I've been involved in 5 or 6 citizens' arrests in the US. We had a plant in a bad neighborhood. Back in the '70s and '80s, guys would cut into our parking lot fence, find a car, and break the window to steal the aftermarket radios that were then popular. We had an alarm system that sometimes alerted us to run out and apprehend them.
One Winter a kid kept breaking in every morning about 9:30. After a couple of times, our maintenance guys tried to catch him but he ran away. The next day the cops sat on a rise in our parking lot, in their black and white, with the motor running (needed heat, I guess). Guess what? The kid didn't come. I asked the cops what they were doing and they said, "Deterrence." I asked them if they would be back the next day and they said they didn't know.
So we posted a lookout and also put an employee, an ex-cop, in a little garage. The kid came, our PA system sounded the code, the ex-cop handcuffed him, and we dragged him inside the plant. The cops came AN HOUR AND TWENTY ONE MINUTES after we called them and told them we were holding the crook. During that time I held him at gunpoint with a shotgun.
The cops took the kid around the block and let him go free. (Saves paperwork, don't ya know?)
The kid's only punishment was that someone clanged him on the head with my shotgun barrel.
He didn't return until five years later when he walked in and applied for a job!
That was in the '70s and '80s. Entirely different situation now. But because of situations like that, and an unresponsive city government, we eventually moved several hundred jobs out of that city and into plants in the suburbs.
