Walmart’s low-paid employees cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. That’s an astonishing $1 million per store in subsidies for the underpaid employees. But, that’s not the only cost to taxpayers. A new analysis from the Tampa Bay Times reveals that taxpayers are also acting as a full-time security force for the retail chain, fielding 16,800 calls for theft, assault, drugs, etc., in just one year alone:
Local Walmarts, on average, generated four times as many calls as nearby Targets, the Times found. Many individual supercenters attracted more calls than the much larger WestShore Plaza mall.
When it comes to calling the cops, Walmart is such an outlier compared with its competitors that experts criticized the corporate giant for shifting too much of its security burden onto taxpayers. Several local law enforcement officers also emphasized that all the hours spent at Walmart cut into how often they can patrol other neighborhoods and prevent other crimes.
“They’re a huge problem in terms of the amount of time that’s spent there,” said Tampa police Officer James Smith, who specializes in retail crime. “We are, as a department, at the mercy of what they want to do.”
It isn’t a single location that is a problem. It’s all of them:
Hillsborough sheriff’s deputies ended up at a Walmart on Fletcher Avenue more than any other location. What came second? Another Walmart. What was third? Another Walmart. In fact, seven of the Sheriff’s Office’s 10 busiest locations were Walmarts.
“It is a tremendous strain on manpower,” Sheriff’s Col. Greg Brown wrote in an email to the Times.
Some sheriff’s departments are proposing fines for excessive calls. Read more about the drain on police resources and taxpayer dollars in this excellent report from the Tampa Bay Times.