Stop, Thief!(loss-prevention )

On a recent morning, a dapper man in his fifties with a narrow mustache, dressed in a black Armani suit, strolled past the cosmetics counters on the main floor of a midtown Manhattan department store. He was the store's vice-president of corporate asset protection, second in command in the store's loss-prevention department. Loss prevention is devoted to reducing what retailers call "shrink": the erosion of profits--some forty billion dollars in 2006, according to the University of Florida's National Retail Security Survey--resulting from shoplifting, employee theft, and organized retail crime (professional thieves who steal goods in large volume for resale). Some form of loss prevention exists at every level of retail, from dollar stores and big-box discounters like Wal-Mart and Target to high-end establishments like Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys, and Saks Fifth Avenue. But it is a side of retail that many merchants are reluctant to publicize; hence this store's insistence that neither it nor its personnel be named.

The vice-president grew up in East Harlem and the Bronx, and has worked in loss prevention for thirty years. "I started as a store detective on Long Island," he said. "I had a knack for picking out bad guys. I grew up with them and I knew how they behaved." As he walked past the boutiques on the store's main floor, he saw the place very differently from the way shoppers would. A selection of Dolce & Gabbana handbags on display steps from a street door was an open invitation for a shoplifter (or "booster," in industry parlance) to scoop up a few thousand-dollar purses and run out. The seventy-dollar bottles of Christian Dior perfume on open shelves near the entrance posed a similar risk. "The opportunity is there," the vice-president admitted. "But it's a risk that management is willing to take to create an atmosphere that's relaxed and inviting."

He left the store's polished wood cabinets, marble floors, and Roman columns for a dingy stairway tiled in linoleum. At the bottom, he pushed through a door into the asset-protection complex, a warren of windowless basement offices. He went through a door marked "Camera Room"--a low-ceilinged chamber lit by the glow from twenty television screens stacked floor to ceiling along one wall. The screens showed high-angled views of customers moving through more than two hundred thousand square feet of sales floors, wholly unaware (most of them) that the grapefruit-size mirrored domes attached to the tops of pillars and to the ceilings concealed high-resolution color cameras recording their every move. The several hundred cameras dispersed about the store can be rotated three hundred and sixty degrees with remote-control joysticks; that day, they were being operated by three loss-prevention camera agents who sat, in suits and ties, at small consoles in front of the screens.

Loss-prevention professionals say that they avoid any kind of profiling to single out suspects, since thieves can be male or female and come in all colors, ages, and socioeconomic levels. (Winona Ryder, the movie actress, is one of the standing examples of this tenet: in 2001, she was apprehended at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills and later convicted of stealing more than five thousand dollars' worth of designer items, including an Yves Saint Laurent blouse, Donna Karan socks, Frederic Fekkai hair accessories, a Gucci dress, and a Dolce & Gabbana handbag. In 2006, Claude Allen, then the top domestic-policy adviser to George Bush, pleaded guilty to stealing hundreds of dollars by making fraudulent returns at Target.) Instead, agents are trained to recognize the behaviors that betray a person's intention to steal: selecting merchandise without regard for size or price, feeling carefully along clothing seams for sensor tags, or scanning the ceilings and walls for security cameras. Men shopping alone and carrying any kind of bag always draw a second look from agents, according to the vice-president, because it is assumed that most men will go shopping only when dragged by a wife or girlfriend. One of the store's camera agents showed me a surveillance tape from three weeks earlier, when he had zeroed in on a well-dressed white man with graying hair who was carrying an expensive briefcase. The man was trying on three-hundred-dollar designer sunglasses from a swivel rack. Nothing about his relaxed demeanor suggested that he was a thief. But each time the man took off a pair of glasses, he folded them and placed them on the counter before selecting another pair.

"You don't do that when you're trying on glasses," the camera agent pointed out. "You don't fold down the arms."

It was enough to convince the agent that a camera should be kept on the man, who eventually slid a pair of glasses into an inside pocket of his jacket. He unhurriedly pocketed three more pairs, then took a circuitous route out of the store--riding an elevator up two floors and immediately descending on the escalators--trying to shake any floor detectives who might be following him. But the camera detectives never lost sight of him. At the street door, several loss-prevention agents converged on the man. (They never intervene until a thief has made clear his intention to leave without paying.) He was taken to an interview room for questioning. A search of his belongings revealed that his briefcase contained a "booster bag"--an ordinary shopping bag lined, inside and out, with tinfoil affixed with duct tape, a tactic used by boosters to defeat the electronic alarm systems at store exits. Agents also found a knife and wire cutters, a Ralph Lauren suit that had not been paid for, and a list of other items to steal. Clipped to the man's belt was a Taser gun disguised to look like a cell phone. The man was held in one of the complex's barred lockup cells pending the arrival of police. The vice-president told me that he turned ...