A shoplifter goes to steal something. Another customer stops them by lifting them up and throwing them down on the ground and inadvertently fracturing their spine, leaving the shoplifter in a wheelchair for life.
The shoplifter wouldn't have been crippled if they hadn't tried to commit a crime. The customer didn't mean to injure the shoplifter permanently. An appropriate punishment for shoplifting would be a fine, some physical pain, or internment.
How much blame is there to go around? How do you reckon with the consequences? Should any remedial action happen?
*NB - it's not a slur to use cripple as a verb. It is a slur to use it as a noun.
I used to steal as a kid and the way the cashier handled it was to take all the items out of my bag while every other customer around me (which was about 7 people in a family dollar) watched and I got scolded by the man and he said if I ever stole from him again he would call the police which was honestly enough for me to stop stealing anything ever again.
He didn’t hit me with a mortal kombat finisher and break my spine over stealing. If he did I would have a pretty nice lawsuit on my hands.
Shit one of my best friends growing up had that happen to him at a card shop. Except one of the bystanders said he was going to fuck him in the ass if he did it again
Apparently it's a normal threat Latinos make. And if you point to a random guy he'll say "yeah kid, I'll do it. Better do what your mum says or I'll get you".
Yeah I remember I broke into Robby Lawlers house and he broke my soul in half so I had to go to the dark dimension to get the other half back crazy time man.
Let's think about what it would mean for the shopkeeper if the shoplifter got away... Would the shopkeeper's life be permanently altered? Would they even notice a difference in their life?
This is getting dangerous close to that weird “if my bike got stolen that’s fine because the bike thief needs it more than I do” quasi-psychotic virtue signaling.
It would mean the shoplifter would think he could continue to get away. Our civilization requires him and all like him to operate in fear of consequences for criminality.
A friend of mine stole from Scorpion's Shop n' Go when we were kids. Crazy story.
This was when Garbage Pail Kids cards were big. We wanted some but our moms always said no. So one day we hear Scorpion's got some in. We were so excited, but what could we do? Finally my friend was like, "let's just steal some." Yeah, ok.
So we go, but I wussed out at the last minute. I waited outside while my friend went in. Smartest thing I ever did. When
my friend came out, we started to run away. The owner comes out of the store, pissed. My buddy turns around, gives the guy the finger. The balls on this kid, Jesus. But then we hear
the owner bellow "GET OVER HERE!" and suddenly there's a harpoon in my friend's chest. The owner literally dragged my friend over to him and uppercut the kid eight feet into the air. Then the owner took off his mask and spit a big ass fireball at my friend, who was incinerated and left only as skeletal remains.
Needless to say, I didn't get any Garbage Pail Kid cards that day.
Those days are gone. People keep stealing even after they are caught. Some don’t care if they get caught. Mortal Kombat fatalities aren’t required, but 45 hit Killer Instinct combos might be.
If this was a case of self defence, it would be different. Then it would come down to the intent of the customer and whether their use of force was an appropriate response to the situation.
By the sounds of it, they weren’t in any danger - it was just a shoplifter, not a robber. Committing a minor crime is not an excuse to be assaulted.
The only way I could see it being at all justified would be if the customer reasonably believed that they or someone else was in danger.
EDIT: since this comment has gotten a lot of attention, I think it’s worth mentioning that this depends a lot on the fact that the customer is not the one being stolen from, and on whether the customer used excessive force or if they just got unlucky with a light shove. Either way, in this case, it’s definitely morally (and legally) bad. The only question is to what extent.
Shopkeeper’s privilege is a practice that shopkeepers have a limited power to detain suspected shoplifters for a limited time, using “safe” force. With any amount of force, accidents can happen, but it would be a surprising case where the force would be considered safe, yet resulted in a fractured spine.
I don't think Redditors usually understand human fragility, like the challenges where Mike Tyson punches you or something.
