El Paso shooting renews scrutiny of crimes committed at Walmart
A 21-year-old man was charged with murder last week after shooting another man in the parking lot of a Walmart in Auburn, Maine.
At the retailer’s store in North Bergen, N.J., a woman squirted pepper spray at people around the customer service desk in February, temporarily blinding some employees and customers. She then retreated into a back room, wielding a knife and shouting obscenities.
And on Monday, a customer grabbed a kitchen knife off a shelf, began unwrapping it and threatened an employee, prompting an evacuation of a Walmart in Marietta, Ga. A few weeks ago, a man was arrested at the same store, accused of trying to kidnap a 9-year-old from the bathroom.
Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, with more than 4,000 sprawling stores dotted across every region of the United States. And partly because it operates in so many places, crime, some of it deadly, seems to follow it.
The shooting at the Walmart in El Paso that killed 22 people on Saturday was the worst episode to happen inside or in the parking lot of one its stores in the company’s history. Police and law enforcement experts have said there was not much
Walmart could have done within that store to prevent the gunman from carrying out the massacre.
However, it has placed renewed attention on why the retailer historically has been the scene of so much crime, and whether the company has done enough to deter it.
In the week before the El Paso shooting, at least three people were killed at Walmart stores across the nation, including two employees who, officials said, were shot by a former colleague at the store in Southaven, Miss.
“In some ZIP codes, Walmart is a significant driver of crime rates,” said David Pyrooz, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado who was the co-author of a 2014 study analyzing the stores’ effect on local crime.
There are thousands of reports of shoplifting each year, straining the resources of local police departments, which say they spend much of their day processing petty theft cases.
Officers have complained that Walmart, renowned for controlling costs, depends too heavily on the local police and taxpayers to prosecute wrongdoing in its stores, rather than taking on the responsibility — and expense — itself. In some cities in Kentucky, calls related to Walmart sites accounted for as much as 36 percent of all crime reports, one analysis shows. The Tulsa, Okla., Police Department logged 1,700 more calls for service at its Walmart locations than the next leading retailer, according to a report by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2016. The Tampa Bay Times reported that in some years, local police departments received, on average, two calls every hour about problems at Walmart stores in several Florida counties.
With thousands of stores, covering nearly much of the United States, police say bad things are bound to happen when people of all walks of life coexist in an enclosed space.
In many rural areas, Walmart is the primary place where people come to shop and socialize, and bump into friends — or enemies.
Sometimes, these chance encounters lead to violence, as was the case with the killing at the Walmart in Maine late last month. The two men, who were engaged in a running dispute, encountered each other in the Walmart parking lot.
“It does suggest that if this is the nature of your clientele, you need to have security provisions in place,” said Michael Scott, director of the center for problemoriented policing at Arizona State University. “It should be built into your business model.”
Walmart says it has taken steps to improve security at its stores, like installing cameras in parking lots and hiring off-duty police officers on busy days like Black Friday.
The Walmart greeters, who once only welcomed shoppers as they entered the store, now have expanded duties that include checking receipts and helping with returns — increasing interactions with shoppers than can act as a deterrent.
“You can never predict violence; no business can,” a Walmart spokesman, Randy Hargrove, said. “But what you can do is prepare for it. We are continuing to invest and change because safety is a top priority.”