That's just one of the flawed assumptions. They don't actually measure stress that well in the first place, especially not in the already stressful position of police questioning.
The problem is that lie detectors set up an optional testing set for suspects. It's sorta akin to police, before questioning someone, asking 'Do you want me to setup a stylize questioning where I can pick up non-verbal clues form you, or should we do this the normal way, where I face away from you?'. It's sorta stupid.
They're doing this all wrong. There's plenty of technology to determine if someone is stressed. What they need is to drop all this 'lie detector' bullcrap and run voice stress monitors over interrigations. (Of course, first they'd actually have to tape them, which they do almost nowhere.)
Obviously this is no more admissible in court than 'The suspect looked nervous when I questioned him about...', but it's stop all these insane ideas that you can take lie detector tests to prove anything, and there's a good argument that it wouldn't need any sort of warrant or court order, as people speaking that know they're recorded have no reasonable expectation of privacy WRT the recording.
It's reasonable to think a lie detector can detect your intention to lie, just like it's reasonable to think my hometown has a Starbucks. But it is not, in fact, actually true.
Incidentally, the idea of combining lie detectors and torture is insanely stupid. As they supposedly (But not actually) detect stress, pretty much everyone who's been tortured is going to be 'lying' so much they can't even get a base reading. Of course, as they don't actually work in the first place, the person administrating the test could just pretend they did.
Yes, the supercomputer they have control of is only the most powerful known computer, but it's unlikely that, barring national government involvement, there are any others, and considering the amount of power they would draw, they'd need some sort of secret power source, too.
But arguing about the difference between 'most powerful known' and 'most powerful' is idiotic. I'm sorry, everyone knows what people are talking about.
Secondly, they clearly can do serious harm to the internet and any machine on it. Whether or not any specific attack would harm any people is unknowable, but they can, right now, take any company or person they want offline and keep them there.
That's obviously false, and a fallacious argument. By your argument there is only evidence against people who were guilty, there can be no evidence against innocent people. The idea of "suspicion" no longer exists - if you suspect someone, the evidence that led you to suspect them is proof of guilt. The logical conclusion of your idea is that there is no need for a court system, since all suspects are automatically guilty. Sounds a bit Judge Dredd.
Um, actually, that's almost right. What you missed is that he was talking about citizen's arrest (Or Shopkeeper's Priv, a specific example of that that sometimes is coded into law separately.)
Citizen's arrest requires observing something you believe to be illegal activity. Ergo, almost all legal detentions made under them actually are open-and-shut cases. There are very very few false positives on the legal detentions.
The only mistakes in a lawful detention that i can even think of are:
1) When someone is very confused about what their eyes saw: 'I saw him stab that guy!' 'It was a LARP, we were roleplaying!' (Or the 'pretend to shoplift' example someone else was talking about above.)
2) When someone is very confused about the law: 'I arrested him for playing music with swear words on his radio'
Yes, even 2) is a lawful, although stupid, citizen's arrest, if you can convince a jury that a 'reasonable person' would believe that was illegal.
It is very very very hard to find any examples of lawful citizen's arrest that turned out to be incorrect. I'm sure there have been a few, but they're probably under rather surreal circumstances. (Possibly involving evil twins.)
Of course, there are plenty of illegal detentions that people make that they think will be covered under citizen's arrest, but then sadly find they are not and that they, themselves, have committed a crime.
Most store policies on shoplifting prevention have rules that the person must have been continually observed the entire time for just that reason.
However, legally, the store is in the clear even if they go after him, assuming there's not a specific status to cover this. (Which some states actually have.) They observed him sticking things in his pocket, they observed him walking out the door, a reasonable person would believe a crime was committed. They didn't observe him put it back, but the reasonable person test is what a reasonable person with their knowledge would believe.
The fact he was playacting a crime and didn't actually commit one means he's not guilty, of course, but the detention is also legal. It is perfectly legal to incorrectly arrest people, 'wrongful detention' happens when there's detention in violation of the law, not when the detention is based on a factually incorrect premise.
