The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [129]
The woman went out the door. One of the camera agents used a camera mounted on the store’s façade to pick her up as she left the store. He zoomed in to follow her up the block. “Sometimes they double back,” he said. She disappeared into the crowd.
“We don’t like letting them go,” the vice-president said. “But when they’re successful they always come back. And now her face is burned in our brains. We’ll get her next time.”
THE ORANGE COUNTY CONVENTION CENTER occupies a pair of low-slung buildings, each more than a million square feet, set among green lawns on an artificial lake thirteen miles from downtown Orlando, Florida. In June, the center played host to the National Retail Federation’s Loss Prevention Conference and Expo, an annual three-day event. A record three thousand attendees roamed throughout the Expo Hall, under banners with the motto “PREDICT. PREVENT. PROTECT,” and visited the hundreds of booths exhibiting the latest theft-prevention technologies. Two I.B.M. employees demonstrated a video-analytics software program that allows agents to search video data for specific visual evidence, like license-plate numbers. On display nearby was a device called the LaneHawk, an ankle-height grocery-store scanner that uses visual pattern-recognition technology to detect items hidden in the bottoms of grocery carts. (According to a company rep, grocery stores lose an average of ten dollars per lane every day when shoppers fail to disclose items stuffed into the cart’s undercarriage.) Throughout the conference, attendees heard presentations by loss-prevention experts and law-enforcement officers, most of which centered on a topic that has dominated the industry for the past few years: organized retail crime.
No one in loss prevention can say precisely when shoplifters began to organize themselves into professionalized gangs, but there is general agreement that one of the first people to isolate the problem was a man named King Rogers. Rogers retired in 2001 as the head of Target Corporation’s asset-protection program and now runs his own consulting firm, the King Rogers Group, in Minneapolis. A short, voluble man, sixty-three years old, he is as close as anyone can come to being the star of an industry that is virtually defined by its secrecy. Rogers is a fixture at every loss-prevention conference, and is, in the words of Nate Garvis, the vice-president of government affairs at Target, “one of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.” Rogers worked for a short time at the National Security Agency before taking a job, in the late nineteen-sixties, as the head of asset protection at Strawbridge & Clothier, a regional department store in Philadelphia.
In those days, store security was a decidedly less high-tech venture: no cameras, no live video monitoring. Agents were obliged to improvise, hiding among racks of clothes or in empty boxes to conduct surveillance. “I can recall lying in the return-air plenum of a ceiling—the space between the drop ceiling and the main ceiling—having poked a hole in the acoustic tile so I could look through,” Rogers told me. “In those days, you often didn’t have radios, so you had to signal to your compatriot somewhere on the selling floor that the person you were watching just concealed something. You dropped something gently out of that ceiling—usually a small piece of paper—and let it waft to the ground. That was the signal to go pick them up.” When security personnel did spot a thief, they commonly took what Rogers calls a “cops-and-robbers” approach—pursuing the suspect into the street and trying to tackle or otherwise detain him. “I remember working at the downtown Philadelphia store at Eighth and Market, chasing some shoplifter out of the store,” Rogers said. “He was running down the street with an armload of clothing and I’m yelling ‘Stop!’ and thinking, Do I really want to catch this guy? By then, we had those big clunky two-way radios, and I do recall