Talk:Retail loss prevention/Archives/2012

Major Revision is Planned

A group of retail loss prevention professionals got together and crafted a major revision to this article. (Pictures and charts not yet introduced.) It is in its final stages of preparation. This is an open invitation to comment on the existing article. Please refrain from editing the article itself. The link is: User:Usgrant7/RLPSandBox. Please visit the article, read it, and help us talk about what's written. Your input is important and valued. This proposed revision cures the current retail loss prevention article's importance and quality for both the business and company community.(Usgrant7 (talk) 19:13, 22 May 2012 (UTC))

This proposed revision is now active. We appreciate the hard work of James W., Jac B., Jack T., Jim L., and the other industry captains who put effort into making this article a reality. We hope that anyone researching this topic, will be enlightened and educated in the spirit of the Wikipedia. This was most certainly a collaberative effort, hopefully worthy of all who read it.(Usgrant7 (talk) 14:58, 28 June 2012 (UTC))

Call for pictures in support of the different paragraphs. Usgrant7 (talk) 18:21, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Door-Cam

The door cam stuff reeks of advertising, just sayin' —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.112.205.7 (talk) 05:11, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

This article is a joke. It should be taken down 84.226.170.140 (talk) 04:23, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Article needs NPOV

user:68.104.219.22 aka user:Tom Fearer submitted a great deal of material for this article, that appears to be accurate, and relevant. Though he has negated the wikipedia NPOV policy; writing in 1st person, and referencing his email address in the article itself. I started rewriting for NPOV, and wikified. Got as far as Shoplifting. I will contact said user and suggest that help with the rewrite, and possibly include his info in the references section. --R Lee E - 20:44, August 15, 2005 (UTC)

Can we get a reference to "studies like the Uniform Crime Report" please? --R Lee E - 21:02, August 15, 2005 (UTC)

And may I suggest to Tom Fearer that you include your name and contact info down in the references section - in addition, any credentials you may have. Since the bulk of this article is coming right out of your mouth/hands, we should feel confident that the source is credible. --R Lee E - 21:49, August 15, 2005 (UTC)

To Tom Fearer One of the most comprehensive articles I have found on Wikipedia so far. Thank you Tom. I have dared using some of your thoughts within my site Shoplifting in Germany], which hopefully you will enjoy from a professional's point of view. As mentioned above there is no way to contact you directly.

I've added a {{Advert}} template, and made a start on cutting the sections down to size. It's not that hard, thankfully: many paragraphs are not about the practice of preventing retail loss, and only tenuously about the industry, so one can remove whole swathes at a time. Sections done/still needing work:

• Introduction
• History
• 3 Modern Loss Prevention Strategies
  • 3.1 These losses are further broken down by categories of loss
• 4 Modern Loss Prevention Mission
  • 4.1 External Threats
  • 4.2 Other External Threats
  • 4.3 Internal Threats
• 5 Safety & Risk Management
• 6 Loss Prevention as a Career
• 7 The Loss Prevention Foundation
• 8 Industry Certifications
  • 8.1 Other Certifications
• 9 Possible Careers
• 10 The Future of the Loss Prevention Industry
• 11 See also
• 12 References
• 13 External links

--Sietse (talk) 17:02, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Article needs NPOV - October 2012

While full of solid material from the RLP POV the article does, especially later on, read more like an advert for working in RLP. Also there is a lack of any information on criticism of RLP with regards to firms asking more money in remuneration than was actually required (see here). As well as that there's also cases of those who criticise RLP being sued for libel for publishing reports on their websites (noted at the top of the last link and also here and letter sent to websites by a particular firm shown here). Basically while this article goes into plenty of detail on how RLP is done, it doesn't obviously list and criticisms of disadvantages. If Usgrant7 could provide more details of criticism to stay within NPOV I'm sure we'd all be very much obliged. J Mitchell - 21:00, October 4th, 2012 (UTC)

Help us revise certain pieces, one at a time.

The majority of the comments we got from legit edits improved the article. Then the vandals hit and tried to air a political viewpoint by deleting the article. This was unkind and a vandalism of the article. A lot of people put in a lot of hard work to make this article an informative piece on a subject of importance to commerce and jobs. If people see phrases that come from a RLP POV, then lets follow the Wiki revision rules and lay a foundation for revisions. Vandalizing the article was uncalled for. Usgrant7 - 18:00, October 17th, 2012 (UTC)

VANDALISM

The user without a user page JGz is vandalizing this article with a strong POV clearly hostile to the subject matter at hand. Usgrant7 (talk) 15:45, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

