Category: Crime

I’ve said before that corporate HR departments are more concerned about deflecting blame and not allowing the company to be sued than they are about doing the right thing.

Here’s a case of a Home Depot employee losing his job for doing exactly that:

Last week, the 24-year-old department manager confronted a man who was standing by a soda machine in front of the Murfreesboro store off Old Fort Parkway holding a crowbar and a wad of cash. When the suspect started running, Chester said his instincts took over.

He was fired Monday for violations of company policy in the incident.”When he ran, I ran after him,” he said. Chester caught the thief and restrained him in the parking lot until police arrived.

Chester was shocked to find out that for managers and most employees, catching and detaining thieves is against company policy.

Yep.  It’s against company policy, because the thief might get hurt and sue home depot.  The employee might get hurt, and sue home depot.  It could be a massive orgy of everyone suing everyone else!

Such things are nightmares to HR executives in large companies, and a few lost dollars is better than a lawsuit or bad publicity.

But even if he had known how the company wanted him to act, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

“He had a crowbar, and what if he had come inside and gone after customers or the employees working at the registers?” Chester asked. “I’d rather have him coming at me than going after any of the customers.”

Sounds like a good guy to me.  A pity he has to become another victim of corporate cowardice.  Making a “citizens arrest” is a minefield that people should be very wary of, and unlike a police officer, we don’t have qualified immunity.   But I hate to see someone who does it right, and helps get a loser off the streets, punished for his good deed.  As a society, we need to encourage bold behavior like this, not punish it.

I really wouldn’t want to be the guy who has to clean this up:

At that point, a 58-year-old employee shot Mies once in head with a shotgun.

Generally, at close range, you can only can shoot someone once in the head with a shotgun, because after that, they will no longer have a head to shoot again.

This started out as a response to a comment by BadIdeaGuy, but I decided to turn it into a separate post. BadIdeaGuys pointed out:

There were more overdoses in Philly last year than gun homicides. Anyone seen an article on the drug problem facing Philly youth? My observation is that gun homicides occur largely in the “dealer class,” while the overdoses occur in the “user class”.

As much as I might recognize the drugs and violence are fairly intertwined, I think the drug war has hurt these communities more than the drugs themselves. I favor ending the drug war for this reason. Remove the black market incentive for drugs, and the violent black market in drugs will end.

You’ll still have the addict problem, but if you took all the money that goes into enforcing our drug laws (and it’s sizable), and put it into education and treatment, I think you’d find it money much better spent. It will help not having drug dealers shooting it out on the street corner, and it will also help not to send the message to young poor kids, with no hope and no opportunity, that the only way they can escape the poverty they live in is by joining a gang and selling drugs.

The drugs war, in my view, is a prime example of wealthy suburbanites supporting laws, under the illusion that it makes their kids safer from drugs, because they don’t live in the communities that are paying the price for maintaining that illusion. No doubt you’ll find support for keeping drugs illegal in virtually all communities, but the people I’ve encounterd who argue most passionately for it are middle class parents.

We need protection from the children of people involved in professional sports. Yep, Britt Reid is in trouble again, this time for raising a stir at a Plymouth Township shopping mall that I frequent semi-regularly, then crashing into a bunch of shopping carts when confronted by police. Police are checking to see if he was under the influence at the time.

Reid is out on bail awaiting sentencing for his previous crime, which involved threatening another motorist with a gun. No doubt this will not help his case when he goes before the judge.

Countertop links to a story of a crooked cop who raped a woman he pulled over, got caught, and….. sentenced to three years.

This group of criminals in Uniontown, Pennsylvania were certainly not prepared to have their victim fight back.   Despite brandishing an “assault weapon”, their victim managed to drop the magazine, and effectively disarm them, sending them fleeing.  They were captured by police.   Good show!

Folks who hate guns often tell us that criminals will just take the guns from us.  Well, that seems to happen quite often to them!