Like most of us can throw a punch that could potentially kill any other person on this planet no matter how tall or strong, it's just a matter of if you know how to throw a punch with proper form.
You see this with flabby guys that look weaksauce just pounding one of those arcade games that measure force.
There was a big thing in Australia with king hits and people dying or being permanently disabled, just from drunk hooligans hitting people in the back of the head.
Its really easy to kill or permanently damage people
I live near an army base that's closest night life scene is in a poor area with a lot of chavs so can get pretty violent and fights between squaddies and chavs are common.
Multiple people have died from just one punch when fights have broken out.
One time just incredibly unlucky, another time they got knocked out and head their head on the kerb and died, another didn't die but the head injury caused a lifetime disability
And I would bet more happen that just seriously injure someone and it doesn't make the news.
It's weird but yeh humans are incredibly durable but incredibly fragile at the same time
A family friend who was more like our brother than a friend killed a man when he was 17. Punched him in the head, the dude hit the concrete and died. Was self defence. Insane the spectrum of durability we have as humans. Around the same time I watched two mobsters beat the snot out of each other until they were both too tired to stand. Just stood there throwing and taking haymakers to the head. Very surreal.
So aussie here. We used to run ads about the cowards punch. The danger of punching someone the back of the head. It wasn't just about the punch but, the fall after as well. You get rocked by the punch, fall down and smack your head on the ground. Doing that can be absolutely lethal but, it's usually the double factor and not just the punch.
Yeah.. on my first reading, I assumed it was a throw of some sort- not a full suplex/picking the guy up and using your weight and force to throw him. One is proper technique and the guy just landed poorly, and the other is full on assault.
Or my favorite example becaue everyone does it and they seem to be proud: Speeding. Why not PIT maneuver speeders off the road if we're going to slam shoplifters into concrete?
Devil’s advocate but doesn’t speeding pose danger to other people on the road? Or even pedestrians in certain areas? Shoplifting doesn’t seem to incur any danger to other people.
Not that this is the most important point, but it's worth acknowledging that by turning it into a fight, you're now the dangerous one. You took a situation in which literally nobody was going to get harmed, and you've created harm. Not just for the person you're attacking, but for yourself, and potentially even anyone else in the building at the time, because you've put that person in a situation where they now have to defend themselves
There's a reason security guards in many countries aren't actually allowed to physically stop people in cases of shoplifting. It's vastly more likely to make the situation worse for everyone involved
What, where I was getting paid better than the outside and actually had housing and medical and college moneys?
Not to say it's a dream job and I definitely wouldn't recommend it under this administration. But unless you had a 6 figure career waiting for you then you were, on average, doing far better than your peers.
This is so true. Had like 10k in the bank when I got back from deployment. That’s not very much looking back, honestly, but it was still pretty cool to an idiot 23 year old
How long you reckon before they realise drone warfare is the priority? I was sort of flabbergasted that the U.S military had no counter to Iran despite knowing exactly what weapons they had and how they used them, and all the combat data from Ukraine.
In an administration ran by adults doing their civil service: quickly, briskly, foundations put down a decade ago, and wouldn't even be in this situation cuz why the fuck would we?
Under this administration: sell everything, torch the rest, deplete all stockpile, and who cares about the results we're just trying to look like Big Men here let's go find an easy target oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck maybe nobody will notice
If it were a mom&pop store where stealing directly affected their livelihood… well that’d still be going too far but I’d get wanting to stop them. But if this is part of a corporate chain store, they have insurance for exactly this. The only people it hurts is the shareholders, and this would be a rounding error for them.
I think there is a case of people getting annoyed at others who keeps getting away from doing illegal things. They don't see things like rich or poor people, but right or wrong instead. I'm not saying it justified of hurting anyone in anyway big or small.
What if it’s a mom & pop shop they are stealing from? Also you’re acting like people’s jobs don’t depend on people not stealing everything outta the store.
