unload the merchandise in any of the following ways:

Repackaging operations use a number of ways to “clean” the stolen items, making them as untraceable as possible back to their original retailers. These operations usually occupy about a 3,000 square foot space and often employ illegal immigrants to clean the items, removing any sticky security tags or price tickets and adhesive residue with lighter fluid or other solvents. They also alter lot numbers and expiration dates to make it harder to trace the origin and original destination of the items. Obviously, this activity can cause huge safety issues, from product tampering to the inability for a manufacturer to recall products to products losing their potency due to expired shelf life. Employing illegal immigrants is useful to these operations because what they are doing is illegal in every way. The government will have no record of the operation or even who worked there, since there is no documentation for the IRS or ICE. The cleaned merchandise is then often repacked into larger bottles or larger multipacks, and then packed into cardboard shipping boxes which appear legitimate to the untrained eye, as the cartons are even stamped with the legitimate manufacturer’s logo. The “cleaner” the items are, the further out the expiration date, the higher the price that will be paid by the illicit purchaser.

The illicit purchaser could be a wholesaler who buys the stolen product and perhaps comingles it with illegally diverted products, counterfeit products, and even products legitimately obtained from the manufacturer. These wholesalers can be described as looking like an iceberg: we can see part of the huge chunk of ice sticking out above the surface of the water (the legal part of these operations), but there is a very large illegitimate business that is not easily seen lurking beneath the surface of the water. The part of the business this wholesaler conducts that is not readily seen is the purchase and sale of stolen products, counterfeit products, and products that have been illegally diverted. Illegal diversion occurs when products are purchased from a manufacturer for less than what they would normally be sold by the manufacturer because they are purchased under the pretense that they are intended to go to another country where they are then retailed for substantially less than they sell for in the United States. The diversion is illegal because a crime has been committed (false pretenses, altered documentation, etc.). Counterfeit products are those that were not made by the manufacturer who owns the rights to make the products, and these counterfeit products might very well contain hazardous ingredients. This unsavory part of the wholesaler’s business (the part of the iceberg that lurks beneath the surface of the water) then gets comingled with the legitimate part of the wholesaler’s business (the tip of the iceberg we see on top of the water), which is products purchased from the manufacturer in a legitimate business deal. The wholesaler then sells the comingled goods to unsuspecting retailers who can purchase the entire order of goods from the wholesaler for substantially less than they can purchase them for directly from the manufacturer.

Obviously, retailers also have a problematic role in this illegal supply chain. When a retailer knowingly buys products from a questionable source, whether or not they know the products they are getting are legitimate, they are making it possible for this entire illegal chain to remain in business. One of the reasons a retailer might be tempted to do business with a questionable wholesaler is the intense price competition in the retail market. If retailers can get an item at a lower price from a wholesaler than they can get it from the manufacturer, these retailers may choose to do so because they will make more money and be much more competitive even if they sell it at a very low price to the consumer. Retailers may claim that they have no knowledge of a wholesaler’s illegal practices, but this isn’t always true. When a retailer’s purchase order with an illegitimate wholesaler includes contractual language that states that the retailer is not liable for any problems with the product that they get from the wholesaler, we have to suspect that there is knowledge or at least suspicion on behalf of the retailer regarding the legitimacy of the wholesaler’s business practices and product safety. Retailers are taking a huge liability risk when they agree to sell questionably obtained products. Who knows how safe or unsafe these products may be? The adage probably holds true: You do get what you pay for. Retailers must hold themselves to a higher standard and refuse to do business with these questionable wholesalers. By doing so, the retailers are doing their part by refusing to again participate in this illegal supply chain.

What makes certain products more attractive to boosters than others? As in traditional retail environments, stores stock more of what sells well and less of what sells slowly. Likewise, boosters steal more of what they can sell faster and for a higher return against the full retail value. Items that are most popular with the public are also those most often stolen. Boosters sell things that are in high demand, things that are easy to resell, commodity-type items that are small and easy to move, as well as items that can be easily stolen in large quantities from a store or the supply chain. During the early part of the 21st century, items that topped the most stolen list included razor blades, film, batteries, infant formula, smoking cessation products, analgesics, and other over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. What made these items more attractive to the thief and not others? They are all relatively small items, which makes them easy to steal. All these items are readily available on store shelves. They are in high demand with consumers. And they are all easy to repackage, which makes them easier to sell back to retailers and to the public.