Incidentally, even a store that requiring continual observance before charging people with shoplifting doesn't stop people from carrying their own items into the store, slipping them on the shelf, and then 'shoplifting' them, if they truly wanted to make trouble. Although, actually, deliberately deceiving someone into arresting you is probably grounds for being charged with disorderly conduct.
However, in this case, it was wrongful detention, in that the store did not observe any action that a reasonable person would consider a crime.
You may not like it, but pick 100 guys off the street and a majority of them will consider it "reasonable" for the merchant in that situation to suspect shoplifting.
The standard for a citizen's arrest isn't that you have a reasonable suspicion they are a criminal. It is that you saw, with your own eyes, them do something which you have a reasonable suspicion is a crime.
The 'reasonable suspicion' is not of criminalness in general. It's that a specific thing that you saw was a specific criminal action. The only false positives on a legal citizen's arrest would be when the detainer is factually mistaken about the law or had their eyes fooled in some manner.
I.e, detaining someone for underaged drinking is legal when you see them drinking and know they are underaged, even if it turns out they are not underaged or were actually drinking non-alcoholic beer or you were in a state where the legal drinking age was actually 18. You misjudged the specific action you saw, but any person could have had the same reasonable suspicion as to that action's legality.
It is not legal to detain them when you simply hear them talking about it, or you find beer cans where they were hanging out, or if they give you a signed and notarized confession of underaged drinking, or if they refuse to let you search them for beer when walking off your property.
It doesn't matter how 'suspicious' reasonable people would be that that is what they are doing, it isn't until you observe criminal activity or, at least, think you observed it, that you can detain them. Anything else is illegal detention.
Why is this? Mainly because people can't break the law in general, only in specifics. Ergo, it matters not a whit how much you think they are breaking the law in general, you must have some specific reason to detain them, because you are, in the literal meaning of the word, arresting them, and you must actually 'charge' them with a specific instance of a crime and not just 'shopliftic activity in general' or 'generalized murder'.
He's either ironic of very stupid, considering that no churches specify 'The King James Bible' as the best one. Most of them, in fact, recognize that it's written using a rather outdated vocabulary and is often unclear because of that, and additionally has a few things translated poorly, so if any religions did have an 'official' translation (And I'm not aware of any that do.), it certainly wouldn't be King James.
In addition to you boycotting the wrong people like the other post said, you should probably do a little bit of research to see if you actually disagree with anything the Quakers do or believe. They are an extremely 'liberal' denomination in that they don't really have any hard-and-fast rules about anything. (They were created as a backlash to fighting between Catholics and Anglicans in England.) Their basically theology appears to be 'Why can't we all just get along?'.
The only theological positions I know, in addition to being very strongly pro-sexual equality (Way before other churches or even society as a whole thought it was even a possible idea. They had women participating the same as men 300 years ago. ) they are very very very pacifistic and reject the idea of a 'Just War', IIRC. Belonging to the Quakers almost automatically gets you a conscientious objector status.
So let me get this straight. Someone posts a link to religioustolerance.org asserting something. Someone else says 'That's a known Scientology front'. You dispute this by...posting exactly the same link. Interesting.
It matters that they use extortion to silence critics. Repeatedly. They accuse them of child porn, they have them arrested on bogus charges, they break into their houses and harass them at work. They've even kidnapped 'errant members' before, and at least such one person has actually disappeared while in their custody.
It has nothing to do with the rather surreal beliefs of their religion.
Incidentally, whether not something is a cult also has nothing to with the beliefs. It is simply a list of things like 'requires members to cut off contact with family' and 'uses sleep/food deprivation as a form of mind control' and stuff like. Scientology uses some of the cult tricks, and not others, so whether or not it actually is a cult is debatable, but that is not why they run into legal trouble, they run into legal trouble because parts of their organization operate illegally in attacking critics.
It has nothing to do with the cars. European cars running off the clean diesel over there are plenty clean. (And those cars can't even run over here because of how dirty the diesel is.)
