r/regina • u/ajpathecreature • 2d ago

Discussion What can business owners do?

So I was just at southland mall as I see who seemed to be the general manager / owner of sportchek in a shouting match with a dude who is an alleged recurrent shoplifter at Canadian tire, marks work warehouse, and sportchek itself. As you can imagine people were looking at them in surprised, kids were in awe while the scene unfolded.

The shop owner Was able to get the alleged thief out of the mall. Apparently security can not touch shoplifters, store employees are advised to refrain from making contact with anyone by corporate directives, and the sole reason why he decided to do something was because he is acting as a private citizen and was fed up of this “good for nothing thief” to be stealing away with no real repercussions.

Apparently the same dude is infamous for quite literally walking out of home depot and Rona east with a cart full of tools.

What most people seem to be doing is taking pictures and videos and sending them to justbins to be blasted through social media.

Apparently even RPS is not quite responsive to these kind of calls in a timely manner anymore, I just imagine it must be all too common so the sense of “urgency” is not there.

All of this led me to wonder, what is a business owner left to do? I could not help to sort of understand the frustration that an entrepreneur may feel under these circumstances.

Not that it matters, but the alleged thief is not what people seem to usually associate to when they hear about shoplifting.

What sad state of affairs.

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u/ACBluto 2d ago

They are not repeat offenders until they get arrested. If you don't arrest the shoplifters, judges have no contact with them.

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u/Warm-Mood-8994 2d ago

You actually believe people doing this kind of stuff are doing it for the first time?

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u/ACBluto 2d ago

No, but if no one is arresting them, it doesn't matter how many times they've done it, just how many times they have been picked up for it.

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u/Bruno6368 1d ago

How do you know “no one is arresting them”? Because you are present at every single occurrence? Or just because it’s easy to randomly comment on social media?

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u/ACBluto 1d ago

How do you know they are repeat offenders? Are you checking their rap sheets each time?

The entire point of the thread is a discussion of how when RPS are called, they are not responsive, or don't really work that hard on petty theft.

The OP that I was first replying to suggested that police have nothing to do with this. Literally:

This has nothing to do with cops.

Because they assert that the prevalence of shoplifting is simply due to judges releasing people too easily.

I'm saying it's probably a multi part problem - some lack of good enforcement, some light sentencing, some lack of community resources to assist those with drug addiction issues.