I've lived in the same city now (not NYC) for 10+ years, so I'm moderately connected with all sorts of people and not just a bubble of affluent tech people. So I'll be real, I know some sketchy people that probably do drugs or at least know where to find some. What I don't know, however, is any "fences". That is, someone that traffics in stolen goods. Or maybe I do, they don't exactly advertise their services. I've never been offered speakers that fell off the back of a truck, however. Maybe that's just me being naive.
Anyway, to get to my point; turns out I do know fences - basically anyone with an Amazon account, and I know a lot of fuckers with Prime. For the low investment of polyfill bags and other shipping materials, and this one weird trick called stealing, you too can make money online! Just take your stolen goods, send them to Amazon, and they'll take care of selling them for you. All you gotta do is some computer shit, and some packaging, and then send it off to Amazon. Because your supply costs are cheap, you can undercut your competitors (but not by too much) and rake in the profit. Amazon supposedly is cracking down on this but I have yet to see any meaningful evidence of any real enforcement.
The economist article avoids naming names, but what you're looking for to get started is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
To further underline your point, if the chain is (thief)→(amazon)→(end user) then the fence isn't "anyone with an Amazon" account: the fence is amazon.
Except products like deodorant are considered health products. Amazon doesn’t just let you easily sell health products, you need to produce invoices, receipts, etc.
Isn't the chain: (thief) -> (fence) -> (Amazon) -> (customer)? If a fence sells his wares in a bazaar, the bazaar is the fence? No, the fence is the fence the bazaar is the marketplace.
Help me understand here: how is blaming amazon any different to blaming the post office (who are also an intermediary here) or the payment processors and banks? None of these groups actually know theft is involved in the transactions they're facilitating.
>Because your supply costs are cheap, you can undercut your competitors (but not by too much)
or, take the other approach, and sell it slightly higher. this will easily remove the suspicion that you are selling stolen goods. in fact, you might get more sales from people deliberately looking to not purchase from the lowest price seller. it's genius, and i see no fault in this plan whatsoever.
Amazon makes it easy to sell especially with FBA. That's as much a good thing as it can be misused. It allows new businesses to get started when they cannot afford to handle shipping to customers themselves.
In the big $8 million bust a few years back in the Bay Area, it turned out that they were paying street criminals more to steal specific items like toothpaste, but the police were frustrated by Amazon’s lack of assistance in figuring out all of the involved parties. Can’t find the specific article at the moment but that really stood out to me at the time.
I have bought a lot of books from Amazon, and if you look past the scrubbing with a marker, it's always some library within America - so yes even books from Amazon are just books taken from public libraries.
> But surely Amazon is literally handling stolen goods? Is there a smoking gun email?
If Amazon were a mom and pop fence, the local cops could bust them in a sting. But Amazon is a huge megacorp, so even if the cops try to catch them in a sting nothing will stick because Amazon will claim their shear scale rendered them completely oblivious to everything and therefore not criminally culpable.
Chains in Manhattan put stickers on the merchandise that tell you where it came from. While you could remove them, it’s a PITA and cuts into your margins. If you don’t remove it, there is a clear signal to Amazon that these are stolen goods.
There’s a whole industry based around arbitraging price differences between Amazon and brick and mortar merchants. Just search YouTube for “get rich with FBA”. How would Amazon know if it was stolen or retail arbitrage?
You can tackle a problem from multiple directions. So while direct prosecution is important, cutting off a method for converting stolen goods to money is also important. As soon as that method become unprofitable, the activity will either stop or switch to something else.
But also blame Amazon. If you ran a store that repeatedly sold stolen goods do you think local police and prosecutors would ignore you?
Trafficking in stolen property is a felony. That's true whether you definitely know it's stolen property or if you definitely should have known (recklessly trafficking). You, if you repeatedly did it out of your small business and ignored complaints, would face prison. Why does the law apply differently to Amazon?
My guess is, if you told Amazon's CEO that he had one month to substantially reduce trafficking or face felony prosecution and prison time - I bet you'd see severe reductions.
Nope. In most states (CA for example) it is a felony to sell stolen goods when the amount exceeds a pretty modest threshold. If, as alleged in the parent comment, they are committing a crime on a large scale then the blame is very well placed.
*of course this does not exonerate the original thieves, but as a matter of practicality it is going to be easier to hit a single large offender than a myriad of small ones.
I do not think it is misplaced to look at a massive fence of stolen goods as a problem. Amazon takes a cut of every sale just like a fence. They have constructed their onboarding and process to "not know your customer" because they enjoy this revenue even though they must know their system is being heavily used for these illicit sales.
Perhaps thats why I've noticed a large number of complaints related to CVS-type items sold on Amazon: used items, counterfeit items, diluted items, etc..
> basically anyone with an Amazon account ... Amazon supposedly is cracking down on this but I have yet to see any meaningful evidence of any real enforcement.
Amazon has "Amazon Invoice Verification" for sellers selling large quantities of merchandise. But I personally do not want Amazon trying to check if Mr. Doe just wants to sell a couple extra tubes of deodorant he bought by mistake.
Can that be abused by thieves? Sure, but not everything is fixable.
Just like that without evidence you laid an allegation on Amazon even though all facts are that Amazon does KYC and doesn’t actually let anyone sell health products (among many others) without receipts.
This is text book rumor-mongering and spreading misinformation.