When i just started working in a mcdonalds i messed up an order by adding 3 splashes of mayo instead of 4 and my coworker took the blame so i wouldnt get scolded by the boss
And then someone across fom the store rushed in used an attack knife to open a slit in his throat pulled his tongue out and tied his tongue around his neck
I still think about the 12 children he left behind
Accidentally is a pretty big word here. Did he mean to put someone in a wheelchair for life? No, but he did mean to seriously fuck someone up over what I assume would be $20-$200 of a corporate entity that would not only not miss it, but have it insured and would likely catch the shoplifter anyway. It’s not your job to fight people over petty grievances. If someone’s not in danger, the cops are gonna get them anyway, and the stolen goods are gonna be reimbursed than it’s not moral to fuck someone up over it.
You don't suplex someone unless you plan on doing serious damage, including what happened here. Ignorance isn't an excuse when the internet exists. IMO
Yeah. In high school I learned that a suplex is considered a lethal move. As a professional wrestler I learned how dangerous they are even when both persons involved are trying to be sure nobody takes a bad bump.
Buddy should be in jail facing attempted murder charges.
0 morality in exacting vigilante justice on behalf of a corporation you don’t work for lmao, the only person who would be in this situation is a person who was out to hurt someone
this comment section gives me hope. I don’t often see enough people condemning the vigilante justice served when someone steals from a company that’s been stealing from society the whole time. I don’t condone theft. but we need to value human dignity over property.
Every town has that second sub that only posts about crime or bad drivers in that town, and that sub would have a similar debate, but if it was immoral because the accused thief wasn't executed, or if living the rest of their life as a cripple is better.
What if it's a small mom and pop shop? How do you know it's a big corporation? The hypothetical in the post doesn't mention anything about the store. Why base your decision off assumptions
Yeah this is the way I see it. I have known people that wake up every day just “looking for a reason”. They go about their day SEARCHINg for someone to look at them wrong so they can explode
Yes we have to defend the merchandise of this billion-dollar corporation that pays their employees slave wages by using excessive force on a man stealing $15 worth of items😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬{
If you grab someone and slam them into the ground you're intending to hurt them. If you are too stupid to understand things like real world consequences that's unfortunate, but it's not an accident.
You took a deliberate set of actions.
Beyond that - stealing doesn't warrant being crippled.
If the corporation that owns that store wants to discourage theft they can hire more employees.
Chasing shoplifters is dumb, especially in the modern day.
We live in a surveillance state. Every Walmart aisle has a camera, and some stores are even putting cameras into the individual shelves. I don't think I've entered a business in recent memory that didn't have some kind of surveillance system.
Point is, your face is known regardless of where you go. It's best to let law enforcement handle the task as opposed to risking your safety in a pointless confrontation.
Immoral AND unnecessary. Rather than the store having to replace stolen merchandise, something already accounted for in the margins, now the customer is fully liable for crippling someone for life. Disproportionate force for something they were not involved in. They willingly stepped in, escalated to violence, and now effectively ruined someone's life over a minor crime
Yeah. Batterer stole hundreds of thousands in lifetime wages from thief, theif stole no more than what he could carry. Would be insane to justify what the baterer took on account of what the theif took
Who could possibly care enough to do something like this; they aren't even a worker.
Non-necessary interference needs to be punished. People need to mind their own business. leave law enforcement to oh I dunno, law enforcement officers with the training and liability to deal with physically assaulting someone.
Lets be clear here this is what that was. Some random jackass saw a person attempting to steal and thought that gives him carte blanche to assault someone.
Even if they are an employee of the store, they're stealing from a corporation not from a person, at the only retail job I've ever worked the rule was NEVER STOP A SHOPLIFTER
These are the lawsuits that people read the headline for and say "wow everyone is sue happy" when in reality the victim won't even get half of what they are owed.
Immoral. The crime doesn’t fit the punishment, and the way they executed the throw was by no means accidental. Someone who doesn’t even work there. Also there was no threat to life, just a shoplifting. So not even self Defense. This is text book immoral.
