People shouldn’t steal, and that includes stealing from stores. Virtually everyone believes this. It’s harmful to merchants, and infuriating to honest customers.
That some will, on occasion, commit these crimes doesn’t lessen the obligation of government to publicize that information both effectively and cleverly. It may be effective initially to post a shoplifting notice, with photographs and a headline ending in an exclamation point, but it’s surely not clever.
If it’s not clever, it’s not the best approach.
It’s not clever because alerts about small property crimes (wrong although those crimes are) seem overwrought and excessive when compared with necessary alerts about crimes of violence, missing child alerts, large-scale thefts, or any crimes where a suspect brandishes a weapon.
Those are the crimes that one typically reserves for a photographic alert, and expanding the pool of crimes treated this way diminishes the significance of those other alerts. Worse, it risks making the shoplifting alert look like a parody of the more serious missing-person alerts.
(The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, headquartered at UW-Madison, also cautions that there’s a liability risk for misidentification of shoplifters, where the risk should be weighed against the relatively small value of the crime: “May have some limited value in deterring shoplifting, but where those identified have not been convicted by a court, both the merchants and the police engaged in the practice are vulnerable to legal challenge.”)
Over at the City of Whitewater’s webpage, there’s a SHOPLIFTING ALERT! about someone who allegedly stole merchandise from Walmart and Daniels Sentry.
It’s one of the worst ways to market the city to someone successful from beyond Whitewater: it risks looking like a parody of more serious alerts, makes the town seem more provincial than it is, and will cause people to wonder about how the city government directs its focus.
Adding an exclamation mark and all capitals (SHOPLIFTING ALERT!) only brings the notice even closer to a parody.
Shoplifting is wrong, but it’s also a down-market crime, and emphasizing it at the city’s website only makes the city look down-market, too.
This is easy for some people to see, but very hard for others to grasp.
City government needs someone who understands messaging beyond the perception of a few overly-insular residents.