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By Root 835 0

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 out to be a booster from an organized retail-crime ring run by Russian mobsters.

A walkie-talkie lying beside a pair of handcuffs on a camera console crackled. It was a sales associate in one of the denim boutiques, on an upper floor, radioing, breathlessly, to say that he had detected a strong smell of ink in the fitting rooms—a sign that someone was perhaps trying to remove the ink tags from a pair of jeans. (Ink security tags—small conical plastic units that are clipped to clothing—are designed to release staining pigments when removed by anyone but store employees, who have a special device for disassembling them.) Because it is illegal for stores to install surveillance cameras inside fitting rooms, experienced thieves often use the rooms to remove security devices.

One of the camera agents hit a sequence of keys on his keyboard and brought up an image of the exterior of the boutique fitting rooms.

“We have a thirty-nine as per the forty-five,” he said into his radio, giving the department’s code for a possible theft in progress. The alert went out over the concealed earpieces of the business-suited guards positioned around the sales floors.

On the monitor, the agents watched as one of the loss-prevention department’s dozen plainclothes store detectives—a grandmotherly African-American woman carrying a shopping bag—entered the fitting-room area. She came out seconds later and radioed to confirm that a woman was cutting off security devices in one of the booths, and gave a description of the woman. (The booth’s louvred doors are designed so that store employees can look in.) She cautioned that she had not seen the woman actually put a pair of jeans into her bag.

A minute or so later, a young woman who fit the suspect’s description—leather jacket, white cap, sunglasses—emerged from the fitting-room area carrying a large canvas shoulder bag. “Is that her?” the vice-president asked. “Bring the camera more to the left.” The agent moved the joystick on his keyboard and the camera swivelled, picking her up as she got into an elevator. The agent hit a few buttons, and an image of the woman from a camera concealed in the elevator ceiling came up on his screen. When she stepped out onto the main floor, he tapped his keyboard and brought up an image of her as she sauntered past the perfume displays toward the street doors.

The camera agent picked up his walkie-talkie and radioed the guards near the exit. “Get a twenty on her,” he said—code for “get her location.”

“We can’t arrest her,” the vice-president said. “We have to have an eyewitness that actually saw her put something in her bag, or we have to have it on camera. Otherwise, if we’re wrong, or have the wrong person, we’ve got to deal with a rash of shit. A lawsuit can cost tens of thousands of dollars to defend, and you pay more in punitive damages. If we didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.” He watched the woman approach the doors. He bent forward