Today, however, the boosters have grown in both number and acts of thefts. The targeted products they choose to steal have also grown in assortment and diversity. If an item is good enough to be offered for sale to consumers, there is a market demand for it and therefore it is subject to be stolen. In the 1970s, leaders of ethnic organizations would meet at a restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, every Monday morning. At that meeting, these leaders would agree on which geographical area their organizations would go steal from for the balance of the week. The ethnicity was various Central and South American countries, and the leaders might decide that the Peruvians were to go to Michigan and Ohio, the Ecuadorians to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the Chileans to Maryland and Virginia, and so forth. They did this every week because they didn’t want to “stumble” onto another gang’s territory while that group was working it, and they didn’t want the same faces in the same stores week after week. These groups targeted brand name apparel from department stores, and they sold the stolen goods through small shops in ethnic neighborhoods in big cities. Often, these shops were not known by the general public, and customers found out about them by word of mouth.

Organizations behind ORT vary in structure from very loose to the more traditional hierarchical structure involved in other types of organized crime. Ethnicity is still sometimes a factor in the organization, but ethnic origin is now as varied as citizens and noncitizens alike in America. There are Asian groups, Middle Eastern groups, Eastern European groups, Russians, South and Central Americans, etc. There also are nonethnic groups that are criminal enterprises engaging in this low-risk, high-reward criminal activity.

So, how did these groups get started, how have they grown, and how do they recruit the boosters to steal for them? Essentially, many of the groups started relatively small in number, and their leadership was simply inclined to criminal behavior. As they enjoyed early success in their stealing and fencing activities, they began to recruit others into their organizations because the rewards were attractive. Illegal immigrants joined the ethnic enterprises, and prisoners serving time for other criminal activity were recruited by organizations with tentacles in prisons during conversations occurring in exercise yards when the topic “what are you going to do when you get out” came up.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of the mass merchant chains with stores around the country began to recognize the growing problem of ORT and began to take proactive steps to attack the issue. Small, very mobile teams of investigators were formed to ferret out this activity. At first, trying to stop it was like the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike to stop the flood as it felt like the teams were relatively ineffective in impacting these swarms of boosters and the organizations behind them. But soon a few successful cases occurred, some of the teams began to work together with each other (after all, this was a common enemy these competitive retailers were confronting), and they leveraged their success with state and federal law enforcement agencies. Although there was no formal training program in those early days, many of the leadership in loss prevention hired former law enforcement personnel with experience in conducting investigations, conducting surveillance, and resolving large multistate property crime rings. Those early efforts by retail loss prevention practitioners have evolved to the point where there are now formal training programs for selected ORT investigators, store-based loss prevention teams, and best practices by store operations in detecting, observing, and reporting evidence and incidents of ORT activity in the stores.

In the scenario at the beginning of this section, the loss prevention agent made some wrong choices. When the agent observed the older man with the grocery bag in the aisle merchandising the razor blades, he should have immediately gone to the selling floor to continue the surveillance without the cameras when he realized there were not enough cameras installed throughout the store to provide full video coverage of the selling floor. Had the agent done this, the teenaged girl would probably have been able to successfully steal the lip gloss. But given the loss of the lip gloss value compared to the loss of the razor blades, the agent obviously made the wrong decision.

It is not the intent of this section to be a training manual to teach loss prevention agents how to resolve the issue of ORT. Those training programs exist in many of the more forward-thinking and proactive retail loss prevention departments today, and experienced loss prevention consulting firms have developed some programs that can assist retailers in combating ORT.

However, it is necessary to point out that store loss prevention personnel should deal with persons suspected of engaging in ORT as professional boosters very differently than they would handle typical shoplifters. When dealing with a typical shoplifter, generally the store detective or loss prevention agent observes the shoplifter come in empty handed, look around, and take an item or two and conceal it on his or her person. The shoplifter might then select some other items for purchase but never declare the item that is concealed when he or she is at the point of purchase. This person pays for some items, but not the concealed one, and then leaves the store. The store detective stops the person at the exit (although policy and state statute may require different action to be taken), identifies himself or herself as security personnel, and then asks the shoplifter to come into the office to talk about what wasn’t paid for. The security agent asks the shoplifter to come with him or her so that both the stolen products as well as the person can be identified. The security agent makes sure that he or she is following all applicable state laws and company policies and procedures while interviewing the detained suspect. This method is effective in prosecuting shoplifters but is not as effective or relevant to persons suspected of engaging in ORT as boosters.

The loss prevention agent can certainly follow the same procedure with a professional booster, but to what end? When a professional booster is sweeping product from shelves and peg hooks into his or her bags or pockets, it is vital that the loss prevention agent gathers as much evidence as possible so that he or she is not just stopping this incident, but is having an effect on the ORT criminal organization beyond that one thief among many. Some loss prevention agents have been trained to observe but not stop these individuals in order to see where they go when they leave the store. The key is to observe and report. Loss prevention agents should record the description of the individuals involved in the incident, as well as the vehicle make and model and plate number that the suspected thieves get into. Obviously, video recordings of these individuals will become very helpful in later proceedings, provided that the rules of custody for this evidence are understood and in place. This information should then be reported to law enforcement. Often, if reported to law enforcement as the theft unfolds, it may enable law enforcement to take immediate action, such as continued surveillance or even apprehension.

