Hehir fisks the anti shoplifting hysteria

Liam Hehir notes:

The real issue is the unnecessary complexity and arbitrariness of the current law. That isn’t being addressed. Instead we are getting a deluge of hand-wringing about “vigilantism” and doomsday hypotheticals about how shopping in New Zealand is going to become like an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter.

The premise of the government’s reform is simple: New Zealand’s current citizen’s arrest laws are inconsistent and random. Right now, whether a security guard or shopkeeper can detain a thief depends not just on the crime itself, but on the time of day it happens. 

Tonight is late night shopping at The Plaza Shopping Centre here in Palmerston North. If go and steal something worth $800 at 8.59 pm, the store security guard cannot legally stop me. If he grabs my arm, he has committed assault, battery and false imprisonment. If I am running behind schedule on my crime spree and steal the item two minutes later, at 9.01 pm, the guard has some measure of protection in law. 

Geddis and Benson-Pope don’t argue that this is defensible. They simply argue that changing it is too dangerous. And so, instead of engaging with how to fix the law, they resort to pure scaremongering. They warn that these changes could lead to “excessive force,” wrongful arrests or even racial profiling.

A principled approach would be to advocate for no power to detain for any theft, ever. That would be wrong, but principled. But defending the current law is unprincipled.

Massachusetts is one of the most liberal, Democrat-dominated states in the U.S. If you’re going to point to a state that takes a cautious, restrained approach to law enforcement, Massachusetts is the one. It’s hard to think of a jurisdiction that better embodies the soft-on-crime stereotype.

And guess what? Like a lot of places, it has a shopkeeper’s privilege law. 

Under Massachusetts General Law ch. 231, s. 94B, store owners are allowed to detain a shoplifter for a “reasonable amount of time.” There’s no requirement that the theft be above a certain dollar amount. No special night-time rule. No arbitrary three-year penalty threshold. If a shopkeeper has probable cause to believe a theft has occurred, they can hold the suspect and call the police. 

Massachusetts is a deep-blue, progressive state. Do people genuinely believes that New Zealanders can’t handle the same powers as store owners in Cambridge, Massachusetts? If so, that’s a remarkable vote of no confidence in our society.

I am happy to predict that the changes will become law, and the only consequence is more shoplifters get detained and arrested.

The liberal reaction to the announcement hinges on the idea that allowing businesses to detain shoplifters is somehow a greater risk to society than shoplifting itself. 

I think their view is that shoplifters are people, while companies are not people, so shoplifting is not a real crime. Never mind that people own companies.