[jessaustin]

In July, three Walmart employees in Florida were charged with manslaughter after a shoplifter they chased and pinned down died of asphyxia.

No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don't get prosecuted for that.

This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic "let's take a shit on society to save some money" programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won't cause them to go out of business immediately, and they stop doing it. Even if they eventually have to restart in most locations, they still save money over the interim. If society really wanted to end this practice, society would stop bending over backwards to coddle large corporations, or even to allow them to exist in the first place.

TFA describes problems in lower-income urban and suburban settings. Maybe these are the Wal-Mart stereotype, but Wal-Mart has stores in many other communities that don't fit that mold, and which may not have seen the crime wave described here. The mayor in TFA had the right idea: declare problem stores a public nuisance to force Wal-Mart to do something. What Wal-Mart will do, was also identified in TFA: hire a bunch of off-duty cops. It kills three birds: security will actually improve with cops on the premises, police chiefs won't publicly criticize a business that's paying their subordinates lots of money, and the cops they hire will use the resources of the whole department anyway. Again, however, this expenditure will only be required in those special communities that have lots of potential criminals.