Challenge Accepted: Man Attempts to Shoplift in Walmart Full of Cops

On Sunday, December 1, dozens of police officers from Chesterfield County in Virginia gathered at a Walmart for an annual event called “Shop with a Cop.” The event is the kind of pro-cop Copaganda where law enforcement officers help local children pick out their presents for the holidays. It’s safe to say that this particular Walmart, on this particular day, was swarmed with police officers. And yet one man decided this was the best time to try to get a five-finger discount.

The cops were participating in the event when a Walmart staff member informed them that someone was shoplifting in that store at that moment. Between the Sheriff’s Department and the police officers, there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 uniformed officers on site.

So not only is the shoplifter deeply unintelligent, but they have no observational skills whatsoever and might actually be completely blind. That’s the only explanation. Or maybe they were a master criminal trying to pull off one last epic heist with the highest stakes possible. If that was the case, well he was very bad at it, because security footage clearly showed him hiding merchandise and attempting to leave the store with it.

The officers participating in the event dispersed to find the shoplifter which took almost no time since there were about 50 of them. They arrested 32-year-old Hector D. Velasquez Maldonado. The funniest detail in this whole story is that the officers arrived at the event in their police cruisers, parking them in the Walmart parking lot. There were 30 to 40 extremely obvious police patrol cars in the parking lot.

The shoplifter’s car was parked in the parking lot facing all of the cop cars. And yet, he went ahead with the theft. Either this guy wanted to be arrested or he just wasn’t very bright. Now he’s facing a charge of grand larceny after he tried to steal $1,400 worth of merchandise.