The Insider уже wrotethat there has never been any decriminalization of shoplifting in the United States. The sums of money named in the plot are the threshold below which theft is classified as misdemeanours. For example, in the state of New York punishment for petty shoplifting – up to 364 days in prison and a fine of $ 1000 or double the cost of the stolen.
The man who has been released 46 times after shoplifting is Isaac Rodriguez from New York; about him wrote The New York Post… He is a real “serial thief” who sometimes came to the same store 3-4 times a day and in the open took out the goods in front of the guards. All 46 episodes happened within a few months. Rodriguez was not released from liability, but released on bail pending trial; New York State’s controversial law allows this measure to be applied to those already on bail on other charges. In the end, Rodriguez ended up in jail.
The police catch shoplifters quite successfully; the fact that she cannot do anything with them is the correspondent’s invention. But the store guards really often only record what is happening on video and do not interfere. This is explained by the decisions of some retail chains: they instruct the guards not to try to stop the thieves, so as not to risk their lives, as the criminals may be armed. Instead, the guards must call the police and hand over the videotapes to them. By the way, the series of crimes of the same Isaac Rodriguez ended with the fact that he, when trying to rob a passerby, stabbed him several times.
However, the guards do not always remain observers; in the same plot of the Vremya program there is a fragment of a scene from the documentary series I survived a crime, where a security guard tries to snatch the stolen goods from the hands of a shoplifter.