“Shopping While Black: America’s Retailers Know They Have A Racial Profiling Problem. Now What?”
“Experts say the enormous power retailers hold to stop and detain people of color in their stores remains woefully unexamined. At the same time, however, a handful of retail executives, criminal justice experts and consumers like Johnson are calling for greater scrutiny of racial disparities in the private justice system of the nation’s brick-and-mortar stores…
A recent Gallup poll suggests that African-Americans are more likely to feel discrimination at a store than when going to a restaurant, or dealing with police during a traffic incident. In several recent lawsuits against nationwide retailers, companies including CVS, Apple and Best Buy stand accused of misidentifying minorities as shoplifters on the basis of their race…
According to Gabbidon, some estimates find that private security firms employ three times as many people as public police departments. The 1.1 million security guards working in the U.S. today far outnumber the approximately 640,000 police and sheriff’s patrol officers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most states have laws that give retailers the right to detain people they suspect of shoplifting. Experts say loss prevention staff can decide whom to release, whom to call the police about and whom to refer to the local prosecutor’s office. In many states, stores can also issue monetary fines to alleged shoplifters, under a process known as “civil recovery.”…
In addition to fines, stores can enforce quotas for stops by loss prevention staff, who “are often being appraised and assessed on the number of stops they make,” Wigdor says. “What ends up happening, I think, is the loss prevention officers end up preying on people who are the easiest targets and in most people’s minds that would be an immigrant, or a person of color.””
What? Why? Ugh. And the section about how this affects individual people!
I definitely have some level of anxiety about going into small stores, where I feel very visible as one of very few customers; I so often get the “Hello, welcome, how can I help you, what are you looking for?”. And I always convince myself that it’s just how people are greeted when they go into stores; that I don’t need to have an excuse to be there. But I am still so, so careful about keeping my shoulder bag clearly in view and closed, and I don’t feel comfortable going into a store where I know I won’t buy anything. And I always, always smile and thank the shop attendant when I leave if I don’t buy anything.