Most of the comments here are ignoring the difference between regular old shoplifting and the trend driving the increase discussed in the article, which they're referring to as "organized retail crime".
I think it's very fair to have differing attitudes/moral thresholds for an impoverished mother shoplifting a week's worth of baby formula versus "a couple in Alabama [which] pled guilty to shifting $300,000-worth of stolen baby formula on eBay".
My reading of the article suggests that the trend discussed is a result of the latter, which is more recent and problematic, and not the former. Comments here discussing the morality of crime or a desire for policy change are missing this distinction.
> I think it's very fair to have differing attitudes/moral thresholds for an impoverished mother shoplifting a week's worth of baby formula versus "a couple in Alabama [which] pled guilty to shifting $300,000-worth of stolen baby formula on eBay".
I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Knowing some people who work in retail, the impact of rampant theft (organized or random) is really quite unsettling on the people who have to be around it. Retail store policies are very much about not interfering with the thieves, but it’s quite upsetting when you realize you’re in an environment where the law doesn’t really mean anything and consequences basically don’t exist for breaking the law. The few people I know in retail (including retail management) are looking to get out ASAP because it just feels so vaguely unsafe and, worse yet, large swaths of the public seem to thing the thieves are the good guys and the retail employees are the bad ones because they’re associated with a corporation.
Few people live in what can reasonably called a "community" any more, so the link between anonymous theft and the erosion of social culture doesn't make sense to everyone.
The most remote, homestead-y places will have unattended "stores" where you leave out goods and people come by and leave money in the basket and take what you have. The least remote, most-managed places have security locks on items over $15. It is impossible to run a friendly, neighborhood-run store when any new customer is a potential thief. When theft goes uncontrolled, owners begin to look at their customers with suspicion. Those who don't like theft leave for more peaceful places and are replaced by owners who will tolerate theft with a big insurance policy and force.
It is continually astonishing to me that so many "community-focused" people don't realize that unilateral actions of harm inside the community (theft, assault, etc.) have ripple effects that harm the entire community. If you grow up in a region where store owners believe you might be a thief unless they personally know you and you have to constantly worry about protecting what's yours, and I grow up in an area where I'm trusted and respected by business owners and I leave my door unlocked when I go to town, how is equity meaningfully achievable between us?
> I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately.
Happened before in history. See the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union. Widespread moral justification for theft of private property on class-based "social justice" arguments. It's even happening right here in this HN thread, people justifying stealing.
> I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Let me try to convince you without defending the morality of the shoplifter or declaring corporations evil.
1. On the totem pole of crimes, petty shoplifting (without violence) is pretty close to the bottom when it comes to harm done the public. Jaywalking and smoking weed are lower.
2. These corporations that are being robbed already build shrinkage into their budgets. $300k of baby food is nothing to Walmart, a rounding error, and I doubt you can even see it in their bottom line. Even a smaller shop is not going to go out of business if someone walks out with all their toothpaste. It’s not analogous to stealing from an individual.
3. There are a limited number of police and I’d rather them be out there deterring violent and serious crime than protecting the inventory of companies. When every rapist, murderer, white collar fraudster, and drunk driver is behind bars, and the police have nothing left to do, then sure, go bust those dastardly deodorant thieves.
> I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Well... it's not that weird. The big chain stores like Walmart ruthlessly exploit their workers to the point of them being forced to apply for food stamps [1], while the owner class makes literally a dozen billions of dollars a year in net profits [2]. Additionally, Walmart is infamous for killing off small businesses around them [3]. So, I don't have much sympathy at all for these corporations and Walmart in particular.
With ever more and more people being unable to make a honest living - over half the US has less than 1000$ in savings [4] - it's no surprise that shoplifting for survival is on the rise and at least somewhat accepted in society.
Unfortunately, small stores get caught up in the crossfire as they can't afford to bear the rising cost of shoplifting.
We need better wages for the 99% and higher taxes for the 1% so that we can get away from forcing people to steal to survive.
> Most of the comments here are ignoring the difference between regular old shoplifting and the trend driving the increase discussed in the article, which they're referring to as "organized retail crime".
I guess, but conversely I'd argue that organized retail theft has been around pretty much as long as supply chains have existed. That's the mob's bread and butter. The phrase "riding shotgun" is in common use. Perhaps mass shoplifting from the store is a new tactic, but personally I look at this situation and ask, "what has changed"?
For one, we've sort of collectively realized how terrible modern jails are (Rikers anyone?). And that's good.
A second conclusion I draw is that retail stores have been gutted... walmart-ized... every ounce of efficiency wrung out of them. Have you ever been to one of these massive retail outlets and had trouble finding anyone that works there? A few months ago everyone was clutching pearls about some 150 yd stretch of train track in LA that was continually being robbed... and I can make a wild guess that this was the result of 1) skeleton crews, 2) minimal security on the ground and 3) shipping containers that are running with sub-standard defense mechanisms because they're simply too much work (slows down loading, probably break a lot, etc.).
Yes organized crime should be punished, but these companies seem to throw up they're hands and say "Gee golly, we have no idea why $20 million dollars of merchandise watched by 5 overworked, low wage employees and 1 loss prevention officer is such a target! It's a mystery!"
I don't hate mega corporations (ok maybe a little), but they definitely have a hand in creating this situation. And it's rarely commented upon when discussing the recent rise in shoplifting.
(Edit: I forgot my favorite shoplifting fact... up until recently, reports showed that both shoplifting and wage theft "cost the economy" around $40 billion per year. Comparing prosecution rates of the two crimes is left as an exercise for the reader.)
