…make even the French (Spit!) look respectable. The cottage industry those parasites sleazed upon us a few years ago, that of victimizing the innocent in order to make a few bucks even less honestly than con men practicing the Bible scam does nothing more than make it impossible for many companies and individuals to protect their homes, families, merchandise and possessions.

What these scumbags (and this particular brand of lawyer should take the term “scumbag” as a compliment as he/she stuffs his/her maggot-ridden pockets with the lucre stolen from honest citizens) don’t give a damn about is decency, morality or any other quality that requires a soul.

They sue the innocent on behalf of other human feces who, like them, are nothing more than opportunists who are too lazy to try and earn a living like anybody else.

Here, we have a prime example of a couple of people losing their jobs because their employers’ attorneys advised them, rightly, that the flotsam known as a liberal trial lawyer is always waiting in the wings to transform a victim into a victimizer and make a victimizer into a victim.

Here’s the story.

Two retail employees say they were fired last week after they chased down a suspected shoplifter.

Wait: The tale gets even loopier. The men – Paul Shoemaker and Mike McGee – apparently were on their break and chasing an alleged store shoplifter not in their store, but in an adjacent Apple Store.

The pair were heading out of the Sprint store where they used to work in Denver’s Cherry Creek Mall when they came upon a frantic security guard in the hall. “[He] came right basically in front of us, and was like, ‘Help me, Help me.’ Out of breath. You could totally hear he was distraught,” Shoemaker told Denver’s 7News.

The pair pitched in to help capture the alleged shoplifter.

“It’s the way I was raised as a kid,” McGee said. “You see something that’s going on wrong you step in and try to help whatever way you can.”

In other words, the young man simply wanted to do the right thing, like any decent person. So…

The trouble started after the suspect was carted off. Sprint’s corporate policy states that employees should not chase shoplifters, though the men argue they were on break and it wasn’t even Sprint’s merchandise they were seeking to retrieve. Sprint declined to comment, citing privacy concerns.

The firing isn’t without precedent. In October Walmart fired an Ocala branch’s loss prevention officer for chasing a man allegedly trying to steal golf balls. And in August 2009, two college-age Best Buy employees were fired from a Broomfield, Colorado Best Buy after tackling an alleged shoplifter. A Best Buy spokeswoman said all employees “are aware, and trained, on the standard operating procedures for dealing with shoplifting or theft – which includes ceasing pursuit of a suspected shoplifter once they exit the store.” This, she said, was for the safety of employees.

So should you fire an employee for pursuing a thief? Only you can decide the “should,” but legally you are able to do so.

Employment lawyer Frank Steinberg blogged about the Walmart case that the chain “was clearly within its rights to set a policy on how shoplifting incidents were to be handled and to decide that the guard’s violation of that policy warranted termination.”

In fact, having a policy about how employees should handle shoplifting or any crime they witness on the job is seen as a smart move legally, because it can protect you from liability in the event someone is hurt. Judgments in these cases are rare, but can reach into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

In Texas, for example, a shoplifter – his lawyer says he admits to the crime – is suing Walmart for $100,000 over the dislocated shoulder he claims employees inflicted on him.
Separately, the Houston Chronicle reported the company paid nearly $750,000 as part of a settlement to the family of a 30-year-old alleged shoplifter who died of a heart attack as employees tried to stop him. (The items he was accused of stealing: a package of diapers, a pair of sunglasses, a BB gun, and a package of BBs.)

Whether the good Samaritans in Denver deserved to be terminated is another question; how you train your staff to handle loss prevention is one of those tricky matters you probably never considered when you first started your business.

These two people were on break, which means they were on their own time, yet companies have become so paranoid about lawsuits that this didn’t matter to Sprint.

However, while the excuse used was that their concern was the safety of the two employees, face it: The larger worry was a lawsuit by the criminal. That’s right, criminal, the perpetrator of the crime of shoplifting.

I have seen this before. Security chases a thief out the door and the dirtbag runs into traffic attempting to escape, gets hit by a car, and it’s no longer his fault that he was running in the commission of a crime, because some derriere creeping, toilet cake liberal trial lawyer turns things around and makes it the pursuers’, and therefore their employers’ fault, that the anal cavity ran out into traffic.

Look at the other examples in the linked article.

In Texas, for example, a shoplifter – his lawyer says he admits to the crime – is suing Walmart for $100,000 over the dislocated shoulder he claims employees inflicted on him.

Separately, the Houston Chronicle reported the company paid nearly $750,000 as part of a settlement to the family of a 30-year-old alleged shoplifter who died of a heart attack as employees tried to stop him. (The items he was accused of stealing: a package of diapers, a pair of sunglasses, a BB gun, and a package of BBs.)

Whose fault was either the dislocated shoulder or the heart attack?

The employess were simply, as the late Louis L’Amour used to say, “riding for the brand”, trying to recover their employers’ merchandise, so the business wouldn’t have to take a loss on something it had paid for.

Shrinkage control, or loss prevention, is an integral part of running any business where there is any sort of inventory involved, whether it’s equipment for performing services or it’s merchandise.

In the course of my own consulting work, I’ve had to counsel clients along the same lines their attorneys have had to — advising them to incorporate the same policies of non-pursuit (except in the case of clients wherein security officers have such concerns as national security or certain kinds of public safety issues that will protect them in instances of litigation) while silently cursing those walking, talking used prophylactics who dare think of themselves as anything other than the thin film of scum that floats atop the cesspool of humanity. Unfortunately, coaching clients in the avoidance of fraudulent, frivolous or overstated lawsuits is often part of my job.

In my opinion, sustaining crime related injuries, whether superficial, disabling or fatal, should be written off as “If you mess around with the bandwagon, you have to expect to get hit with the horn. Live with it.”

Some divorce lawyers (that’s a brand of lawyer who milks his lucre out of another kind of misery) are as septic tank qualified as the ones described above. I’ve never had any truck with any of those critters, but one day last year, as I was strolling by a divorce lawyers’ office in Santa Monica, an older lawyer walked out with a younger one, and he was telling the rookie, “You’re gonna call the broad, and you’re gonna kiss her ass. Promise her anything you have to, the pension…” and then they were too far away to hear any more.

These turds should be taken out and either boiled or drowned very slowly on national television…