It's a different thing legally, but it has mostly the same standards. The only exception I know of is that the observation of the crime can be distributed...one person can see them hide something, pass the suspect off to another suspect who watches them leave the store, and yet another person could be the one who physically detains them.
Whereas in citizen's arrest the same person is supposed to do all that. You're not supposed to take someone's word that someone else just committed a crime and detain them, although in actuality people do it all the time during real citizen's arrests. (Stop that man! He stole that lady's purse!) This opens 'helpers' up to a lot of legal liability if the observer was wrong, but whatever. (More liability than if they'd observed it and were wrong, that is. Observers of things that look criminal have some legal protection from liability even if they are factually incorrect and wrongly detain someone.)
Also many places have encoded requirements for continual observation of the person after the point they conceal something, which wouldn't technically be required for a citizen's arrest. And it has some additional waivers of liability assuming they do follow all the rules.
But they are basically the same things. They both say 'reasonable suspicion' but what they actually mean in court is 'You saw them committing an act that a reasonable person would assume is a crime'. Aka, they could have, in theory, slipped their own personal item on the shelf and then back off the shelf and hidden it, and walked out of the store with it, and if you'd missed the first action you're be wrong. But there is indeed a reasonable suspicion they just committed a crime. Anyone who had observed the same would think it was a crime.
What it doesn't include is them acting 'suspiciously' but without any act that is overtly criminal. The police can detain people skulking around and eying a closed store. Or someone who 'acts like' a shoplifter tends to act. The police are expected to be able to notice when things are 'wrong', and they have to right to question people and detain them and do further investigation if they have a good reason.
Citizens cannot do this, at all. Either as part of 'shopkeeper's privilege' or a straight up citizen's arrest. It doesn't matter how suspiciously someone behave, or if they have a sign saying 'I'm a shoplifter' and are mysteriously carrying a full garbage bag they didn't have when they entered the store. They must actually see something that a reasonable person would believe to be a criminal action. (Maybe they're stealing the garbage bag! It's like that joke about smuggling bicycles.)
Whether or not a reasonable person would think they were a shoplifter or behaving in a manner typical of one is not relevant, as those are not criminal actions. Only the police can detain people acting suspiciously, other people must have 'reasonable suspicion' that the action they saw someone commit was criminal.
They can post that sign if they want, and I can leave if I don't agree with that sign. At any point. Even after I've made my purchase.
If they want to make an actual contract with penalties that hit me if I break it, they can do that, but not by me walking by a point, and I'd still have the right to just walk out with my bags, breaking the contract.
This country does not have the concept of imprisonment due to breaking of contracts, aka, debtor's prison. It doesn't matter what terms they write in their contracts, I can sign them and then, later, breach them by walking out of the store. They could, in theory, sue me if there was an actual contract as opposed to a mere sign, but they could not forcibly detain me or search me under any legal theory at all.
People tend to ignore that laws that protect us from the police abusing their powers protect us from other people, because we will actually call the police when crimes are committed, instead of going 'Well, I don't have my license on me, it's entirely possibly they'd decide to arrest me instead'.
Oh, and there are one more set of people overload 911. People who call in to, correctly, report 'crimes', but appear to have a very fuzzy idea of just what sort of activity is actually illegal, and thus report things like someone using all the washing machines in a laundromat or someone smoking while driving.
Being in the middle of any sort of crime is a perfectly reasonable reason to call 911, or having just been in a crime, or having just stumbled across evidence of a crime.
People who talk about when it's 'correct' to call 911 are asses. Any time you need police to response, in person, at that moment or shortly thereafter, is a good time to call 911.
As long as you're not a fucking moron and calling them to complain about parking tickets or ask for directions, you're good. Those are the idiots overloading 911, not people who come across a body three days old in an abandoned lot and say 'Well, this doesn't look like an 'emergency' per se, he's clearly dead and no one seems to be around, so I better just lookup the police's non-emergency number when I get back to the house and call them.'.
Did you not quite grasp that everyone in this entire discussion, when they said 'illegally detain', they meant kidnapping? There is no actual crime of 'illegally detaining' someone, it is called 'kidnapping'.
