I am a staff writer at Forbes covering retail. I have been at Forbes since 2013, first on the markets and investing team and then on the billionaires team.
Companies that sell body cams to law enforcement are now chasing a promising new market even as critics question the extent of the problem.o battle what they call a rising wave of organized theft, retailers have hired security guards, locked merchandise behind glass, installed face- and license-plate-recognition software and deployed shopping carts whose wheels lock automatically when they’re pushed beyond a certain range.
Stores could be a vast new client base for body-cam makers. Camera prices typically range from $500 to $700, plus a monthly fee starting at $29 for the software that goes with them, like storing footage on the cloud, transcribing audio and redacting sensitive parts of the video like bystanders’ faces. The global market for wearable cameras is already over $6 billion, according toMall of America, the biggest in the U.S., recently outfitted its entire security force with body cams.
The hope is that they’ll not only help diffuse certain situations, but give stores more evidence to prosecute shoplifters. At one big-box retailer, an asset-protection employee wearing a bodycam confronted a woman who had gone into the changing room and put merchandise in her purse and donned four layers of clothing. She spit on the employee and cursed at them. When she was informed that she was being recorded, she dropped the merchandise and quietly left.
Many retailers are trying the body cams on their security officers first, then looking at rolling them out to their loss-prevention employees, store managers and employees, in that order, over time, said manufacturers. Hy-Vee, a Des-Moines based grocer, has equipped the security officers that are stationed in its stores with both tasers and body cams from Axon.
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