You have it backwards. Saying it's the store's fault is like blaming a victim of rape.
Once I chased a thief out to the waiting car, and blocked the door from closing, leaned into the car, and came to my senses...
I let them go. It was only worth $750. And I wasn't about to brawl inside a car with two thugs.
I could have been stabbed or shot. It's not worth the risk. And I was the store owner. Let me tell you straight up: it's not understaffing.
I would expressly tell my staff to not risk their safety for merch.
A couple years after I sold the store, they had an armed robbery at closing and lost about a hundred thousand. Also, break-ins went up: they tried cutting the safe out but couldn't reach the rear bolts to cut them. They even stole the security cameras.
I only reported once because I knew the guy and I felt betrayed. I don't know for certain, but I think the vast majority of retail theft goes unreported.
And your favorite shoplifting fact is down-right offensive. If you were more balanced in your counterargument you'd also ask the reader: What is the cost to the public for added security, staff, deterrence tech, and lost merch? And lost sense of safety and security? Those are priceless in the eyes of most reasonable people.
It's sad to think we may have lived through the golden era of retail where stores were relatively safe and pallets of merch could be left out unguarded.
These gangs are ruining it for everyone. We shouldn't even have this discussion. We should all unify with retailers of all sizes. Theft is straight up wrong, and the thieves should be punished.
Understaffing doesn't justify crime. You probably understaff your home security, leaving it empty all day while you're at work. Do you deserve to be robbed?
This is such a big nationwide problem that Target actually mentioned it during their earnings report (this is stated in the article.) Some states/cities have made it near impossible to prosecute these people, so the risk/reward is very favorable to stealing and reselling. Some stores have even closed down in certain areas because of it. When we talk about "food deserts" in some cities, it could one day be we have massive deserts of no retailers at all, and it will largely be a government policy failure.
The videos of organized ransacking of stores are honestly insane. The stores are somewhat powerless because of liability, and the new laws that have raised the level in which the law even cares. I don't think the "broken window" policy is the end-all, it has some problems but allowing "small" theft rings does not generally put areas on a good trajectory. These goods are almost always getting 3rd party listed, be it Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc.
This is mostly a function of policies that explicitly allow and tolerate this sort of behavior as a sort of “pay back” and “release valve” for the poor, addicts or generally speaking under represented social classes.
As the wage gap and opportunity gap widens in the US, allowing shoplifting is actually an intentional release valve that is being tolerated and even outright legally permitted (California Prop 47), because - without it - we would see more home break-ins, kidnappings of wealthy people and more severe offenses. Instead, shoplifting is relatively harmless and prevents this type of escalation of crime.
“Panem et circenses” said the Romans, shoplifting is a form of “panem”. I think many don’t understand the incredible pressure pot that is the US at the moment with vast negative social pressures and inequality. If it explodes, all bets are off: the US could look a lot like South Africa and Brazil than what it is now.
This plus some political survivorship too: votes are all equal, and when most people are disadvantaged or about to become disadvantaged, politicians cater more and more to them (populism) in order to survive and dominate in the political arena.
This is an idiotic rationalization even if it is true that this is the motivation behind allowing ransacking to go unchecked. You're essentially funding the creation and expansion of criminal gangs. Training up a whole generation of people to become looters with little fear of the law. Take this a few steps further, the article mentions that retailers have begun keeping product off the shelves or even completely shutting down outlets in problem areas. What happens when this becomes general policy and there are no more easy targets to loot? Do you think that every person who has grown accustom to this lifestyle and has forgone legal work in favor of this more profitable option is just going to look around and say "oh well, it was good while it lasted. Guess I'll go get a job at McDonald's and be a law abiding citizen", fuck no, they're going to look for other targets but now they have possibly years of experience and contacts with other criminals allowing them to go after other options that they wouldn't have considered before.
This isn't hyperbole, just look at what happens in other countries that lack the ability to enforce their laws.
> As the wage gap and opportunity gap widens in the US, allowing shoplifting is actually an intentional release valve that is being tolerated and even outright legally permitted (California Prop 47), because - without it - we would see more home break-ins, kidnappings of wealthy people and more severe offenses. Instead, shoplifting is relatively harmless and prevents this type of escalation of crime.
What a wild theory. I've seen no evidence of this mechanism existing.
I have no idea how a prosecutor can take down these organized rings. The entire method prosecutors use for say exotic drugs, guns, etc: "Ok we have you for 5 years here, who do you work for, make these phone calls, we can get your sentence down to parole". This allows prosecutors to work their way up. But if a prosecutor is sitting in front of a low level shop lifter - who gets out that day - i don't see any prosecutor leverage.
>and it will largely be a government policy failure.
You mean feature.
If you tell voters in no uncertain terms what will happen if they piss on the electric fence and they piss on it then it's safe to assume they wanted the results. Make no mistake, people were told certain policy would lead to businesses leaving these areas resulting in <thing> deserts. Voters voted for it anyway.
If this only harmed the people who voted for it, then I'd have no problem with it. The problem is that it's also harming all of the people who voted for the opposite but lost.
Having the penalty be a slap on the wrist and having the person is released same day, it’s essentially the same as not prosecuting them. NY state bail reforms, and in San Fran;
“ In 2014, a ballot referendum passed that downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanor.”
