* Most people agree that stealing from a store is wrong.
* Most people agree that opening food/medicine and consuming it in the store before paying is stealing
* Most people believe that helping those in a medical emergency is important
If I was in a store and saw someone going into hypoglycemia and grabbed a candy bar and handed it to them, or if they were having a heart attack and I grabbed a bottle of aspirin and opened it to give them one, I am committing a crime. Most reasonable people would say that even if a police officer was standing in front of me watching me do it that I should not be charged.
That's why we don't want universal enforcement.
In my jurisdiction, that is only stealing if you do it with intention of not paying for it.
Sometimes I go to the supermarket, pick a drink off the shelf, start drinking it, take the partially drunk (or sometimes completely empty) bottle to the checkout to pay. Never got in trouble, staff have never complained - I know the law is on my side, and pretty confident the staff training tells them the same thing.
The legal definition of theft - at least where I live - is all about intention. It involves an intention to deprive another of their property. No intention, no theft. If you absent-mindedly walk out of a store without paying for something, no theft has occurred. When our kids were babies, we used to put the shopping in the pram. One day I left the supermarket and down the street discovered a loaf of bread in a different section of it, that I’d forgotten to pay for. I went back and explained myself to the security guard, did he call the police? No, he commended me for my honesty, and let me pay for it with the self-serve checkouts.
For a supermarket, their biggest concern with theft is the repeat offenders. If it is an unclear situation, it is in their best interest to give the customer the benefit of the doubt. But, if the same unclear situation happens again and again, that’s when the intent (which is legally required to constitute stealing) becomes obvious. Ultimately though, it is up to the store staff, police, prosecutors and magistrates to apply a bit of common sense in deciding what is likely to be intentional and what likely isn’t. But yes, given theft is defined in terms of inferring people’s intentions, “zero tolerance” is a concept of questionable meaningfulness in that context.
We’re on the same page there.
> if they were having a heart attack and I grabbed a bottle of aspirin and opened it to give them one, I am committing a crime
Only if the store insists you pay for it and you refuse. And maybe the law needs to be rewritten to include some type of “good Samaritan eminent domain” clause.
But let’s say you misdiagnose the incident and the stranger refuses the medicine and you refuse to pay. Even then, the punishment for tampering with a product should be a small fine.
Laws could have linear or compounding penalties to account for folks that tamper with greater numbers of products or over multiple instances in a given time period.
But if there’s an automated system that catches people opening products and alerts the property owner or police then they could decide if it’s a high enough concern to investigate further.
But the alert would be the end of the AI involvement.