In normal speech 'kidnapping' is usually meant 'moving someone against their will', so few people have been using it here, but there is no legal difference between moving someone without their consent and holding them in place without their consent, it is exactly the same law.'
More to the point, it's easier to fight things when they're cut and dried. The store admitted they had no reason to suspect him and he wasn't in fact shoplifting. And he called the police.
Frankly, the police thing is much more important than the bag searching one. Some random store overstepped their authority and, just like always, they'll be slapped down. We already know bag searching cannot be required, quite a lot of courts have made that clear, although it would be nice to get a national precedent.
But the real question is: If you call the police because someone is illegal detaining you, can the police then arrest you if you fail to produce ID?
Why are they searching me because they have an employee problem. They have cameras over their registers. It would be just as easy to look at the cameras and checkoff that all items that were carried to the checkout did, in fact, make it through the purchase.
Stopping shoplifters is one thing, but with their own employees they don't even to catch them in 'real time'.
Why the heck would they charge someone with shoplifting because they were missing an item in their bag? Is there some secret form of anti-shoplifting that I'm unaware of where people buy things and then illegal leave them in the store?
No it's not. That's a police standard. The standards for a citizen's arrest, which is what we're actually talking about here, requires a crime being observed.
Most people who shoplift are dreadfully terrible at it... but if you get someone who knows what they're doing and knows the rules, they're next to impossible to catch.
That's what I always assumed when I heard the loss-preventions runs when I worked at Walmart as a cashier. (Hence, I wasn't really expected to do too much, people don't normally shoplift in sight of the checkout.) I was like 'Good lord, what's someone from blatantly putting a dozen things in their pocket, and then rapidly walking back and forth in the store a few times and weaving through some isles?'
Anyhow, the worst losses always came from employee theft. Biggest one I had contact with: The head of loss prevention in that very store I worked in got busted a couple years after I left with over a hundred thousand dollars worth of stolen merchandise in his possession (quis custodiet ipsos custodes?). They never figured out just how much he did take in total, but the investigation but the grand total at something near a half million dollars of merchandise. Someone walking out with a 200 dollar VCR (to help set the era... DVDs were still a decade away) is chump change next to that level.
That's what, as someone pointed out to me above, bagchecks are for. Customers in collusion with cashiers. It's not they think you're a shoplifter (Why the hell would you shoplift to the checkout and not past it?), it's that they think the cashier is a buddy of yours who 'forgot' to ring up that 200 dollar VCR and only ran up that package of VHS tapes and that Joan Jett tape.
There's a difference between marking receipts and searching bags. I assert that a store should have the right to mark receipts on the way out so that you cannot walk back into the store and take out more goods on the same receipt in full view of everyone else. (Didn't we recently have a Congressman commit this sort of fraud?) I think everyone would agree with me on that one.
Sadly, right now, they don't have that right, and all too often this gets conflated with searching bags, which the store also doesn't have the right to do, and shouldn't. If the courts make it clear they don't have that right, it's probably going to remove the right to mark receipts.
And if we don't come up with a way to let them do the marking, I fear they'll implement privacy invading measures like, after you buy something, they send your photo to the front of the store to tell them you can exit with bags of stuff for a limited amount of time. (And once they start doing that, they'll tie the photo to the purchase, and all sorts of crap. Yes, they already have you on video, but there's a difference between hours of video not tied to specific purchases and a photograph specifically of a certain customer.)
My suggestion: A loaner receipt. As part of the transaction, they hand you a slip of paper as the real receipt (Which is your property.) and another slip which they are careful to say is not your property and you can't leave the store with...which you turn over to people at the front on the way out.
And, like I said, don't confuse this with searching bags, which I agree is very stupid and not supported in law.
Anyone has the right to detain anyone they've seen commit a crime. It's called a citizen's arrest.
What they don't have the right to do is detain them when that person has simply decided not to comply with some rule of theirs. Even if that rule is to prevent theft.