You delegate and subdivide. I get a gang together and each person steals $50 at a time, no more; if they get caught they get let go or it’s very minor.
You collect the materials and farm them off to Amazon.
I was talking to a NYC colleague the other day about how there are trends in favor of not punishing people for certain criminal activity in the city. We were talking about driving with a suspended license, but I asked about shoplifting. She said, "Oh, no. That's on the opposite trend. Not only are they prosecuting it to the maximum, but they just changed the law to make it easier to hold people on bail for shoplifting." She made it clear that shoplifting was never a low priority for prosecution, but now it's a higher one.
I understand that the claim in this article is that aggregators/sellers/fences whatever should be surveilled and prosecuted (more), but just wanted to add this tale from the courthouse and emphasize that the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.
> Manhattan D.A. Acts on Vow to Seek Incarceration Only for Worst Crimes
> The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told prosecutors in his office in a memo that they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for the most serious offenses — including murder, sexual assault and economic crimes involving vast sums of money — unless the law requires them to do otherwise.
It clearly is true. I can actually watch it happen. You can too, if you go to arraignments in NYC. The line ADAs have no discretion to dismiss petit larceny (shoplifting) at arraignment. They need supervisor approval. There are other cases like driving under suspension (VTL 511 -- mentioned in GP) where they do have this discretion. There is a reason for the difference, which is that petit larceny is a priority.
Also, the DAs supported the "harm over harm" amendment to bail reform (CPL 510.10(4)t) for the explicit purpose of seeking bail in repeat shoplifting cases. And can you guess how they're using it?
You are conflating DA public statements with actual operational policy. It is nothing new that DAs claim to prioritize things that are not on their roadmaps.
The other thing that's interesting from their state graph is that it disagrees with the "people fleeing anarchist California to orderly Texas to escape rampant crime" meme.
Not only does Texas have higher rates of larceny theft[1], it is the biggest outlier on the graph in terms of lack of prosecution for it - no other state is further below the trend line.
Also should be taken into account, it's about _reported_ larceny theft. Allegedly, they say that in "anarchist California" people don't even bother reporting anymore.
> the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.
Getting a low-level criminal or junkie off the street, alive, is worth a lot. You can then offer them a chance to turn their sentence into rehab or something if they don't need jail.
And there's no reason we can't go for the higher ups too, there's (jail)time for everyone!
> Getting a low-level criminal or junkie off the street, alive, is worth a lot.
Off the street and on to Riker's Island. A jail so dangerous that it has a high likelihood of being put into federal receivership in the next year. People are safer on the street. Full stop.
This is about organized retail bulk theft. Punishing the individual shoplifters is useful. But it's also useful to crack down on secondary markets through which (mostly) stolen goods are shifted.
Ideally they would get the street-level shoplifter to inform on the shoplifter's boss in order to get a low sentence or immunity, so that the real kingpin can be caught.
Some speculated that prosecutors had gone soft on looting after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But it is hard to see any such trend in the data: generally states with more shoplifting prosecute more shoplifters
The claim is about the time-series comparison, and the rebuttal is about the cross section comparison. Is the journalist in question stupid, gaslighting, or both?
It's funny they say it's "hard to see any such trend in the data" of arrests in a post-Ferguson America when the data is so apparent and its meaning so contested that it has its own Wikipedia article.
It would be totally illogical to pretend that such massive sweeping change in public perception of policing would have no effect on the activity of the police themselves.
What's amazing is how no one is honing in on the real reason this is happening, the DA's office combined with state laws make it hard to bail people and send people to prison. That's the decision made, and it's referred to as the carceral system. It's something viewed as urgently needing reform, and that's how the progressive DA's operate. Look at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA's program (https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Day-O...)
If cops are standing around doing nothing, it's because it's pointless to engage with a suspect physically, risking yourself while by the way people around whip out their phones to video you, if the suspect will be released on their own recognizance on some lowered charge, if the charge isn't dropped anyway.
You can also add, if you want to criticize cops, that they're civil workers at the end of the day, and most are in for the benefits, such as pension and healthcare, rather than pretending to be superheroes or vigilantes.
I wish that DA had added some references to the studies that support less incarceration. It just doesn't make sense to me, he admits that Manhattan is the worst burrough for crime, then states that it is over incarcerating. How does one determine that?
Also he mentions social programs as an alternative to incarceration, but are these programs actually available? The crime rate suggests they are not, so reducing incarceration may be counterproductive until they are better established.
>It just doesn't make sense to me, he admits that Manhattan is the worst burrough for crime, then states that it is over incarcerating. How does one determine that?
It's tied in this foundational belief (and it's mentioned as one of the points) that incarceration leads to more recidivism. How one can reach this conclusion by taking overall violent crime stats into account (also all but one out of seven felony types are up in NYC) requires some logical legwork.
The fact that increases of petty crime and increases of serious crime are both happening yearly should be a red flag that makes us question the policy decisions, which again are based on not 'over policing' or 'over incarcerating'. It could be the two are connected, but you'd be accused of Broken Windows Theory.
It's hard not to see a general chaos as being contributing. The plexiglass seems like a symbol of that to many people.
The real reason is mentioned I the article: it’s absurdly easy to sell bulk stolen goods online. As long as that’s possible, there will always be someone stealing it, no matter how many people you lock up.
Why is it specifically a problem here in New York then, but wherever else I go in the country I don't see things nearly as locked up? Geography presumably shouldn't be a factor if shoplifters are only selling their loot online.
