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It’s not keeping them safe: it’s recording in order to facilitate an investigation if someone harms them.

That might serve a deterrent effect, but given how much crime is a result of poor impulse control, it may not have as strong an effect as one might like.

Let's not forget unless this is constantly uploading, hostile folks will be even more inclined to attempt assault to 'remove evidence' from the employee.
This sounds incredibly risky - given other employees may be nearby and the stores already have fixed cameras everywhere.

After the first year or two of such incidents spiking it'll go down quickly.

note: I really don't like the idea of a panopticon

The stores already hav3 cameras to provide evidence required for an investigation. Why would Walmart require additional evidence?
Because cameras have blind spots.
Or, it really is there to inhibit theft by employees, and safety is just the public rationalization.
That's another benefit of the system from the perspective of Walmart higher ups. No doubt.
> It’s not keeping them safe: it’s recording in order to facilitate an investigation if someone harms them.

It's getting them used to wearing them on a pretext of being about monitoring customers, to ease them into a shift to an always-on policy which will be promoted as a simplification that will reduce the risk of forgetting or turning them on too late, but which will also allow them to be complete records of the employee’s behavior, which is almost certainly the real target.

I wonder how hard it would be for the microphone to listen for the word "union" and send an alert to Walmart Corporate?
real life implementation of Marshall Brain's Manna
> may not have as strong an effect as one might like

You’re forgetting how much crime is motivated by “merciful” judges afraid to give long sentences to people who are incapable of functioning in society.

All you have to do is look at El Salvador for the ultimate proof study. According to CNN, murders fell by 97.7%. The western academic whines about the innocent; but NGOs invited to oversee the project have yet to make a single convincing innocence story.

There’s also the issue that crime is fundamentally, at its very root, a punishment of the innocent. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the harmless.

El Salvador's case is not as clear cut as it might seem - see #3 at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
I’m far from an expert on this - but doesn’t it seem like they are just locking up all the people inclined to commit murder, not actually deterring people for the most part? It still seems consistent with the idea that crime is mostly impulse-based and hard to deter.

Additionally, wouldn’t less serious crimes (like shoplifting) be even harder to deter than murder, since they are even more likely to be committed impulsively?

(I really don't like this but) I definitely expect the future will involve ubiquitous on-person video & audio recording. People will walk around with devices that constantly record every interaction, which will eventually seem normal. A lot of formerly private conversations will be uploaded to whatever social media we have in the future, some stuff will go viral, etc. Goodbye any semblance of privacy!
Assymetric recording. There will be people recording you, but you'll be either legally barred from recording them or banned from publishing it on the Internet.

(this is likely where the norms around recording will end up - reinforcing the existing power structure)

Seems like a great market for non-recorded spaces. Or society will eventually just develop strong norms about recording.
The episode of Black Mirror "The Entire History of You" comes to mind.
Yeah this might just be a bunch of suits seizing an opportunity created by cheap technology (and not an indicator of some moral decline, the position I instinctively moved to at first).
At first glance this seems like an indicator of the country's overall moral health. But when I went to look up crime statistics I was told property crime has been declining since the 90s. What gives? Is this an example of misleading statistics, or is there something else?

One hypothesis could be that a reduction in employee/customer engagement within stores creates more opportunities for theft. More self-checkout lines, fewer department representatives roaming around. Maybe?

This is what happens when you have an economy driven by finance, with corporate overlords who see their 2 million employees as numbers in a spreadsheet that can be moved around to squeeze out as much "shareholder value" as possible.
I don’t know man, when I used to work a Walmart deli we would throw out roughly 400 lbs of meat and cheese a day from expiring and were too lazy to mark it as shrink as we were told to.

As far as the store was concerned that was indistinguishable from theft and the managers/supervisors never gave a shit either. Then you’ve got CEOs of retail organizations admitting they they overstated how much theft had increased[1]

I’m pretty sure it’s just C levels lying to justify the changes for other reasons and then pinning it on the brokies as a convienent scapegoat

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...

To be fair, the crime in the 90's is different than the crime today.

In the 90's, there was absolutely more crime than today. No question about that. However, how many Target or Walmart mass shooters were there in 1990? How many hotel shooters mowed down 260 people in the 90's?

Just pointing out that there has been a slow change in the nature of threats in society over time. At the same time, I'm not sure our laws, or even our law enforcement infrastructure, has changed to interdict that kind of crime/(terrorism?).

Now here's the thing however, the answer is not to invade everyone's privacy and make every conversation or action you take available on social media or whatever. I think the answer is to really dig into why interdiction is not happening for some of these new forms of crime. Sure cameras help police and Walmart uppity ups when the inevitable happens, but I think we can be a little more creative and maybe even get better results?

What we learned by reducing crime in the 90's is that interdiction is always better than crime scene investigation. That's not any less true for the type of crime we're seeing today. In fact, it's more true. You definitely want to interdict mass shootings.

