Two stores, the same theft, the same week. One has no camera and never knew. The other's AI detected it, flagged it, timestamped it — and nobody moved. If those incidents reach a jury, the store that saw it gets treated worse. In Part 1 of Detection's Dilemma, Don Carr and Jim Cords expose the paradox at the heart of AI-era loss prevention: detection systems are knowledge-manufacturing machines, and knowledge creates legal duty. So does better technology make you safer — or just raise the bar for what you should have done about what you saw? A provocation, left deliberately unresolved. Pull up your alert system before Part 2 and ask: when it fires, what happens next? Loss. Liability. Law.