That sounds like we're pointing to an external force (the ease of selling stolen goods online), as if it were some sort of magnetic draw, an irresistible temptation.
What's tempting is that there's a lack of punishment. Do you propose we lecture to thieves to dissuade them?
It's like arguing people run red lights because they get distracted due to phone notifications and so maybe we shouldn't punish them with points that could lead to a license suspension.
Certainly not for one offense, or even two. Someone who behaves outside the law consistently needs to be dissuaded though. What suggestions do you have?
Ideally they'd be given corporal punishment by perfectly morally upstanding cops. This is cheap, fast, doesn't stop them working and doesn't put them in an environment where they're around lots of hardened convicts.
I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
443 comments as I write this. I searched for the word "boost" and "Fentanyl" and was surprised that neither word had been mentioned.
There is another engine driving this phenomenon: addicts "boosting" to feed their addiction. Drug use is another crime that society seems uninterested in prosecuting or punishing as of late. Add illicitly manufactured Fentanyl (1) to that recipe and you have an absolute onslaught of retail theft.
In interview after interview with addicts, it's clear that boosting is one of the primary methods of funding drug use. (2) If we are not interested in curbing drug trafficking, sales, and abuse, we will continue to have a huge problem with retail theft. (And also an unconscionable death toll that is growing rapidly.)
We already tried this. It was called The War on Drugs and it failed totally, completely and unambiguously. If there's one thing to understand about the last 60 years of United States drug criminalization and enforcement, it's that those policies have utterly failed to curb drug abuse and addiction. There are a mind-boggling number of studies which show that criminalizing drug use doesn't create fewer drug addicts.
Decriminalizing drugs doesn't mean that addicts would suddenly be able to afford them. How would drug decriminalization mitigate retail theft? Who is going to purchase their Fentanyl for them?
The article says prosecutors don't go after these thefts but I'd think the issue is with the cops and the number of arrests. After the BLM protests of 2020 (George Floyd) cops basically went hands off on these so called minor crimes, and so I'd imagine many of them don't even make it to prosecutors. We'd need a graph of incidents and arrests for years prior to 2020 (or months in early vs late 2020) to see the change.
The article claims that the BLM protests made little difference, and include a graph of various states comparing the amount of shoplifting with the amount of prosecution. Generally there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between states with large BLM protests and reduced prosecution.
For example, Oregon had huge protests and weak government responses, and yet prosecutes large amounts of shoplifting.
Blaming this on the response to BLM seems intuitive, but I have yet to see data that supports it.
There were not protests state wide, they were in a single county, the one in which shoplifting isn't prosecuted as much. A couple miles away, with different DAs, you will get arrested and prosecuted for even very minor theft.
> Unseating [Washington Co DA] Barton has been a priority for national progressive groups funding criminal justice reform in Oregon.
> “Washington County is the most extreme county I’ve ever worked in, and that’s because of the tough on crime, war on drugs, lock 'em up and throw away the key fanaticism coming from the DA’s office,” Decker said.
This is the person responsible for a 93% prosecution rate, being re-elected on the basis of "law and order" and relatively conservative viewpoints, backlash against the BLM protest responses that you talk about.
As others have said, aggregating at the state level makes no sense.
For example, in Austin, TX, I can't speak for retail crimes in particular but there has most definitely been a change in prosecuting other crimes. Hit-and-runs are an epidemic now in the city, primarily because the police won't even respond unless there is a major injury. I was in a hit and run, I got a detailed description of the car and license plate, and yet there were 0 consequences to the person that hit me. It actually makes more sense to run if you hit someone because there are literally no downsides (except for people with a conscience, of course).
But if you looked across TX as a whole, this data would definitely not show up.
In Chicago there has been a dramatic drop off: the arrest rate for retail theft went from 43%-54% in 2016-2019 to 18% in 2021 and the number of cases brought to Chicago police has dropped from 8986-10792/year to 6166.
> The article says prosecutors don't go after these thefts
the article says that was speculated but not borne out by the data.
> What is behind this unwelcome rise? Some speculated that prosecutors had gone soft on looting after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But it is hard to see any such trend in the data: generally states with more shoplifting prosecute more shoplifters (see chart).
As stated in another comment, the articles claim makes no sense. More shoplifting = more prosecuting has nothing to do with there having been a change after some event. There could still be a linear relationship between incidents and prosecutions, but a lower line after George Floyd. Specifically, a single cross sectional data point cannot prove anything about a time series or a claim about it.
Has the number of cops shooting people actually decreased?
Considering that they've never even looked for a bicycle, which is many times more expensive than a stick of deodorant, I'm seriously doubtful that they've ever have been hands on for these thefts.
Readit News
Anyway, to get to my point; turns out I do know fences - basically anyone with an Amazon account, and I know a lot of fuckers with Prime. For the low investment of polyfill bags and other shipping materials, and this one weird trick called stealing, you too can make money online! Just take your stolen goods, send them to Amazon, and they'll take care of selling them for you. All you gotta do is some computer shit, and some packaging, and then send it off to Amazon. Because your supply costs are cheap, you can undercut your competitors (but not by too much) and rake in the profit. Amazon supposedly is cracking down on this but I have yet to see any meaningful evidence of any real enforcement.
The economist article avoids naming names, but what you're looking for to get started is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
More likely this stuff is sold on ebay
Same as if stripe, google ads and shopify were used.