Someone who is trained may then make the decision to stop the thief upon exiting the store or, instead, to keenly observe and report for follow-up action by others. The objective when engaging in ORT investigation is to follow the money, go all the way up the snake to the extent you can. There is an old saying that the only way to kill a snake is to cut off its head. Well-trained investigators may communicate with other well-trained investigators about certain known boosters and their methods of operations. And, if they are trained, they may even follow a professional booster to a fencing location. But at that point their surveillance must stop unless they have been instructed by law enforcement and have the permission of their employer’s general counsel. If they do continue their involvement because they have been directed by law enforcement and they have permission for the company’s legal counsel, they do so “under color of law.” That means that they have the same legal restrictions and obligations as sworn law enforcement has. It is, therefore, usually wiser to let law enforcement do their job while retail loss prevention investigators performs their responsibility representing the private sector and not sworn law enforcement.

Statutorily, there is no provision in any state’s retail theft statute to continue the investigation of a retail thief outside the store. It is essential to work cooperatively with law enforcement when dealing with ORT boosters. If a loss prevention agent apprehends a booster, then he or she should ask the right questions but not expect to get the answers he or she is seeking. For example, who are you working for? Where were you intending to take this merchandise? Where was the last stop you made? Is there other stolen product in your car? If the booster says yes to that question, the LP agent cannot search the car. Law enforcement has to conduct the search of the car and only under the following circumstances: (a) with the permission of the owner of the vehicle or (b) if the contraband is in plain view or (c) with a search warrant or (d) incidental to a lawful arrest. All the LP agent’s efforts will go down the drain if he or she conducts any part of the investigation illegally, which would include an illegal search and seizure.

It’s extremely important for you to know the laws of your state that apply to the location where you are doing your job. It is also important to document any information learned and enter it into the case management system. If you have any store surveillance video that has captured images of the suspects and/or their vehicles, then it should be entered into case management system as well. Law enforcement, from the officer who responds to the call from the store to the prosecutor who tries the case to the judge who hears the case, must all be educated about this problem of ORT in order to treat this offender as the professional thief he or she really is. Otherwise, the offender will likely fall through the cracks in the criminal justice platform and simply be treated as just another shoplifter.

How can we educate the criminal justice system, all retailers, and the public in general about this very real and rapidly growing problem?

The best defense against ORT is to develop a comprehensive plan. Good comprehensive plans are utilized effectively by some very different types of retailers. Some large store mass merchants, large department stores, regional grocery chains, national drug chains, and fashionable and trendy apparel specialty store chains have very effective comprehensive plans that work well in their stores. Components of the comprehensive plan include a trained loss prevention investigations team.

A well-known specialty chain developed such a team after management began to recognize that the company was being victimized by ORT. The team was trained to gather intelligence from the malls where their stores were located, to work with mall security and law enforcement to identify crews of boosters hitting the stores in the malls, to search for company merchandise being offered for sale on Internet auction sites, to look for their merchandise being sold in noncompany stores, and to understand the limitations of what they can and should do and what law enforcement is capable of doing. This chain provides store associate training and awareness which extends into providing intelligence support to the loss prevention investigations team. Store associates are trained to use an Incident Reporting Software program that includes a section for ORT. Associates can record detailed information about each incident, including the day; time of day; number of associates on the floor; which manager was working; the size, color, and type of product stolen; area of store; number of customers in the store; as well as any other relevant information. Investigators used this information and began to notice trends such as which days and what time of day incidents were most likely to occur.

And, finally, another key component in a comprehensive program is a legal strategy to support the investigators’ efforts in the apprehensions and prosecutions of ORT perpetrators. The legal strategy component is effective in educating prosecutors during the criminal proceedings, but it is even more effective in pursuing civil remedies through lawsuits against the ORT organizations. This strategy of aggressive civil penalties (damages, asset forfeitures, etc.) has driven some ORT organizations away from sending their boosters into the stores in this specialty chain. Chances are very good, however, that those boosters are still stealing somewhere. They will continue to seek retailer victims who are not as diligent in protecting themselves. This criminal displacement simply moves the theft elsewhere to the path of less resistance.

As long as there are stores selling merchandise, there will be some people who will be inclined to take that merchandise without paying the store for it. As long as there are people like that, the likelihood is great that some of them will steal in some type of organized manner. Because of this likelihood for continuing organized retail theft, ongoing diligence by the retail community will be essential to survival.