| Some ways to make the system better: - Allow the accused to repay the sale price of whatever they're accused of shoplifting (or possibly even a discount) to remove the charge. There's no harm done, and nobody's banned from every store because nobody's truly banned from any store - If someone can't afford repayment, provide work or community service as an alternative. I know this is unfair to poor people effectively forcing them to work, but the alternative is JAIL or just letting people steal; and also, people shouldn't be stealing in the first place. Still, EBT, SNAP and other bare minimums should absolutely never be gated (and doing so will lead to violence), and the work/service needs to be capped at something reasonable otherwise people just won't do it - Absolutely provide a way to appeal false positives. People should have an opportunity to present their own evidence, have a human review the camera footage, and check dates / times (because if you can prove you were somewhere else that will rule it out quickly). Most of all, the appellate court should be part of the government, not the company; it may still be biased towards companies but less so. - If someone loses their appeal, maybe allow them to make the evidence or entire case public (with others' info redacted), so they can post it to social media? That will help people convicted on iffy evidence, because evidence banning someone from every store needs to be solid; and making the info public will mitigate truly guilty people posting misleading information I do think there's no good solution. I also think this isn't something we can just ignore, and we can't just ban every method stores use to prevent shoplifting, because otherwise they'll just close or start taking drastic actions. I think that whatever the solution is, it should be biased towards the consumer; but try and reduce this bias as much as possible, because too much bias and the stores just close or take drastic actions. |
At 10x the cost. You need to make the penalty greater than the value from the crime.
Yes, to everything else you said.