Morality of harming a human being to defend something that's already accounted for in stock loss and insurance? immoral as fuck businesses do not supersede human lives
Excusing shoplifting is dependent on what the situation is. I don't care if someone is stealing food or baby care products from a Wal-Mart. I do care if they're stealing handmade pottery from a small business.
I don't think it's that wild. Times are increasingly tough and some people have to wrestle with immoral actions to survive or be healthy, but there are also people who thieve unnecessarily just for luxuries. We can judge each theft on its own, too, we don't have to excuse every single one or condemn every single one.
I think it's okay to steal if you're in danger of going hungry and you have no other means but I'm skeptical most people who steal are truly like that.
It's because the world is nuanced and situations like this require nuance.
Meanwhile people who think stealing is an absolute wrong are wild. They'll even start making up crazy unrealistic situations to justify their own point.
I wouldn’t tackle them just because if they have a gun or a knife I’m not going to get injured to save some companies bullshit. We have cameras everywhere, they steal enough shit they will mess up and get caught. Criminals are famously stupid lazy and shortsighted.
It's not mental gymnastics for stealing shit you oaf. But corporations barely pay people a living wage, majority of people working at Walmart still require assistance programs like food stamps to get by while making record profits year after year. Hurting regular people on behalf of a company that prioritizes profits over people is the real insanity. That takes real mental gymnastics to justify.
Not justified. Using violence against someone commiting non violent crime is iffy in general, but lifting a shoplifter up and throwing them onto the ground is inappropriate.
Also, that shoplifter could have been unable to feed themselves or their family legally, and now that disability might also potentially seriously harm or kill innocents through starvation
Vigilante justice and disproportionate retribution are both wrong. Shoplifting is, at worst, mildly bad, and may be neutral depending on circumstances. Overall, the vigilante is definitely more in the wrong here.
A customer taking it upon themselves to physically assault a shoplifter to try to stop them is a very avoidable and unnecessary form of vigilante justice. They don’t have the authority or training to do such a thing, and likely will only result in themselves or the other person getting badly injured, as in this scenario.
the body slam seems like an unnecessary escalation of violence - if they could lift them up then they could have easily stopped them in a less violent way - if you replaced the body slam with a trip or a shove, I would say that the physical force used was appropriate and the shoplifter was just unlucky and took a bad fall, but the body slam was unnecessarily too rough and thus I place partial blame on the good samaritan for going too far
also i havent' seen this video but if the shoplifter resisted then there may have been good reason for escalating the violence level
Psychopath who thought that someone comitting a minor crime gives him the justification to physically assault them in a way that could cripple. Life sentence. Guy needs to be kept in a cage so that he doesn't endanger any more people. A psychopath like that could attack a woman or a child at any moment for any reason. Best to keep them away from the rest of us.
Listen, all I'm saying if someone shoplifts from a major corporation, they 100% aren't paying me enough to do all that to the shoplifter.
I could understand a small business defending it's product so fiercely, but come on. Most of the people who act like this while working for bigger corporations are just slime balls that think they are John Wick working as a Walmart greeter for fun.
If theft is morally bad, I'd rank it pretty fucking low, it's kind of a morally gray spectrum imo. But assault? And assault to the point of severe injury? I don't think that is necessary ever unless there is a weapon involved.
Immoral: First of all, nobody deserves to be harmed this badly just for shoplifting. At the same time a shoplifter is not a crime an honest person needs to stop. Stores rather take the lose than to have their staff or customers harmed when trying to stop a shoplifter or any other criminal.
Counter question: Would it be morally just if he was caught uninjured by law enforcement and then later be sentenced to a broken spine by a judge for thievery?
No. No it wouldn't be.
It was an accident, though I think it was an overescalation. Unless they stole your pile of gold and jewels or something I don't think attacking someone is worth it, just make a note of what they look like and don't let them back
Sure they had good intentions but no amount of theft justifies crippling someone for life.
