Security staff in retail settings can appear very intimidating and official, but what powers do they actually have to prevent people from leaving? How long can loss prevention detain you?
Under most circumstances, a person detained by loss prevention will need to be released within an hour if law enforcement does not arrive. However, the amount of time that they are legally allowed to hold someone does change depending on the specific laws of the state and the district.
Read ahead to discover all that you need to know!
Are Loss Prevention Allowed To Detain You?
To understand the authority that loss prevention officers might have, we first need to talk about how and when they would be allowed to detain someone in the first place.
Most loss prevention staff are not deputized and have not been given special police status, which means that they do not have the arrest powers of the police. Instead, they have the same arrest powers as any other private citizen. With these powers, they are legally allowed to detain an individual in order to hand them over to law enforcement.
Essentially, when a member of security detains someone they are actually carrying out a “citizen’s arrest”, and this is completely legal in pretty much every jurisdiction.
Exactly what they are allowed to do when detaining someone, and when they are allowed to do it, does vary though.
How Does A Citizens Arrest Work?
So what is a citizen’s arrest, exactly, and how does it work?
A citizen’s arrest is not the same as when a member of law enforcement carries out an arrest. A loss prevention officer who detains someone is not putting that person under arrest in the way that a police officer would.
Every citizen’s arrest must only be used for the purpose of turning the person over to the proper authorities. It is only legal when the private citizen who is detaining an individual reasonably believes that a crime has been committed, or that the detention will prevent a crime from occurring.
Basically, any person can physically detain someone else so that they can be officially arrested by the police but state statutes define when and how this is allowed.
Some jurisdictions only allow a citizen’s arrest when the alleged offender commits a crime in your presence and some jurisdictions require the crime to involve a “breach of the peace” as well.
That means that there are certain jurisdictions where it is not legal for loss prevention to carry out a citizen’s arrest for simple larceny or shoplifting, while others allow them to detain you for almost any suspected crime. For example:
- Texas allows any person to arrest someone that is “committing a felony or an offense against the public peace in front of them.”
- California allows any person to arrest someone “for a public offense committed or attempted in their presence”, “when the person arrested has committed a felony that was not in their presence”, and “when a felony has been committed and the person has reasonable cause to believe that the person arrested has committed it.”
In general, though, almost all jurisdictions in the US do allow loss prevention officers to detain someone when they reasonably believe they have committed a crime.
Loss prevention staff will be trained on exactly what their legal rights are in the jurisdiction that they are operating and will know when they are able to detain someone and when they are not.
How Long Are Loss Prevention Able To Detain You?
Now, let’s talk more about what being detained by loss prevention can actually look like and, in particular, how long you can be held before they have to let you go.
Again, there is no single answer here because different jurisdictions across the country do have different laws about how long a citizen’s arrest is allowed to last.
More often than not, there is a relatively short time limit on the amount of time that loss prevention is allowed to detain you while they wait for the police to arrive. In most cases, they will have an hour in which to contact the police and they will need to release the suspected criminal within an hour if the police do not arrive.
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Can Loss Prevention Use Force To Detain You?
Another important aspect of being detained by a private citizen, like security staff, is that they obviously do not have the same level of authority as the police. That does not mean, however, that they cannot hold you by force.
As part of a citizen’s arrest, any private citizen is allowed to use “reasonable force” to detain a potential criminal until the police arrive. Therefore, loss prevention can hold you by force if they have to, but that force does need to be considered reasonable in order for it to be legal.
The very complicated question that this obviously brings up is: what constitutes “reasonable force”?
It is very hard to define as it depends on the specific circumstances of the detention. The ultimate decision of whether or not the force used was actually reasonable can be subjective and is often decided by a judge after the fact.
The basic guidelines are that a private person can use non-deadly force on someone else if:
- The other person is committing a felony, or a misdemeanor amounting to a breach of the peace
- The force used is necessary to prevent further commission of the offense and to apprehend the offender
- The force is reasonable, under the circumstances, to restrain the individual
In some jurisdictions, this can even extend to the use of “reasonable deadly force”. In Texas, for example, a civilian can use deadly force, if it is reasonable, to prevent someone from escaping from a lawful citizen’s arrest.
Will Loss Prevention Detain You For Shoplifting?
Now that we have a better understanding of what loss prevention is allowed to do in order to detain a shoplifter, and how long they might hold someone, we can talk about how likely it is that this will actually happen.
Loss prevention staff are generally highly trained and will be following a clear and strict policy that the store has put in place.
More often than not, this policy will be designed to try and prevent anything that would put the store at risk of a lawsuit or result in the store or its employees being on the wrong side of the law.
To avoid this risk, many loss prevention staff will not attempt to use any kind of force to detain an individual, and they might not even try to detain them at all. Instead, they may simply confront the potential suspect, gather as much evidence as they can from cameras and direct interaction, and then leave everything else up to the police.
Other loss prevention staff, however, might be following a much stricter and more aggressive policy and it is not uncommon that they have been trained and instructed to carry out a citizen’s arrest.
Many loss prevention officers will detain an individual and immediately contact law enforcement if they think the person has committed a crime.
At the end of the day, you can’t tell what lengths loss prevention will go to and, most of the time, they do have the right to hold a shoplifter by force for quite some time if they choose to.
Summary
So, how long can loss prevention detain you? They can hold you for a “reasonable” amount of time, but exactly how long that is differs depending on the jurisdiction that they are in.
Generally speaking, loss prevention is allowed to detain someone under a citizen’s arrest for up to an hour until the police arrive. They can also use reasonable force to stop that person from leaving.
Many loss prevention officers won’t actually try to detain an individual, though, and will instead hand over their evidence to the police and let them make the arrest outside of the store.
Reference Sources
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/detention-of-shoplifters-by-store-owner-what-are-the-rules-51784