Retail Store Detention for Almost Four Hours

[free9man]

Plus if this involved the fitting rooms, I'd bet good money that it was a floor surveillance case. There might have been someone else on cameras but if not, there isn't likely to be any video. You can't be in the camera room and on the floor at the same time.

[DeputyDog]

Read the statute again, and explain your thinking. If your thought is, "Maybe the police were called right away," or "Maybe it was only thirty minutes", while not outside the realm of possibility, those aren't the facts we were given.

You do this investigation after detaining the suspect, without calling the police? In what state?

Absolutely. To make a stop, all that we need to know for a fact is that they stole. When someone spends an hour walking around a store, and removing many, many items from their packaging, ditching the packaging in out of the way places, and sometimes separating tags/UPC's and ditching THOSE, do you know how long that it will take to recover everything? You might be surprised how easy it SOUNDS vs. how easy it IS to recover ditched packaging.

And that has to be done before the police arrive. The police aren't going to stand around while we do all of that leg work. They want the itemized list, narrative report already written, evidence already gathered.

And as for what "facts" we were given - I'm not at all certain that they are facts. The bottom line is, I've been doing this job long enough to have been through all this and then some. I'm not about to say "the LP people screwed this up" without taking those possibilities off the table - because they are FAR from remote possibilities, but rather very common ones.

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Although many States do state the time limits of detention in their Merchant Detention statutes, Hawaii does not. I do agree with Mr. Knowitall that almost fours (if that is a true time line) is unreasonable. And to deny a person the ability to use the bathroom for that amount of time is certainly unreasonable. The last thing you want a judge or jury to hear is - I was detained for almost fours hours and they denied me the ability to use the restroom facilities....so I pissed my pants.

I have written many times about the detention of shoplifters and the length of time waiting for the police to respond. You have to ask, for how long and to what end?

It's on the long end of normal, but not objectively unreasonable. Again, how long did it take the cops to respond? I've had people detained for three hours because it took me 45 min to an hour to do paperwork and another 2 hours for the police to arrive.

Depending on the circumstances, denying the ability to use the restroom is not in and of itself unreasonable. It may or may not be. But pissing one's pants isn't akin to death. And as I stated, if there is a fear of worse than that happening which can be reasonably articulated, it might not be unreasonable.

[Mr. Knowitall]

Absolutely. To make a stop, all that we need to know for a fact is that they stole....

In what state?

[llworking]

While I am certainly not an expert at loss prevention, I do feel compelled to point out that what is reasonable and what is legal are not necessarily the same thing. For the purpose of the OP's legal rights, they don't have to be reasonable - they only have to be legal. So while the discussion on reasonableness is interesting, I have a question; assuming that the OP's perception of 4 hours is correct, was it LEGAL? Reasonable is subjective - legal is not.

I do question whether or not it was legal. They basically imprisoned the OP for 4 hours. Are loss prevention personnel legally allowed to do that?

[Mr. Knowitall]

If in fact it was a near-four hour detention, and the police weren't called until the end of that period, I am hard pressed to imagine it's being deemed reasonable in any jurisdiction. I'm interested in DeputyDog's jurisdiction, as I would like to see if his state's law is truly that forgiving.

[free9man]

I do question whether or not it was legal. They basically imprisoned the OP for 4 hours. Are loss prevention personnel legally allowed to do that?

Even if they were legally allowed to, would it be wise to do it? If you caught a major felon, I could see sitting on them for a little bit. A misdemeanor shoplifting case, especially a low dollar one? I have let shoplifters go when told by police that they are going to be unusually delayed for whatever reason. I can file a report later or, if it's a low dollar case, let it go and just do civil demand.

As for the bathroom question: If there is a same-sex LPO available and the person did not resist (i.e. is a flight risk), I never had a problem with a potty stop. Just gotta check the bathroom after to make sure they didn't ditch anything that might have been missed during the cursory search most companies/state laws allow LP to conduct. Because they will ditch things that I don't care about but the police will, like drugs.

[Security Consultant]

I do question whether or not it was legal. They basically imprisoned the OP for 4 hours. Are loss prevention personnel legally allowed to do that?

The question of detention time limits are not a legal (criminal) question, but a civil matter. I can remember one case when the shoplifter complained about the length of their detention to a prosecutor. They were told that it was not a criminal matter, but a civil one. They did hire an attorney to take up the civil matter which included much more than detention time limits. I wrote in my expert report that her and her son's detention for 2+ hours was not reasonable in this matter. I was looking forward to testifying at trial, but the case settled. This was in Michigan.

[Mr. Knowitall]

To get all technical... civil matters are legal matters -- the relevant distinction is criminal vs. civil.

[DeputyDog]

Our state does not provide a timeline in the law. It says "reasonable." What is "reasonable?" Depends on the circumstances, and how the circumstances can be articulated. It might not be reasonable to hold a 14 year old for 2 hours for a $3.99 theft. It might be entirely reasonable to hold someone for 2 hours for felony theft when the police are taking a while to respond.

[HILEO1]

As a police officer in the Aloha State, I can assure you that the police report will state the time of the initial stop by the LPO, the time of police arrival at the store, and the time of arrival at the cell block. If the OP wishes to argue a 4 hour detention in front of the court, the judge will defer to the times written in the police report as fact. The report may challenge or confirm this assertion, so it would be prudent to check what the report says.

Furthermore, as has been previously stated, police officers in Hawaii can be very busy and shoplifting cases are low on the priority list. I am certain that the LPO knew they would be contacting the police as soon as the citizens arrest was made. However, the store shoplifting report must be generated (typically several typed pages) and printed out, the prices of the stolen items must be verified, and photos of the items and the suspect must be taken before officers are called. If officers show up and these things are not ready to go, they will simply leave again and tell the LPO to call when everything is ready. This process takes at least an hour for a simple theft case and can be much longer depending on the circumstances.