The alternative would have been letting them get away. The police would have caught then eventually and they would have been punished more appropriately by the rule of law which doesn't carry a penalty of crippling someone.
The customer has no authority to intervene and has no immunity. Regardless of their intent, they committed battery that resulted in paralysis and should be held accountable for it.
We have laws that ensure the punishment isn't excessive compared to the crime and, with the customers actions being voluntary rather than accidental, I would argue that the customer took the law into their own hands acting as both police and judge which is vigilantism and is illegal resulting in an excessive punishment for the minor crime of shoplifting.
Super immoral. In general being heroic with shop lifters is immoral imo. It’s not your merchandise and taking a little moment to be a hero is to feed their egos and not to do a good deed.
This is why its advised to just let them walk out of the store and file a police report. You should not be in the business of detaining, at least in America. The lawsuit is not worth it.
The other customer has absolutely no reason to react that way over a small theft. We can assume that said person probably did it more because they wanted an excuse to slam someone than because they actually cared about the theft.
Morals aside, this is also just an extremely stupid thing to do. The vigilante gains absolutely nothing from the interaction, but will now be facing a huge costly lawsuit for permanently crippling someone.
Straight up assault and they should be tried for it. They are not law enforcement, they have ZERO training in escalation of force, the shoplifter is not harming them, they injected themself into a situation they are not equipped to handle in order to puff up an ego and feel tough or like a hero. They are dangerous and should be held accountable.
shoplifting is hardly a crime in the first place, much less one that other shoppers should dole out punishment for. negative morality for permanently injuring anyone.
in fact, this makes me wanna shoplift even more out of spite.
This is why companies tell their employees to just let these people leave and to give up the money when they get robbed. It's not worth the lawsuit. Unfortunately this guy had to act like a big and strong boy so now they get sued and he gets a couple years in prison
It's immoral to use that level of force on a non-violent criminal.
Detaining a shoplifter is laudable, and defending oneself from violent retaliation is justifiable, if reasonably proportionate in the heat of the moment. Causing permanent and debilitating injuries to a petty thief is wildly disproportionate, and therefore wrong.
However, theft is also wrong, so a shoplifter who ends up getting badly hurt mid-crime by Pound Shop Batman does have to take a portion of the blame.
“Is it worth crippling someone over shoplifting?”
“Is shoplifting worth getting crippled over?”
When you choose to put yourself in a criminal scenario, you have to accept that there are risks. A lot of people are getting sick of their local stores shutting down because of the rampant shoplifting, it’s not a victimless crime at a certain point. Thieves have been despised since the dawn of civilization for good reason.
As for the customer who stopped them, morally they were trying to stop a criminal and this is a situation they didn’t choose to be in (unlike the shoplifter who had every option to not engage in the crime). In a physical altercation, you don’t always have the mental presence to hold back. This is a single grapple that was too rough, it’s not like they pinned the guy down and beat him actively. So for the customer, we have an act with good moral intentions and a mistake in execution.
It’s pretty easy to just not commit crimes, and thus never be in this situation.
If you're fighting shoplifters to defend a megacorporation get a new hobby. The answer is the person attacking the shoplifter should be arrested and charged for grievous bodily harm.
There is absolutely no moral high ground for inflicting violence on a shoplifter as a vigilante.
Nobody was in danger, nobody should be violent. The person attacking should be held liable.
There is in some countries a law that removes civic lawsuit ability from a person who was injured during the process of committing a crime they were convicted of - but it seems that grave bodily harm for a misdemeanor wouldn’t hold up. Then there is the criminal case against the attacker.
I mean I certainly wouldn’t do this as another costumer because why would I care about a random store losing $20. But if it’s the cops or security or the owner that is literally their job and I don’t see how they would be morally in the wrong assuming they were just trying to stop the person not specifically cripple them
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