Incident 5

Well there is a good chance this could be last one I post for a while, I have mentioned all the stories that I think are worth mentioning to this date. But boy, is this a good one. This next incident just made me chuckle a little bit at the nature of people in our society. The basis of this story is that myself and one of my partners were working and saw a man conceal several items into another store’s shopping bag. He was near the front doors so we had to run from our office in the back to the front to stop him. Unfortunately for us, as we were going through the first set of double doors he caught a glimpse of us out of the corner of his eye from right out side the second set of doors and took off running. Long story short, we did not pursue for safety reasons and he made it down to the other side of the strip mall our store is in, where we could see him standing plain as day.

Now the storey for the most part is over, now I want to explain a little of the after math of the incident. Not long after he was gone the comments from other customers started pouring in. One lady advised us to “chase him down he’s old you guys can get him,” while another admitted that she “knew he was stealing,” she “saw him taking stuff in the store.” Now I’m not one to judge, but if you saw someone stealing in a store, don’t you think you would tell one of the associates working there that they needed to contact security. Now this is just my analysis of our society, but it seems as if these days no one wants to get involved unless it directly affects them more than ever before. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I would alert someone if I saw someone stuffing their bag full of stolen goods.

Besides the customers, there was also a man who saw the whole thing happen and decided that he was going to help us out. He follows the guy in his truck and finds the bus stop across the street where the guy is sitting. So the man speeds back in his truck to tell us. We thanked him, called dispatch to see if they would try to pick him up, but realized that was probably not going to happen. The pick up truck guy, seeing that we are not chasing the shoplifter down decides to act on his own and starts following the bus the shoplifter is on. He then calls the store and tells the manager he will follow the man till we can do something about it…?!?! Who does he think we are the police? We are going to do nothing, luckily management convinced him to forget it and go home. I don’t even want to think about what could have happened if this vigilante had tried to bring this guy in for us. But the question I asked was, would this man have gone out of his way this much for someone that had a flat tire or needed a lift to the gas station or needed $5? I don’t know the answer to that, but I think that our society as a whole many times is too eager to see individuals suffer or feel pain of one kind or another. Although I like to see the good in people, in this line of work I see the bad far too often. Hopefully I’m wrong; I really hope that people out there really do want to help others out. I’m sorry for the social commentary, but I don’t have anything else to write about, maybe I’ll have a stop in the next couple days and have some juicy new material to write about. Let’s hope, I’m out of topics to write on already.