Twenty-year-old Jared Bergstreser, it should be noted, is my boy. Love him. And if I were his boss, the last thing I would do is fire him.
Instead, he was let go along with 23-year-old Colin Trapp from a Best Buy store in Broomfield for trying to stop a shoplifter who stole two cellphones.
Bergstreser ran out and tackled the thief, who was joined by an accomplice. The thief pulled a knife. Bergstreser and Trapp, who’d come to his aid, jumped back, but a manager was cut.
Both thieves got away when a woman in an old, green Pontiac pulled up and they jumped in. A man was arrested Thursday, accused of being the shoplifter.
Bergstreser and Trapp were pink-slipped by Best Buy headquarters officials.
“I knew I wasn’t supposed to tackle the guy,” Bergstreser, who had worked at the FlatIron Marketplace store for nearly three years, later said. “It’s to protect (Best Buy) from getting sued.”
The firings have raised a storm of protest, even though both men acknowledged they were trained in the store’s policy of never chasing a shoplifter.
The policy, to me, makes perfect sense, but only because I would never, ever put my life or safety on the line to protect what a store sells. They couldn’t — and wouldn’t — pay me enough.
Yet outraged people are now calling for a boycott of Best Buy. Interestingly, the supervisor, who took the worst of the knife-wielding, still holds her job. The firings, at first blush, did strike me as odd. And then I called Pat Murphy.
He is a principal with LPT Security Consulting in Houston, was a long-time Dallas cop before spending 10 years as head of loss-prevention for Sears in Texas, and another 12 for the old Eckerd drug chain. He is now a consultant to retailers and a certified expert on all things shoplifting.
“Retailers have designed their no-chase policy for just (the Broomfield) reason,” he said. “Once you are out of the store, you put yourself and others in great peril.”
He agrees with “no-chase” 100 percent, he said.
“When people steal, there is a sense of outrage by employees, who are working hard and naturally take offense,” he said. “Back in the ’70s and ’80s when I was in the game, I chased all the time. But that was before people and retailers got sued.”
Murphy has worked cases over the past two to three years in which three store employees were killed trying to stop shoplifters.
“Numerous more were stabbed, shot at, run over and injured, including police officers working off-duty.”
The reality is shoplifting is no longer simply the province of kids, he said. Much of it is carried out by organized- crime rings and lesser thugs seeking to sell what they steal for drugs.
So most retailers, he says, now have only two rules for employees: Rule 1: Don’t chase. Rule 2: Do not chase.
“Not 15 minutes from me, there is a big retailer that got a shoplifter,” Murphy said. “The guy stole a small amount of goods, but there was this massive fight and the guy died. The family sued and got $750,000 for their trouble.”
He feels sorry for Bergstreser and Trapp. But at that moment they needed to shrug and become professional witnesses — get descriptions and a license-plate number, let the cops handle the rest.
“In loss prevention, when the adrenaline is running high,” Pat Murphy said, “your training has to, or is supposed to, override the adrenaline.
“If it doesn’t, you become a bigger liability to your employer than every shoplifter they are supposed to catch that year.”
I get it.
But he is still my boy.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