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That's just one of the flawed assumptions. They don't actually measure stress that well in the first place, especially not in the already stressful position of police questioning.
The problem is that lie detectors set up an optional testing set for suspects. It's sorta akin to police, before questioning someone, asking 'Do you want me to setup a stylize questioning where I can pick up non-verbal clues form you, or should we do this the normal way, where I face away from you?'. It's sorta stupid.
They're doing this all wrong. There's plenty of technology to determine if someone is stressed. What they need is to drop all this 'lie detector' bullcrap and run voice stress monitors over interrigations. (Of course, first they'd actually have to tape them, which they do almost nowhere.)
Obviously this is no more admissible in court than 'The suspect looked nervous when I questioned him about...', but it's stop all these insane ideas that you can take lie detector tests to prove anything, and there's a good argument that it wouldn't need any sort of warrant or court order, as people speaking that know they're recorded have no reasonable expectation of privacy WRT the recording.
It's reasonable to think a lie detector can detect your intention to lie, just like it's reasonable to think my hometown has a Starbucks. But it is not, in fact, actually true.
Incidentally, the idea of combining lie detectors and torture is insanely stupid. As they supposedly (But not actually) detect stress, pretty much everyone who's been tortured is going to be 'lying' so much they can't even get a base reading. Of course, as they don't actually work in the first place, the person administrating the test could just pretend they did.
Your son is an idiot.
Yes, the supercomputer they have control of is only the most powerful known computer, but it's unlikely that, barring national government involvement, there are any others, and considering the amount of power they would draw, they'd need some sort of secret power source, too.
But arguing about the difference between 'most powerful known' and 'most powerful' is idiotic. I'm sorry, everyone knows what people are talking about.
Secondly, they clearly can do serious harm to the internet and any machine on it. Whether or not any specific attack would harm any people is unknowable, but they can, right now, take any company or person they want offline and keep them there.
That's obviously false, and a fallacious argument. By your argument there is only evidence against people who were guilty, there can be no evidence against innocent people. The idea of "suspicion" no longer exists - if you suspect someone, the evidence that led you to suspect them is proof of guilt. The logical conclusion of your idea is that there is no need for a court system, since all suspects are automatically guilty. Sounds a bit Judge Dredd.
Um, actually, that's almost right. What you missed is that he was talking about citizen's arrest (Or Shopkeeper's Priv, a specific example of that that sometimes is coded into law separately.)
Citizen's arrest requires observing something you believe to be illegal activity. Ergo, almost all legal detentions made under them actually are open-and-shut cases. There are very very few false positives on the legal detentions.
The only mistakes in a lawful detention that i can even think of are:
1) When someone is very confused about what their eyes saw: 'I saw him stab that guy!' 'It was a LARP, we were roleplaying!' (Or the 'pretend to shoplift' example someone else was talking about above.)
2) When someone is very confused about the law: 'I arrested him for playing music with swear words on his radio'
Yes, even 2) is a lawful, although stupid, citizen's arrest, if you can convince a jury that a 'reasonable person' would believe that was illegal.
It is very very very hard to find any examples of lawful citizen's arrest that turned out to be incorrect. I'm sure there have been a few, but they're probably under rather surreal circumstances. (Possibly involving evil twins.)
Of course, there are plenty of illegal detentions that people make that they think will be covered under citizen's arrest, but then sadly find they are not and that they, themselves, have committed a crime.
Most store policies on shoplifting prevention have rules that the person must have been continually observed the entire time for just that reason.
However, legally, the store is in the clear even if they go after him, assuming there's not a specific status to cover this. (Which some states actually have.) They observed him sticking things in his pocket, they observed him walking out the door, a reasonable person would believe a crime was committed. They didn't observe him put it back, but the reasonable person test is what a reasonable person with their knowledge would believe.
The fact he was playacting a crime and didn't actually commit one means he's not guilty, of course, but the detention is also legal. It is perfectly legal to incorrectly arrest people, 'wrongful detention' happens when there's detention in violation of the law, not when the detention is based on a factually incorrect premise.