They don’t take possession of the items at any time. Even if they warehouse has them, they are in the same boat as uhaul or a storage company.
or, take the other approach, and sell it slightly higher. this will easily remove the suspicion that you are selling stolen goods. in fact, you might get more sales from people deliberately looking to not purchase from the lowest price seller. it's genius, and i see no fault in this plan whatsoever.
So I steal some consumer goods, put them in individual boxes, send them to Amazon warehouse and they distribute for me.
I simply never put that together.
But surely Amazon is literally handling stolen goods?
Is there a smoking gun email?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Bay-Area-retail-th...
If Amazon were a mom and pop fence, the local cops could bust them in a sting. But Amazon is a huge megacorp, so even if the cops try to catch them in a sting nothing will stick because Amazon will claim their shear scale rendered them completely oblivious to everything and therefore not criminally culpable.
Yeah, it's bullshit.
It's not as though the thieves hire workers to do this for them. It's something they can do themselves while tweaking.
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Blame the people stealing and the system that refuses to prosecute them.
Trafficking in stolen property is a felony. That's true whether you definitely know it's stolen property or if you definitely should have known (recklessly trafficking). You, if you repeatedly did it out of your small business and ignored complaints, would face prison. Why does the law apply differently to Amazon?
My guess is, if you told Amazon's CEO that he had one month to substantially reduce trafficking or face felony prosecution and prison time - I bet you'd see severe reductions.
*of course this does not exonerate the original thieves, but as a matter of practicality it is going to be easier to hit a single large offender than a myriad of small ones.
If Amazon can ship products to my house within 2-hours, it certainly can crack down on selling stolen goods. It just has zero incentive to.
TFA addresses this directly.
It's also interesting how the HN crowd will jump to protect a company's profit except when it's about the few love to hate you entities.
Perhaps thats why I've noticed a large number of complaints related to CVS-type items sold on Amazon: used items, counterfeit items, diluted items, etc..
So many sellers you see selling 5 of some random.
It's basically those guys with a suitcase in markets selling whatever they got hold of that week.
Amazon has "Amazon Invoice Verification" for sellers selling large quantities of merchandise. But I personally do not want Amazon trying to check if Mr. Doe just wants to sell a couple extra tubes of deodorant he bought by mistake.
Can that be abused by thieves? Sure, but not everything is fixable.
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Bodegas.
This is text book rumor-mongering and spreading misinformation.
Amazon should not be required to do anything about this, that’s why we pay cops.
I think it's very fair to have differing attitudes/moral thresholds for an impoverished mother shoplifting a week's worth of baby formula versus "a couple in Alabama [which] pled guilty to shifting $300,000-worth of stolen baby formula on eBay".
My reading of the article suggests that the trend discussed is a result of the latter, which is more recent and problematic, and not the former. Comments here discussing the morality of crime or a desire for policy change are missing this distinction.
I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Knowing some people who work in retail, the impact of rampant theft (organized or random) is really quite unsettling on the people who have to be around it. Retail store policies are very much about not interfering with the thieves, but it’s quite upsetting when you realize you’re in an environment where the law doesn’t really mean anything and consequences basically don’t exist for breaking the law. The few people I know in retail (including retail management) are looking to get out ASAP because it just feels so vaguely unsafe and, worse yet, large swaths of the public seem to thing the thieves are the good guys and the retail employees are the bad ones because they’re associated with a corporation.
The most remote, homestead-y places will have unattended "stores" where you leave out goods and people come by and leave money in the basket and take what you have. The least remote, most-managed places have security locks on items over $15. It is impossible to run a friendly, neighborhood-run store when any new customer is a potential thief. When theft goes uncontrolled, owners begin to look at their customers with suspicion. Those who don't like theft leave for more peaceful places and are replaced by owners who will tolerate theft with a big insurance policy and force.
It is continually astonishing to me that so many "community-focused" people don't realize that unilateral actions of harm inside the community (theft, assault, etc.) have ripple effects that harm the entire community. If you grow up in a region where store owners believe you might be a thief unless they personally know you and you have to constantly worry about protecting what's yours, and I grow up in an area where I'm trusted and respected by business owners and I leave my door unlocked when I go to town, how is equity meaningfully achievable between us?
Happened before in history. See the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union. Widespread moral justification for theft of private property on class-based "social justice" arguments. It's even happening right here in this HN thread, people justifying stealing.
Let me try to convince you without defending the morality of the shoplifter or declaring corporations evil.
1. On the totem pole of crimes, petty shoplifting (without violence) is pretty close to the bottom when it comes to harm done the public. Jaywalking and smoking weed are lower.
2. These corporations that are being robbed already build shrinkage into their budgets. $300k of baby food is nothing to Walmart, a rounding error, and I doubt you can even see it in their bottom line. Even a smaller shop is not going to go out of business if someone walks out with all their toothpaste. It’s not analogous to stealing from an individual.
3. There are a limited number of police and I’d rather them be out there deterring violent and serious crime than protecting the inventory of companies. When every rapist, murderer, white collar fraudster, and drunk driver is behind bars, and the police have nothing left to do, then sure, go bust those dastardly deodorant thieves.
Well... it's not that weird. The big chain stores like Walmart ruthlessly exploit their workers to the point of them being forced to apply for food stamps [1], while the owner class makes literally a dozen billions of dollars a year in net profits [2]. Additionally, Walmart is infamous for killing off small businesses around them [3]. So, I don't have much sympathy at all for these corporations and Walmart in particular.
