The Outstater
Urban Life: Shoplifting
HOW ARE THINGS GOING? Well, few venture out after dusk on our multi-million-dollar trail system; there are stabbings at Promenade Park, if that tells you anything; shootings threaten to become routine on the streets below our majestic new downtown constructions; and there is shoplifting and theft throughout. At some point we are going to have to face a sad fact, that is, there is bad, downright horrible, behavior by a segment of the population.
OK, but which segment?
Our Democrat administration would point to the city’s German-American, Lutheran-Catholic lineage. Its members so oppressed the city’s minorities, it is said, that they now have few paths to the middle class. Some have to steal to eat. If so, that is despite three generations of affirmative action and unconstrained welfare spending to the point that some age cohorts have never held a job. And please don’t ask about family structure.
However, now that we have a black female mayor the discussion has left the political realm and settled on an odd combination of inanimate objects (guns, housing) and mystery root causes. Recently, for instance, she lamented the “moral failing” of just “jailing and burying our children.”
There is some truth to all of that, and our mayor seems to be trying her hardest. Her pleas for more parental guidance and respect for police are particularly welcome. But if we are going to make progress going forward we are going to have to concentrate on the substantive.
For starters, it is not a moral failure to put people in jail for breaking the law — quite the contrary — and that is regardless of any social-oppression score, especially if those people are likely to harm others when allowed to walk free.
The segment responsible for this particular aspect is the judicial and prosecutorial systems. Despite heroic efforts by police in solving the most serious crimes, we seem paralyzed by social-justice concerns on the prosecution end. Blame a lack of funding or a lack of will, or both. A single FBI crime category, shoplifting, serves as an example.
My city doesn’t keep comprehensible shoplifting statistics linking to prosecutions. If it did, there would be an explanation for the food “desert” in our central city. In any case, none were mentioned when the city council approved more than $3 million in grants, partnerships and guarantees for a new government grocery store, the model envisioned by several big-city mayors.
Let us just say again that private grocers operate on a profit margin of less than 2 percent, sometimes much less. Shoplifting by itself can wipe that out, not to mention violent street crimes making a store location a dangerous place to work or shop. And while we await a response to our request for a look at the books of our own city-financed store (see “Auditing Good Intentions”) let’s extrapolate from data collected by the Manhattan Institute:
The 13 largest chains in New York City have closed 797 stores since 2020, largely as a result of increases in shoplifting and employee theft. If such numbers hold for a city the size of Fort Wayne, say, it could have lost as many as 26 stores. An executive of Rite Aid in New York told analysts in 2022 that it has been almost impossible to stop retail theft and has closed 73 stores there. The city also has 45 fewer 7-Eleven outlets. Discount chains Family Dollar and Dollar General have shut 20 stores.
“In the wake of New York’s 2020 bail reforms, shoplifting complaints in the city increased from fewer than 40,000 in 2019 to nearly 65,000 in 2022,” writes Steve Malanga of the institute. “Meantime, a study by criminologists determined that two-thirds of those released under the 2020 bail reforms get rearrested within two years. The police commissioner has argued that these so-called reforms ‘have rendered the criminal justice system in New York City a high-speed revolving door for recidivists.’”
Do you see a cause-effect relationship there? If so, here’s a wild idea: Why not go the opposite direction? Let’s concede that random youths shooting and stabbing each other at 3 a.m. (when combined with the complex social matrix from which they arise) is an intractable problem — for now, at least.
Instead, let’s focus precious energy on the simplest of crimes, shoplifting. Let’s set a modest goal of reducing shoplifting by half in the next year, sending a message that indisputable video evidence will likely result in time in jail (you can buy a lot of facial-recognition software for $3 million dollars.)
That will cause prosecutors some late hours and disrupt a certain number of young lives. There certainly will be complaints lodged about discriminatory enforcement even when the evidence is clear. Perhaps, though, brief incarceration could be paired with social instruction and help with life strategies, as several local judges have encouraged.
Most substantively, it could restore vibrant shopping and the attendant jobs and opportunities to our central cities And while we are at it, regulations and taxes on small businesses could be relaxed generally.
Capitalism, they call it. Let’s give it a try, nothing else is working. — tcl
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