Incidentally, even a store that requiring continual observance before charging people with shoplifting doesn't stop people from carrying their own items into the store, slipping them on the shelf, and then 'shoplifting' them, if they truly wanted to make trouble. Although, actually, deliberately deceiving someone into arresting you is probably grounds for being charged with disorderly conduct.
However, in this case, it was wrongful detention, in that the store did not observe any action that a reasonable person would consider a crime.
You may not like it, but pick 100 guys off the street and a majority of them will consider it "reasonable" for the merchant in that situation to suspect shoplifting.
The standard for a citizen's arrest isn't that you have a reasonable suspicion they are a criminal. It is that you saw, with your own eyes, them do something which you have a reasonable suspicion is a crime.
The 'reasonable suspicion' is not of criminalness in general. It's that a specific thing that you saw was a specific criminal action. The only false positives on a legal citizen's arrest would be when the detainer is factually mistaken about the law or had their eyes fooled in some manner.
I.e, detaining someone for underaged drinking is legal when you see them drinking and know they are underaged, even if it turns out they are not underaged or were actually drinking non-alcoholic beer or you were in a state where the legal drinking age was actually 18. You misjudged the specific action you saw, but any person could have had the same reasonable suspicion as to that action's legality.
It is not legal to detain them when you simply hear them talking about it, or you find beer cans where they were hanging out, or if they give you a signed and notarized confession of underaged drinking, or if they refuse to let you search them for beer when walking off your property.
It doesn't matter how 'suspicious' reasonable people would be that that is what they are doing, it isn't until you observe criminal activity or, at least, think you observed it, that you can detain them. Anything else is illegal detention.
Why is this? Mainly because people can't break the law in general, only in specifics. Ergo, it matters not a whit how much you think they are breaking the law in general, you must have some specific reason to detain them, because you are, in the literal meaning of the word, arresting them, and you must actually 'charge' them with a specific instance of a crime and not just 'shopliftic activity in general' or 'generalized murder'.
He's either ironic of very stupid, considering that no churches specify 'The King James Bible' as the best one. Most of them, in fact, recognize that it's written using a rather outdated vocabulary and is often unclear because of that, and additionally has a few things translated poorly, so if any religions did have an 'official' translation (And I'm not aware of any that do.), it certainly wouldn't be King James.
In addition to you boycotting the wrong people like the other post said, you should probably do a little bit of research to see if you actually disagree with anything the Quakers do or believe. They are an extremely 'liberal' denomination in that they don't really have any hard-and-fast rules about anything. (They were created as a backlash to fighting between Catholics and Anglicans in England.) Their basically theology appears to be 'Why can't we all just get along?'.
The only theological positions I know, in addition to being very strongly pro-sexual equality (Way before other churches or even society as a whole thought it was even a possible idea. They had women participating the same as men 300 years ago. ) they are very very very pacifistic and reject the idea of a 'Just War', IIRC. Belonging to the Quakers almost automatically gets you a conscientious objector status.
So let me get this straight. Someone posts a link to religioustolerance.org asserting something. Someone else says 'That's a known Scientology front'. You dispute this by...posting exactly the same link. Interesting.
It doesn't matter whether it's a 'cult' or not.
It matters that they use extortion to silence critics. Repeatedly. They accuse them of child porn, they have them arrested on bogus charges, they break into their houses and harass them at work. They've even kidnapped 'errant members' before, and at least such one person has actually disappeared while in their custody.
It has nothing to do with the rather surreal beliefs of their religion.
Incidentally, whether not something is a cult also has nothing to with the beliefs. It is simply a list of things like 'requires members to cut off contact with family' and 'uses sleep/food deprivation as a form of mind control' and stuff like. Scientology uses some of the cult tricks, and not others, so whether or not it actually is a cult is debatable, but that is not why they run into legal trouble, they run into legal trouble because parts of their organization operate illegally in attacking critics.
No, diesel available today is not as clean.
It has nothing to do with the cars. European cars running off the clean diesel over there are plenty clean. (And those cars can't even run over here because of how dirty the diesel is.)