With ever more and more people being unable to make a honest living - over half the US has less than 1000$ in savings [4] - it's no surprise that shoplifting for survival is on the rise and at least somewhat accepted in society.
Unfortunately, small stores get caught up in the crossfire as they can't afford to bear the rising cost of shoplifting.
We need better wages for the 99% and higher taxes for the 1% so that we can get away from forcing people to steal to survive.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-09-14/radiating...
[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
What are the good reasons that led to and allows this?
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I guess, but conversely I'd argue that organized retail theft has been around pretty much as long as supply chains have existed. That's the mob's bread and butter. The phrase "riding shotgun" is in common use. Perhaps mass shoplifting from the store is a new tactic, but personally I look at this situation and ask, "what has changed"?
For one, we've sort of collectively realized how terrible modern jails are (Rikers anyone?). And that's good.
A second conclusion I draw is that retail stores have been gutted... walmart-ized... every ounce of efficiency wrung out of them. Have you ever been to one of these massive retail outlets and had trouble finding anyone that works there? A few months ago everyone was clutching pearls about some 150 yd stretch of train track in LA that was continually being robbed... and I can make a wild guess that this was the result of 1) skeleton crews, 2) minimal security on the ground and 3) shipping containers that are running with sub-standard defense mechanisms because they're simply too much work (slows down loading, probably break a lot, etc.).
Yes organized crime should be punished, but these companies seem to throw up they're hands and say "Gee golly, we have no idea why $20 million dollars of merchandise watched by 5 overworked, low wage employees and 1 loss prevention officer is such a target! It's a mystery!"
I don't hate mega corporations (ok maybe a little), but they definitely have a hand in creating this situation. And it's rarely commented upon when discussing the recent rise in shoplifting.
(Edit: I forgot my favorite shoplifting fact... up until recently, reports showed that both shoplifting and wage theft "cost the economy" around $40 billion per year. Comparing prosecution rates of the two crimes is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Once I chased a thief out to the waiting car, and blocked the door from closing, leaned into the car, and came to my senses...
I let them go. It was only worth $750. And I wasn't about to brawl inside a car with two thugs.
I could have been stabbed or shot. It's not worth the risk. And I was the store owner. Let me tell you straight up: it's not understaffing.
I would expressly tell my staff to not risk their safety for merch.
A couple years after I sold the store, they had an armed robbery at closing and lost about a hundred thousand. Also, break-ins went up: they tried cutting the safe out but couldn't reach the rear bolts to cut them. They even stole the security cameras.
I only reported once because I knew the guy and I felt betrayed. I don't know for certain, but I think the vast majority of retail theft goes unreported.
And your favorite shoplifting fact is down-right offensive. If you were more balanced in your counterargument you'd also ask the reader: What is the cost to the public for added security, staff, deterrence tech, and lost merch? And lost sense of safety and security? Those are priceless in the eyes of most reasonable people.
It's sad to think we may have lived through the golden era of retail where stores were relatively safe and pallets of merch could be left out unguarded.
These gangs are ruining it for everyone. We shouldn't even have this discussion. We should all unify with retailers of all sizes. Theft is straight up wrong, and the thieves should be punished.
And note that security measures are deadweight loss to society.
I’m in my 30s and this is the first time I’ve ever actually understood the historical meaning of this
Nobody is going to risk it for 7 euro an hour lmao.
The videos of organized ransacking of stores are honestly insane. The stores are somewhat powerless because of liability, and the new laws that have raised the level in which the law even cares. I don't think the "broken window" policy is the end-all, it has some problems but allowing "small" theft rings does not generally put areas on a good trajectory. These goods are almost always getting 3rd party listed, be it Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc.
As the wage gap and opportunity gap widens in the US, allowing shoplifting is actually an intentional release valve that is being tolerated and even outright legally permitted (California Prop 47), because - without it - we would see more home break-ins, kidnappings of wealthy people and more severe offenses. Instead, shoplifting is relatively harmless and prevents this type of escalation of crime.
“Panem et circenses” said the Romans, shoplifting is a form of “panem”. I think many don’t understand the incredible pressure pot that is the US at the moment with vast negative social pressures and inequality. If it explodes, all bets are off: the US could look a lot like South Africa and Brazil than what it is now.
This plus some political survivorship too: votes are all equal, and when most people are disadvantaged or about to become disadvantaged, politicians cater more and more to them (populism) in order to survive and dominate in the political arena.
This isn't hyperbole, just look at what happens in other countries that lack the ability to enforce their laws.
What a wild theory. I've seen no evidence of this mechanism existing.
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You mean feature.
If you tell voters in no uncertain terms what will happen if they piss on the electric fence and they piss on it then it's safe to assume they wanted the results. Make no mistake, people were told certain policy would lead to businesses leaving these areas resulting in <thing> deserts. Voters voted for it anyway.
You collect the materials and farm them off to Amazon.
I was talking to a NYC colleague the other day about how there are trends in favor of not punishing people for certain criminal activity in the city. We were talking about driving with a suspended license, but I asked about shoplifting. She said, "Oh, no. That's on the opposite trend. Not only are they prosecuting it to the maximum, but they just changed the law to make it easier to hold people on bail for shoplifting." She made it clear that shoplifting was never a low priority for prosecution, but now it's a higher one.
