“Shoplifting has soared in the U.S. in 2024, forcing many stores to leave cities and continuing a trend in recent years,” reports The Center Square:
Shoplifting has risen 24% in the first half of 2024 alone, according to newly released data from the Council on Criminal Justice….shoplifting continues to rise. CCJ studied 23 U.S. cities.
Shoplifting has become a major problem in cities around the country, with some store owners announcing they had to close up shop because of the increased theft. Shoplifting and looting during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots helped spur on a new era of increased shoplifting.
Several major stores, including CVS, Macy’s, Target, Walmart and others have cited shoplifting when they closed down urban locations.
The Center Square spoke with a 38-year-old woman who goes by “Jones” who works at a CVS within eyeshot of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Jones told The Center Square that shoplifters take from her store daily. When Jones does see customers steal something, she doesn’t stop them. “We don’t get paid for that,” she said. She said procedure is not to notify police but to write a description of the thief and what was stolen down on a form on a clipboard. Jones’ clipboard has seemingly a hundred pages stacked, at least one for each day, many of them filled with reported incidents. By 11:15 am Thursday morning when Jones spoke with The Center Square, the store had already been stolen from four times that day, at least as far as she knew. Jones said she worked at a previous location in the same city that was even worse, where groups would come in and steal merchandise. She said thieves are only caught if they steal from the same store every day, as some apparently do, and they are caught with the merchandise by police. However, if the merchandise is not a large quantity, police will often let them off with a warning. A security guard comes into the store in the afternoon, Jones said the guard is there to protect employees, not merchandise, and does little to stop shoplifting.
Shoplifters are much less likely to be prosecuted these days, even when they are caught doing it. Some left-wing prosecutors won’t criminally prosecute people who steal less than a certain amount, like $1,000. The Washington Free Beacon reported on a prosecutor whose campaign was bankrolled by George Soros, “who announced in 2020 his office would not prosecute a slew of misdemeanors, including shoplifting valued up to $1,000.”
Shoplifters are less likely to be prosecuted in Washington, D.C. than they used to be. “Federal prosecutors in the Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney’s office declined to prosecute 67% of those arrested by the police in cases that would have been tried in the D.C. Superior Court in 2022, according to The Washington Post….As recently as 2015, the prosecutor’s office was only rejecting 35% of arrests that would have been tried in the Superior Court.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office is headed by Matthew Graves, who was appointed by Joe Biden.
In much of America, shoplifting is out of control, reports the center-left news source Axios, reaching “crisis proportions.” “We have experienced a 300% increase in retail theft from our stores since the pandemic began.” CVS spokesman Michael DeAngelis said last year.
Axios says the “problem is made worse by flash mobs like the 80 people who stormed a Nordstrom in San Francisco in November, and organized retail crime groups that often hire homeless people and drug addicts as “boosters” to do the dirty work. Store shelves aren’t the only places getting hit: Warehouses and cargo trucks are also in the crosshairs. Teams of “boosters” will throng a store with laundry bags, grabbing what they can and assaulting workers who confront them — sometimes fatally. One Bay Area crime ring stole $8 million in merchandise from CVS, Walgreens and Target stores. Another one ripped off a staggering $50 million in goods — mostly health and beauty products that thieves stockpiled in a warehouse. “More than $1.6 million in razor blades alone were recovered.”
More stringent punishment for shoplifters would help reduce shoplifting. Punishments have gotten more lenient in Washington, DC, in recent years, as DC’s progressive city council and legal community have become infatuated with “criminal justice reform.” Peer-reviewed studies show that longer incarceration reduces the crime rate. One such study is “The Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration: Evidence from Several Italian Collective Pardons,” which found that reducing incarceration increased the crime rate. This article was published in the American Economic Review, which is a peer-reviewed journal.
Crime in California fell significantly after California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. A study found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. Similarly, a 2008 Santa Clara University study found that longer sentences for three-time offenders led to “significantly faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.”
On Twitter, some left-wingers mistakenly defend shoplifters as just poor people feeding their families. But this is untrue. As Matthew Yglesias, a former staffer of the progressive Center for American Progress, observes, “the shoplifting surge is not people feeding their starving families; packaged goods are getting stolen in bulk and resold on Facebook Marketplace and elsewhere.”
Moreover, there is very little malnutrition in Washington, DC, where shoplifting is rampant. The food stamps that unemployed people there get covers more than the cost of food, as long as you cook for yourself and use inexpensive, healthy, nutritious foods.
