Walmart developed its current anticrime measures with the help of Read Hayes, director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, a kind of think tank funded by big retailers. Hayes’s specialty is the shopping environment, the retail aisles; he’s now searching, he says, for the right mix of new electronic surveillance and visual cues to tell would-be thieves they might get caught. “They need to recognize it, believe it, and be threatened by it,” he says. “My mantra is: See it, get it, fear it.”