The "user without a user page" has made more than 70,000 edits. I think it's fair to assume, absent any firm evidence to the contrary, that he or she knows what they're doing. And even with just a handful of edits they would of course still merit an assumption of good faith. This article reads like an industry puff piece and it's going to need a good bit of cleanup to bring it into line. JohnInDC (talk) 16:19, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

as another "user without a user page ", i have reverted to what appears to be the most recent "clean" version. From here we can build the article together piece by piece based on what the reliable third party sources have to say about the topic. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 16:24, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Moving forward

There appear to be a lot of redily availble online sources such as at google books. I have started building the article back with some historical advances that appear to be widely acknowledged as important. I am sure that the history extends further back than the 70's, but any of that information can be included as it is discovered. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 17:26, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

and these newsprint sources can probably provide more detail about current applications and their reception. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 17:30, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Opinion of a previously uninvolved editor

This whole thing looks like mountains out of molehills. Retail loss prevention is not mostly civil recovery. How much of this book is about civil recovery? Or how much of this book? I have a feeling the article is being WP:COATRACKed and plagued by WP:RECENTISM for discussing civil recovery, which should be mentioned here, but mostly discussed in its own article per WP:UNDUE. That article is just a stub now; clearly there is room for improvement there. Tijfo098 (talk) 18:58, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

From my recent cursory exploration of sources, I would tend to agree that the content on civil recovery should probably be trimmed down, at least until the rest of the content has been appropriately built up, and particularly since it has its own article. Is there anyone who would like to offer a revised draft of the civil recovery content? -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 20:22, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

For the record, the long version of article was hardly WP:ADVERT (mostly it reflected textbooks) but it's now a massive WP:COATRACK from one newspaper article. If someone bothers to read the long version [1], they'd see that there was no attempt to hide the controversy about civil recovery. It had WP:DUE weight, about 3 paragraphs, which I'm quoting below:

“ However, a clear problem has begun to emerge. People are being pressed for costs despite not being found guilty of any crime. In one case, a young mother whose toddler opened a drink without paying received a bill for £87.50 for “staff and management time, administration and apportioned security costs”. complaints began to stack up on consumer forums, and the BBC's Watchdog ran a short feature. Oddly, whenever consumers stood their ground, the costs claims rarely seemed to be taken any further. According to Citizens Advice, of the more than 600,000 demands seemingly issued since 2000, only four unpaid demands have ever been successfully pursued in the county court by means of a contested trial.

Citizens Advice began to catalogue a steady stream of cases - no coincidence that they coincided with a rise in self-service checkouts. It soon put together one report, then another, showing that many of these cases were the result of consumer errors, and that many who were guilty had mental health problems and were caught taking extremely low value goods. In one civil recovery case that went to court, involving two girls who were caught shoplifting from a high street retailer, the retailer’s assertion that its total losses were almost £137.50 was thrown out. Under cross-examination, a security manager agreed the incident had taken one hour and ten minutes to deal with - at a cost of £17 not the £98.55 claimed. He was carrying out his job, not distracted from a core function of it.

As Denis MacShane MP told Parliament in early 2012, “This is a £15 million racket used by a lot of major companies —corporate groups — such as Boots, TK Maxx, Primark, Debenhams, Superdrug and Tesco.”

”

Now the article about an entire field of study and practice (with a long history) has been reduced just to this controversy. Classic WP:COATRACK. Tijfo098 (talk) 20:41, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

While there was a lot of content that has been deleted, exactly what content was appropriately sourced and presented, as opposed to being WP:OR based on primary sources, sourced to Wikipedia or promotional content about the industry from industry trade magazines? -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 20:48, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't think LP Magazine was cited for anything on which it is not reliable. If you have specifics to complain about, list them here of take them to WP:RS/N. The article could surely use more inline refs given how controversial it has become. Tijfo098 (talk) 21:31, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

And before any involvement of Usgrant7 the article looked like this; no mention of civil recovery in that version, by the way... Tijfo098 (talk) 21:41, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I will take a closer look at the LP cited content. But it does look like the various versions of the article are "bad" or "bad" or "stub with UNDUE focus". -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:55, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, the quality of this article was never much good. We can agree on that. Tijfo098 (talk) 22:36, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

No dispute here. I did try to tone down the original content, but after an hour and a half of work in which I had managed to distill one single paragraph from three entire sections, most of which read like PR, I gave up. And I asked at the time, in various places "out there", for help in making it a half-decent article. It's only with the edit war sparked by the industry insider trying to WP:OWN it that we have seen significant independent involvement. More editors and less ownership is, in my experience, pretty much always what is needed to fix these problem articles. The main thing is that the article is no longer a paean to the industry, which was a criticism of the New Statesman. It should never return to being a paean to the industry, and I hope it never will.

