The government assistance programs Walmart workers need to make ends meet because of their low wages aren’t the only way Walmart relies on the government to subsidize its business model. A major Tampa Bay Times expose finds that local Walmarts are basically using the police as a private security force.
Law enforcement logged nearly 16,800 calls in one year to Walmarts in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis. That’s two calls an hour, every hour, every day.
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.
In line with the overall understaffing that’s been a problem for Walmart in recent years, stores don’t have uniformed security guards who might discourage the kind of minor problems—small-scale shoplifting, panhandling, suspected truancy, and the like—that account for a majority of the calls to police. This is a major drain on the resources of law enforcement agencies:
In August, a Walmart employee called the department after a 33-year-old man stole a $6.39 electric toothbrush. The officer arrived in three minutes, talked to a Walmart employee, arrested the man, and then made the 19-mile trip to the Land O’Lakes jail. After finishing the paperwork, the officer was free to take another call.
Total elapsed time: 2 ½ hours.
Walmart: as bad for local communities as it is for its own workers.