This is about monitoring the employees, not the customers.

When you press, you quickly find out that corporate has zero idea as to what is causing their shrink. They've been pissing and moaning about consumer theft, but the scale seems too large for it to be that.

Of course, the people at the bottom have a pretty solid grasp on what is causing the shrink--and it's all rooted in the fact that they're being paid like shit.

It can be true that crime can be decreasing and that retail thefts can be up.

Crimee trends can change as opportunity shifts.

This seems to be fueled by perceived changes in the legal risk of smash and grabs.

I think that crime is a fear tactic to sell these and to make excuses for worse customer service. Why hire more employees if you can just put cameras on everyone?
This is disturbing. It's bad enough that one might have to stumble through the cone of some surveillance camera while living life, but even should you have to stay there for several minutes completing an errand, you will have another moment of privacy as soon as you walk away. Even while working a shift at Walmart such will be true. But now, for those who work there, they're in the fishbowl permanently.
Privacy implications depend on how long they retain the footage, and how it's stored in general.
There may be some safety (e.g. lawsuit defense) justification, but this is also a trojan horse for increased employee behavior/performance surveillance. Pair and always on microphone with text-to-speech and some language model and it becomes even easier to fire employees at the earliest hint of union organizing.
Incoming alert from Wally, the Walmart AI - Hi there! My vision model has detected you're not following the latest TPS protocol. Remember, all TPS reports must have the updated coversheets before they go out. Please comply immediately to maintain operational efficiency. Thanks for your cooperation!
I’ve had paranoid breaks in life where I felt I was being watched or monitored. It truly changed how I behaved, where I walked, stuff I did/say.

That quantum observer principle follows here. Just being observed can influence things, in this case reducing crime.

But think about what I just described, a literal paranoid state. It’s quite uncomfortable.

Kinda insane that this is necessary in some places. I am not super comfortable with these changes of having cameras everywhere, but I am sure some grocery store employees have to deal with a lot of “shady” customers.
It's doesn't seem to be necessary. If they have just 200 violent incidents then that's impressively low, 0.0125% chance of you as a Walmart employee to have a violent encounter at work per year.

Verbal conflicts can be unpleasant as well obviously, and the cameras can help identify those customers as well. I'm not entirely sure that the cameras well work as a deterrent though, they normal don't in other cases. A frustrated or angry customer isn't going to see the camera an change their behavior.

So you still need to have support framework in place for the employees who have these encounters. The cameras are only there to be able to identify customers, but I'm not really sure what they would want to do with that information.

Cameras have been everywhere for quite some time. Every time you use self check out, at the grocery store or even the post office, a camera is watching you. As you walk around stores, cameras are following and recording your movements. ATM machines, traffic cameras, we are being photographed constantly.
We are being told it is necessary. We don't know that it actually is.
> but I am sure some grocery store employees have to deal with a lot of “shady” customers.

I wouldn't just worry about the customers—the lady who recently died in a walk-in oven (at a walmart!) was unlikely to have been locked in by a customer.

9/11 changed the game. Fear is a powerful motivator.

Cameras on:

- public roadways, highways

- streets (nyc, london)

- businesses

- private cars

- public transportation

- interiors of cars

- perimeter of residential homes

- interiors of homes

- civilian law enforcement agencies equipped with body cams

- and of course the audio, video, GPS capable devices a majority of the world carries

- now adding to the list is private businesses equipping employees with body cams

The “selfie” and social media made us accustomed to posting personal information online as well.

The surveillance state is already here and people are barely waking up to this shit.

If they put criminals in jail they wouldn't have to have a surveillance state like this.
Consider what life will be like for the employee once they combine this with vision models. Constant supervision by an all-seeing robo-boss.
Let’s fix the problems causing the devolution to a low trust society instead of just layering on cameras and ubiquitous surveillance.

Maybe the people making grocery store clerks feel afraid at work shouldn’t be free to walk around causing trauma.

Freedom is not anarchy.

> Maybe the people making grocery store clerks feel afraid at work shouldn’t be free to walk around causing trauma.

Have you ever been on NextDoor? A bunch of people are terrified of completely normal interactions because people look & sound different.

By global standards, the US is not a low trust society, and very few countries could really be considered high trust (https://ourworldindata.org/trust).
>Let's just fix society by locking up everyone who causes problems

is right up there with

>Let's just print more money until we have enough

and

>Let's just make the rest of the airplane out of the same stuff they use to make the black box

Many of things that have contributed to this becoming a low trust society are our most highly held social values. There's no sign that those values are going to change so we just have to accept that there are things we must do to protect ourselves in the permanent low trust society.
We’re very much not headed in the direction of fixing that… so things like this. And who or how or..?
We already imprison more people than any other country on earth.