I understand that the claim in this article is that aggregators/sellers/fences whatever should be surveilled and prosecuted (more), but just wanted to add this tale from the courthouse and emphasize that the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.
> Manhattan D.A. Acts on Vow to Seek Incarceration Only for Worst Crimes
> The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told prosecutors in his office in a memo that they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for the most serious offenses — including murder, sexual assault and economic crimes involving vast sums of money — unless the law requires them to do otherwise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/nyregion/alvin-bragg-manh...
And this isn't entirely new with Bragg...
https://nypost.com/2022/06/07/nyc-da-downgrades-macys-loving...
https://nypost.com/2021/10/02/nyc-man-leads-record-shatterin...
Also, the DAs supported the "harm over harm" amendment to bail reform (CPL 510.10(4)t) for the explicit purpose of seeking bail in repeat shoplifting cases. And can you guess how they're using it?
You are conflating DA public statements with actual operational policy. It is nothing new that DAs claim to prioritize things that are not on their roadmaps.
Not only does Texas have higher rates of larceny theft[1], it is the biggest outlier on the graph in terms of lack of prosecution for it - no other state is further below the trend line.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rat...
Getting a low-level criminal or junkie off the street, alive, is worth a lot. You can then offer them a chance to turn their sentence into rehab or something if they don't need jail.
And there's no reason we can't go for the higher ups too, there's (jail)time for everyone!
Off the street and on to Riker's Island. A jail so dangerous that it has a high likelihood of being put into federal receivership in the next year. People are safer on the street. Full stop.
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The claim is about the time-series comparison, and the rebuttal is about the cross section comparison. Is the journalist in question stupid, gaslighting, or both?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect
It would be totally illogical to pretend that such massive sweeping change in public perception of policing would have no effect on the activity of the police themselves.
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If cops are standing around doing nothing, it's because it's pointless to engage with a suspect physically, risking yourself while by the way people around whip out their phones to video you, if the suspect will be released on their own recognizance on some lowered charge, if the charge isn't dropped anyway.
You can also add, if you want to criticize cops, that they're civil workers at the end of the day, and most are in for the benefits, such as pension and healthcare, rather than pretending to be superheroes or vigilantes.
Also he mentions social programs as an alternative to incarceration, but are these programs actually available? The crime rate suggests they are not, so reducing incarceration may be counterproductive until they are better established.
It's tied in this foundational belief (and it's mentioned as one of the points) that incarceration leads to more recidivism. How one can reach this conclusion by taking overall violent crime stats into account (also all but one out of seven felony types are up in NYC) requires some logical legwork.
The fact that increases of petty crime and increases of serious crime are both happening yearly should be a red flag that makes us question the policy decisions, which again are based on not 'over policing' or 'over incarcerating'. It could be the two are connected, but you'd be accused of Broken Windows Theory.
It's hard not to see a general chaos as being contributing. The plexiglass seems like a symbol of that to many people.
What's tempting is that there's a lack of punishment. Do you propose we lecture to thieves to dissuade them?
It's like arguing people run red lights because they get distracted due to phone notifications and so maybe we shouldn't punish them with points that could lead to a license suspension.
I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
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There is another engine driving this phenomenon: addicts "boosting" to feed their addiction. Drug use is another crime that society seems uninterested in prosecuting or punishing as of late. Add illicitly manufactured Fentanyl (1) to that recipe and you have an absolute onslaught of retail theft.
In interview after interview with addicts, it's clear that boosting is one of the primary methods of funding drug use. (2) If we are not interested in curbing drug trafficking, sales, and abuse, we will continue to have a huge problem with retail theft. (And also an unconscionable death toll that is growing rapidly.)
(1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34603876/ (2) https://www.youtube.com/@SoftWhiteUnderbelly/videos
For example, Oregon had huge protests and weak government responses, and yet prosecutes large amounts of shoplifting.
Blaming this on the response to BLM seems intuitive, but I have yet to see data that supports it.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/multnomah-co...
There were not protests state wide, they were in a single county, the one in which shoplifting isn't prosecuted as much. A couple miles away, with different DAs, you will get arrested and prosecuted for even very minor theft.
> Unseating [Washington Co DA] Barton has been a priority for national progressive groups funding criminal justice reform in Oregon.
> “Washington County is the most extreme county I’ve ever worked in, and that’s because of the tough on crime, war on drugs, lock 'em up and throw away the key fanaticism coming from the DA’s office,” Decker said.
This is the person responsible for a 93% prosecution rate, being re-elected on the basis of "law and order" and relatively conservative viewpoints, backlash against the BLM protest responses that you talk about.
For example, in Austin, TX, I can't speak for retail crimes in particular but there has most definitely been a change in prosecuting other crimes. Hit-and-runs are an epidemic now in the city, primarily because the police won't even respond unless there is a major injury. I was in a hit and run, I got a detailed description of the car and license plate, and yet there were 0 consequences to the person that hit me. It actually makes more sense to run if you hit someone because there are literally no downsides (except for people with a conscience, of course).
But if you looked across TX as a whole, this data would definitely not show up.
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https://abc7chicago.com/smash-and-grab-robberies-chicago-org...
Prosecutor policy, police strike, Covid masking and office closures confounding the operation of the law enforcement system, or something else?
the article says that was speculated but not borne out by the data.
> What is behind this unwelcome rise? Some speculated that prosecutors had gone soft on looting after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But it is hard to see any such trend in the data: generally states with more shoplifting prosecute more shoplifters (see chart).