My strong impression is that the industry is about one third sharp practice, one third good old fashioned retail practice, and one third bollocks; the "Retail Loss Prevention Association", which wrote the article, is lacking in self-criticism, as most trade associations are. Here's my point: every trade association hands out awards that they characterise as "the industry's Oscars"; a sizeable proportion of the people involved sincerely believe that these "industry Oscars" are as significant as Academy Awards. They aren't. And that's why such people do not generally write good Wikipedia content. I don't pretend to either, but I do feel a need to (a) document things which are plainly missing from an article, such as civil recovery practice, for which we have some very reputable sources, and (b) tone down where practicable or otherwise remove PR fluff, which I have always hated, right back to the days when I used to write it myself.

Nobody is evil here. This is Wikipedia as normal. It will be fixed well before the WP:DEADLINE, especially now the main author of the article is actually engaging with people rather than simply reverting to his own version. Guy (Help!) 11:43, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Somewhat of a tangent

LP Magazine surely has some articles which nudge the reader/professional to sue the crap out of everyone [2] [3] (written by lawyers it seems). But they also have articles that are written by academics, and which don't seem to drum up anything in particular [4]. The last one was actually cited in the Wikipedia article. The lawyerish ones were not. The editorial board of LP Magazine seems to be 99% from the US industry though [5]. In general, it's probably better to go with textbooks, except when they are not up-to-date on figures. Tijfo098 (talk) 23:02, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Sure. My problem was, how do you take paragraphs like

There is an important partnership between the loss prevention and law enforcement communities. No single organization has the resources to battle losses both internally and externally. Loss prevention professionals rely upon law enforcement agencies in order to prosecute malfeasance, and law enforcement agencies require companies to both investigate and put forth clear evidence so that they can perform their duties.

and turn that into usable content? I mean, that paragraph basically boils down to: retail loss prevention works with the police. Which is already said several times in equally florid prose elsewhere, and really qualifies for a "no shit, Sherlock" award for statement of the blindingly obvious. That's why I started looking for outside views, and the onyl prominent ones I found up to the time that matey started reverting, were from CAB. I'd love to add more content from independent sources rather than insiders writing books and papers designed to promote their services.

Try a Google search for "retail loss prevention", the top hits and a lot of the industry sources all have red ratings with Web Of Trust. That is a bit of an issue when trying to find usable sources. Guy (Help!) 11:52, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

And another uninvolved editor's opinion

As the article reads at the moment, it sounds like the entirety of the industry is Civil Recovery, which is not at all accurate. It also paints Civil Recovery as a total abomination, which it is not. Can't speak to the UK, but in the US, Civil Recovery has a benefit to the shoplifter. They don't incur a criminal record out of it. Further, Civil Recovery is vital to prevent shoplifting in food stores. As food is perishable, the store would still incur exactly the same loss by prosecuting a shoplifter as they would without trying to detain the shoplifter, as the items shoplifted must be kept by the police for use as evidence. By the time they can be returned, they are unsalable. Under civil recovery, the merchant is not deprived of his wares, the shoplifter is punished by paying three times the cost of the item shoplifted plus court fees, and has the added bonus of walking away from the bad experience without a record.

This article needs a ton of work. It went from being a POV piece for the industry to being a POV piece for a very narrowly focused activism group. There are abuses in every process that can occur in the human experience. Generally they are not the norm. Without loss prevention work, I daresay the already sky high prices at retail would be even higher. Gtwfan52 (talk) 23:56, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

• Well, up to a point. The problem is that the most prominent independent sources about this industry are about civil recovery, at least at the moment, so that is the easiest thing to source; the industry insider who wrote the article would not engage in any kind of debate or discussion so it is very hard to include their perspective. We're working on that. Guy (Help!) 11:30, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Retail Loss Prevention

Retail Loss Prevention (RLP) relates to civil recovery (CR) like botany relates to wheat growing. Civil recovery is a component of RLP, and I would like to see a reference to it, in this article. Lots of companies use CR to reduce their losses, due to theft, and make it a deterrent for people to steal. WP:COATRACK and WP:POVFORK Am I wrong?Psa08918 (talk) 20:28, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

• {{sofixit}}. The old article contained a flowery PR description of the industry, which became a bit of an issue when it was picked up by a major news magazine. I ran out of time and patience trying to turn it into proper Wikipedia text. You are more than welcome to add independently sourced information, and I would encourage you to do so. Guy (Help!) 22:38, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, cool! What major news magazine is that?Psa08918 (talk) 13:34, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

The New Statesman. Guy (Help!) 22:52, 6 November 2012 (UTC)