Protecting Workers and Deterring Theft: Body Cameras Reach the Sales Floor

Highlights from the International Council of Shopping Centers Security Summit

Last week in Columbus, Ohio, the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) Security Summit brought together the people who keep shopping centers safe—operators, property owners, loss-prevention leaders, and the security professionals they contract with. One item on the agenda was body-worn cameras, a technology I have spent years studying and, as a retired New York City police officer, wearing myself. But the most valuable topic of the day ran through nearly every session: The retail floor has become a dangerous place to work, the public safety net is stretched thin, and private operators are increasingly being asked to fill the gap themselves.

Those conditions reframe much of what is often dismissed as “more surveillance” into something closer to a private response to a community problem. To formulate that response, we must ask ourselves three questions: 1) How do we protect workers on the floor? 2) How do we deter retail theft? 3) How can we do both without building more intrusive surveillance infrastructure?

The Threat Is No Longer Mostly About Merchandise

The opening session offered a European perspective from a representative of SAFE Asset Group. Shopping centers in Europe face the same dual-threat environment as those in the United States. Open, welcoming spaces must contend with rising physical violence and organized theft, which climbed roughly 18 percent in a single year. Newer concerns are surfacing as well, including the malicious use of drones. An ICSC session on consumer perceptions made the point that because shoppers register these conditions, their sense of safety has become part of a property’s economics.

The best measure of danger is not in stolen merchandise, but in human exposure. Security guards experience nonfatal workplace violence at a rate dramatically higher than the average employee across occupations, and protective-service workers account for nearly a fifth of all workplace homicides in the United States. The cost of confronting a coordinated theft crew falls on the worker long before it shows up in a shrink report; thus, body cameras used in retail settings should be treated as worker-protection tools first and loss-prevention tools second.

A briefing on rescue task force operations led by instructors from Louisiana State University’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training examined how a property’s layout, access control, and pre-incident coordination determine whether law enforcement and emergency medical services can reach victims in time. Worker and shopper safety increasingly depends on planning long before any incident occurs.

Why Theft Deterrence Has Landed on the Private Sector

The most important fact about retail theft today is not how much of it there is, but how little of it law enforcement is able to respond to, record, or act on. A striking 64 percent of retailers report fewer than half of their theft incidents to police, usually for practical reasons such as limited law-enforcement response, high dollar thresholds for prosecution, and cases that too often go nowhere. This is why most retail theft never generates a police report or enters the official crime statistics.

That dynamic extends well beyond the retail floor. When most victimization goes unreported, official numbers stop describing reality while celebratory headlines begin describing something closer to a decline in reporting than a true decline in crime. Property crime is already the most common and least-reported form of victimization in America; in fact, the 2024 federal victimization survey found that of roughly 13 million property crimes that year, only about 30 percent reached police. Even reported incidents often go unsolved, thereby strengthening a retailer’s decision not to call in the first place.

That calculation is understandable from both sides. Departments are overextended, and officers know which reports are likely to move or not. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle in which low reporting produces weak data, weak data undercuts the case for resources and prosecution, and lack of response drives reporting lower still.

When the formal deterrent recedes, private actors step in to take its place. A session drawing on the Loss Prevention Research Council’s research into offender decision-making framed crime as a sequence from intent to aftermath, with opportunities for intervention at each stage. This reflects one of the most replicated findings in criminology, which is that crime concentrates wherever a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian converge. That is why situational measures that narrow the opportunity for theft tend to outperform after-the-fact response and why body cameras should be considered one element of a layered strategy rather than a standalone solution.

This is also where a limited-government sensibility becomes a practical asset. The argument is not that the government should do nothing about organized retail crime, as coordinated, often transnational theft networks are exactly the cross-jurisdictional problem public law enforcement exists to address. It is that operators should build resilient, well-governed private systems instead of relying on law enforcement to respond to every incident. Self-reliance and public accountability work together—private prevention does not absolve the public system of its responsibilities, while a functioning public system makes private prevention far less burdensome.

What the Video Evidence Actually Shows

Existing research regarding whether visible body cameras actually change behavior show mixed results. Early enthusiasm came from a 2015 randomized trial in Rialto, California, which reported sharp drops in use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints. However, a much larger 2019 randomized study of more than 2,000 officers in Washington, D.C. found no statistically significant effect, while a 2020 systematic review of roughly 30 studies concluded that the effects of cameras on these metrics are inconsistent.

A few notes of caution:

• No peer-reviewed study of body cameras in a retail or service setting existed until 2025, and almost all of the evidence has come from policing and corrections.
• The first such review found genuine perceived benefits, including fewer complaints, but also that the effect of visible cameras on aggression cuts both ways—they can either de-escalate an encounter or provoke one.
• The cameras themselves are the least expensive part—the real investment lies in recurring storage, retention, redaction, and review costs. Any operator budgeting for the device alone has badly underestimated the commitment required.

Governance Is Where the Real Decisions Are Made

The most consequential choices in any body camera program have little to do with the device. Activation rules, ownership of footage, access controls, transparency, and retention—all controlled by operators—separate a defensible program from a latent liability. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation offers a useful comparison in that European data-protection regulators treat lawful basis, transparency, and data minimization as preconditions rather than afterthoughts. The United States has no comparable federal framework—only a state-by-state and contractual patchwork into which discipline must be built deliberately and in advance.

The public-sector version of this case is familiar. Even where the effect on use-of-force is inconsistent, body cameras can still protect officers and the public. Thoughtful implementation results in fewer complaints. The same logic applies on a retail floor, where the technology earns trust through restraint, clear rules, and accountability rather than maximum coverage.

In practice, this means:

• Being accurate. Capturing footage that is reliable enough to serve as evidence
• Being proportionate. Recording only when there is a safety or loss-prevention reason rather than running cameras continuously
• Being accountable. Limiting who can access the footage, setting clear retention limits, and telling staff and shoppers how the program works

Used in this way, body cameras can provide protection without eroding the public trust an operator has spent years building.

What Comes Next for Cameras in Retail?

The summit’s forward-looking sessions made clear that these tools are about to become far more powerful. Demonstrations of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled monitoring and around-the-clock operations centers, including one from SafeTouch, pointed to a trajectory in which cameras become nodes within connected systems that interpret information in real time. AI is central to this shift, turning otherwise unreviewable volumes of footage into searchable, redactable evidence.

The sharpest development is facial recognition, which can convert a passive camera into a live identification tool and which carries documented accuracy differences across demographic groups alongside a fast-growing patchwork of state and local restrictions. This is where the field’s recurring lesson is clearest: Outcomes are determined far less by the technology than by the rules that govern it. The same system can serve as a narrow, well-bounded safety tool or expand into a trust-destroying dragnet. Which direction it takes depends entirely on the policy wrapped around it.

The summit left little doubt that the question for operators is no longer whether body cameras are coming to retail, but how well they will be implemented. Approached thoughtfully, a program can protect the workers on the floor, help deter theft, and avoid building surveillance infrastructure faster than the rules required to govern it. When handled this way, technology becomes an asset to the people it is meant to protect rather than a liability waiting to surface.