It's a different thing legally, but it has mostly the same standards. The only exception I know of is that the observation of the crime can be distributed...one person can see them hide something, pass the suspect off to another suspect who watches them leave the store, and yet another person could be the one who physically detains them.
Whereas in citizen's arrest the same person is supposed to do all that. You're not supposed to take someone's word that someone else just committed a crime and detain them, although in actuality people do it all the time during real citizen's arrests. (Stop that man! He stole that lady's purse!) This opens 'helpers' up to a lot of legal liability if the observer was wrong, but whatever. (More liability than if they'd observed it and were wrong, that is. Observers of things that look criminal have some legal protection from liability even if they are factually incorrect and wrongly detain someone.)
Also many places have encoded requirements for continual observation of the person after the point they conceal something, which wouldn't technically be required for a citizen's arrest. And it has some additional waivers of liability assuming they do follow all the rules.
But they are basically the same things. They both say 'reasonable suspicion' but what they actually mean in court is 'You saw them committing an act that a reasonable person would assume is a crime'. Aka, they could have, in theory, slipped their own personal item on the shelf and then back off the shelf and hidden it, and walked out of the store with it, and if you'd missed the first action you're be wrong. But there is indeed a reasonable suspicion they just committed a crime. Anyone who had observed the same would think it was a crime.
What it doesn't include is them acting 'suspiciously' but without any act that is overtly criminal. The police can detain people skulking around and eying a closed store. Or someone who 'acts like' a shoplifter tends to act. The police are expected to be able to notice when things are 'wrong', and they have to right to question people and detain them and do further investigation if they have a good reason.
Citizens cannot do this, at all. Either as part of 'shopkeeper's privilege' or a straight up citizen's arrest. It doesn't matter how suspiciously someone behave, or if they have a sign saying 'I'm a shoplifter' and are mysteriously carrying a full garbage bag they didn't have when they entered the store. They must actually see something that a reasonable person would believe to be a criminal action. (Maybe they're stealing the garbage bag! It's like that joke about smuggling bicycles.)
Whether or not a reasonable person would think they were a shoplifter or behaving in a manner typical of one is not relevant, as those are not criminal actions. Only the police can detain people acting suspiciously, other people must have 'reasonable suspicion' that the action they saw someone commit was criminal.
They can post that sign if they want, and I can leave if I don't agree with that sign. At any point. Even after I've made my purchase.
If they want to make an actual contract with penalties that hit me if I break it, they can do that, but not by me walking by a point, and I'd still have the right to just walk out with my bags, breaking the contract.
This country does not have the concept of imprisonment due to breaking of contracts, aka, debtor's prison. It doesn't matter what terms they write in their contracts, I can sign them and then, later, breach them by walking out of the store. They could, in theory, sue me if there was an actual contract as opposed to a mere sign, but they could not forcibly detain me or search me under any legal theory at all.
People tend to ignore that laws that protect us from the police abusing their powers protect us from other people, because we will actually call the police when crimes are committed, instead of going 'Well, I don't have my license on me, it's entirely possibly they'd decide to arrest me instead'.
Oh, and there are one more set of people overload 911. People who call in to, correctly, report 'crimes', but appear to have a very fuzzy idea of just what sort of activity is actually illegal, and thus report things like someone using all the washing machines in a laundromat or someone smoking while driving.
Being in the middle of any sort of crime is a perfectly reasonable reason to call 911, or having just been in a crime, or having just stumbled across evidence of a crime.
People who talk about when it's 'correct' to call 911 are asses. Any time you need police to response, in person, at that moment or shortly thereafter, is a good time to call 911.
As long as you're not a fucking moron and calling them to complain about parking tickets or ask for directions, you're good. Those are the idiots overloading 911, not people who come across a body three days old in an abandoned lot and say 'Well, this doesn't look like an 'emergency' per se, he's clearly dead and no one seems to be around, so I better just lookup the police's non-emergency number when I get back to the house and call them.'.
