Macys Stops Minority Targeting And Discrimination

Article written by: Rodrick Rainey
Posted on: January 20, 2005

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer yesterday announced that his office has signed an agreement with Macy’s East, Inc., the owner of 29 Macy’s Department stores in the State of New York, to ensure that race and ethnicity play no role in Macy’s security efforts to identify and process suspected shoplifters.

Spitzer’s office began probing Macy’s security practices in July, 2003 after receiving complaints from black and Latino customers who said they were targeted for particular scrutiny. Black and Latino customers complained of being followed, questioned, and/or searched based solely on their race or ethnicity.

The Attorney General found that the vast majority of persons detained on suspicion of shoplifting were black or Latino, and that their representation in the pool of detainees couldn’t be explained either by customer demographics or local crime rates. The very high percentage of blacks and Latinos among detainees at Macy’s  ‘over 75 percent at most of the stores examined’ is significantly higher than the percentage of blacks and Latinos shopping in those Macy’s stores.

The agreement requires Macy’s to:

Appoint an internal Security Monitor to train, monitor, and investigate complaints about security employees;

Train security employees and sales associates more extensively on how to avoid discrimination in efforts to detect and prevent shoplifting;

Hire an outside entity to perform anonymous audits to assess whether security employees treat shoppers differently based on race and/or ethnicity;

Adopt new record-keeping requirements to enable better tracking of security employees’ interaction with customers;

Permit handcuffing of detainees based only upon individualized assessments of dangerousness;

Change detention policies and practices to ensure that detentions are reasonable in length and nature;

Centralize and improve the investigation of complaints about the conduct of security employees; and

Conduct annual assessments at various Macy’s stores to determine if there are any racial disparities in security practices and, if so, take appropriate corrective action.