Did you not quite grasp that everyone in this entire discussion, when they said 'illegally detain', they meant kidnapping? There is no actual crime of 'illegally detaining' someone, it is called 'kidnapping'.
In normal speech 'kidnapping' is usually meant 'moving someone against their will', so few people have been using it here, but there is no legal difference between moving someone without their consent and holding them in place without their consent, it is exactly the same law.'
More to the point, it's easier to fight things when they're cut and dried. The store admitted they had no reason to suspect him and he wasn't in fact shoplifting. And he called the police.
Frankly, the police thing is much more important than the bag searching one. Some random store overstepped their authority and, just like always, they'll be slapped down. We already know bag searching cannot be required, quite a lot of courts have made that clear, although it would be nice to get a national precedent.
But the real question is: If you call the police because someone is illegal detaining you, can the police then arrest you if you fail to produce ID?
Why are they searching me because they have an employee problem. They have cameras over their registers. It would be just as easy to look at the cameras and checkoff that all items that were carried to the checkout did, in fact, make it through the purchase.
Stopping shoplifters is one thing, but with their own employees they don't even to catch them in 'real time'.
Why the heck would they charge someone with shoplifting because they were missing an item in their bag? Is there some secret form of anti-shoplifting that I'm unaware of where people buy things and then illegal leave them in the store?
No it's not. That's a police standard. The standards for a citizen's arrest, which is what we're actually talking about here, requires a crime being observed.
Most people who shoplift are dreadfully terrible at it... but if you get someone who knows what they're doing and knows the rules, they're next to impossible to catch.
That's what I always assumed when I heard the loss-preventions runs when I worked at Walmart as a cashier. (Hence, I wasn't really expected to do too much, people don't normally shoplift in sight of the checkout.) I was like 'Good lord, what's someone from blatantly putting a dozen things in their pocket, and then rapidly walking back and forth in the store a few times and weaving through some isles?'
Anyhow, the worst losses always came from employee theft. Biggest one I had contact with: The head of loss prevention in that very store I worked in got busted a couple years after I left with over a hundred thousand dollars worth of stolen merchandise in his possession (quis custodiet ipsos custodes?). They never figured out just how much he did take in total, but the investigation but the grand total at something near a half million dollars of merchandise. Someone walking out with a 200 dollar VCR (to help set the era... DVDs were still a decade away) is chump change next to that level.
That's what, as someone pointed out to me above, bagchecks are for. Customers in collusion with cashiers. It's not they think you're a shoplifter (Why the hell would you shoplift to the checkout and not past it?), it's that they think the cashier is a buddy of yours who 'forgot' to ring up that 200 dollar VCR and only ran up that package of VHS tapes and that Joan Jett tape.
There's a difference between marking receipts and searching bags. I assert that a store should have the right to mark receipts on the way out so that you cannot walk back into the store and take out more goods on the same receipt in full view of everyone else. (Didn't we recently have a Congressman commit this sort of fraud?) I think everyone would agree with me on that one.
Sadly, right now, they don't have that right, and all too often this gets conflated with searching bags, which the store also doesn't have the right to do, and shouldn't. If the courts make it clear they don't have that right, it's probably going to remove the right to mark receipts.
And if we don't come up with a way to let them do the marking, I fear they'll implement privacy invading measures like, after you buy something, they send your photo to the front of the store to tell them you can exit with bags of stuff for a limited amount of time. (And once they start doing that, they'll tie the photo to the purchase, and all sorts of crap. Yes, they already have you on video, but there's a difference between hours of video not tied to specific purchases and a photograph specifically of a certain customer.)
My suggestion: A loaner receipt. As part of the transaction, they hand you a slip of paper as the real receipt (Which is your property.) and another slip which they are careful to say is not your property and you can't leave the store with...which you turn over to people at the front on the way out.
And, like I said, don't confuse this with searching bags, which I agree is very stupid and not supported in law.
Anyone has the right to detain anyone they've seen commit a crime. It's called a citizen's arrest.
What they don't have the right to do is detain them when that person has simply decided not to comply with some rule of theirs. Even if that rule is to prevent theft.