Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores | Hacker News Reader

Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

wsj.com

193 pointsjuokaz325 comments

> The target was no ordinary shoplifter. He was part of a network of organized professionals, known as boosters, whom CVS had been monitoring for weeks. The company believed the group responsible for stealing almost $50 million in products over five years from dozens of stores in Northern California.

The story isn't about people selling stolen goods on Amazon. It's about organized theft operations. One way to stop theft is to reduce the ability to sell stolen goods, but that infringes on ownership rights of a large number of people that want to sell things online. I'm sure large corporations would love it if you can't buy their goods second hand.

At the end of the day, protecting property rights is a job for the state. Since it sounds its being organized, the criminal organization might be exploiting recent changes in sentencing and prosecution:

> Retail investigators blame changes in sentencing laws in some states for an uptick in thefts. In California, a 2014 law downgraded the theft of less than $950 worth of goods to a misdemeanor from a felony. Target recently reduced its operating hours in five San Francisco stores, citing rising thefts.

The felony theft limit for Texas is $2,500, but their retail establishments do not report massive shoplifting sprees. Clearly there is more than misdemeanor/felony classification at work here.

I'm pretty sure in CA it's that police do not respond to calls for anything less than felony theft.

So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.

> So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.

Walmart and Target, among others, reportedly monitor small thefts and let you get up to the felony threshold over multiple incidents before swooping in.

An option not available to small businesses, as the shoplifters have no doubt already learned. Another hidden tilting of the playing field against small business.

Yes, exactly.

So will we see a startup: Uber for alternative policing to whom small retailers submit surveilance camera footage, and expect a series of crimes to be merged into a single case?

That’s actually a pretty compelling idea. Not necessarily the alternative policing part (private police?), but compiling hard evidence against offenders and handing that to the authorities.

"They were robbing the store, and I think one of them had a machine gun!"

"i think they had some counterfeit $100 bills as well"

“Yes, that’s right. The shoplifted said he was going to use all the stolen merchandise as part of his unregistered securities exchange.”

That's a good point. I don't think the felony theft limit is the only consideration the deters organized theft. One obvious difference between Texas and Bay Area is Texas has a lot of guns.

> In TX can You Legally Shoot & Kill a Shoplifter? The short answer is…not unless they somehow injure you in the process of committing the theft, making it a robbery. “During the process of committing the theft” would include while trying to escape with the property... One thing that is UNIQUE to Texas is the ability to use deadly force to protect property, even if you are not in fear for your life.

Even though I doubt CVS security guards are trained the shoot shoplifters, the preception that this is a possibility would deter low level criminals tasked with shoplifting

http://legas.legrandelaw.com/criminal-justice/in-tx-can-you-...

And what happens if you check the receipt on the body and find out that the item wasn't stolen? How many years do you face for murdering a customer?

I can point to where firearms have stopped shoplifting crimes.

Can you point to where your scenario has happened?

Because I’m all for hypotheticals, so long as we admit the rarity and precedent before saying there is a problem.

Difficulty: It would take maybe, shall we say, ten thousand of your "firearms stopping shoplifting" cases to offset even ONE "innocent person getting shot" case.

Yes. This is exactly what was talking about in my previous post asking for examples to determine how hyperbolic the response was.

I grew up in NH which is a gun-happy state.

My mom worked at Macy's and reported endless problems with organized shoplifting in the 1980's and 1990's. One time a whole family came into the Men's clothing department after her shift, the dad kept the clerk distracted, the mom and the kids took a few racks of suits and loaded them into their car.

She said that the security guards were loathe to use force on anyone because Macy's could get sued; that didn't stop shoplifters from running over a security guard in the parking lot.

I worked at a supermarket where the security was entirely undercover (probably because they were more afraid of us stealing than the customers) and I knew nothing about the security until the day I saw a massively overweight woman tackle a man who was leaving the store.

I read this book

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Mafia-Ethnic-Succession-Organiz...

which describes similar organized theft organizations working in the 1970s, how the goods were fenced, etc.

The 70s 80s and early 90s was the golden age of crime. Short sentences, much more lenient recidivism laws, poor security, a culture that really didn't care that much, no digitsliazation and no tech to easy track stolen goods or id suspects, no smartphones . Multiple types of crimes thrived in that era: bank robbery, drug dealing/distribution, shoplifting, auto theft, and so on. It was pretty bad, even worse than now. The noticeable decline of crime since the 90s according to steven pinker seems to confirm this.

Now is the golden age of shoplifting though. I'm REQUIRED to wear a mask and no one wants to come with in 6ft!!

> Even though I doubt CVS security guards are trained the shoot shoplifters, the preception that this is a possibility would deter low level criminals tasked with shoplifting

I've never once seen a security guard in a Texas CVS. It actually sounds preposterous to me. Charging $3 for a 20oz soda is the real crime.

These comments are ridiculous. Have any of you people saying these things ever actually lived in Texas? Minimum wage chain store employees are not carrying guns. I would discourage you from trying to rob someone's actual house, sure. My wife once called me home to say she thought someone was in the house, and I cleared every single room with an AR-15, and you can believe I would have shot an intruder without a second thought. But a convenience store? No one is taking it personally enough to shoot you for stealing corporate property. If anything, the employees are probably the people most likely to be doing the stealing.

I'm not so sure about that, like someone stealing a few things yeah, no one is going to care enough. But in SF it's common that people walk in and fill up a fucking roller suitcase and then just walk out.

In the south someone is likely going to call you out for that, at which point a confrontation may ensue and it has a much higher likelihood of a gun being involved.

I've been called out by presumably minimum wage employees before for opening food in the gas station while waiting on family members to finish shopping or use the restroom.

There are studies that show people from the south are more aggressive and take much more personal offense to perceived disrespectful behavior.

My guess is it's the same situation as Seattle; Prosecutors in California refuse to prosecute these cases, meaning the cops refuse to waste time trying to apprehend them.

Here's an excellent clip about a famous criminal living free in Seattle that happily expounds on his illegal activity: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868

There are plenty of things about my state that get hated on all the time, and deservingly so, but I'll never get how the West Coast is happy driving productive people away and coddling those that have no intention other than to fuck over society.

> how the West Coast is happy driving productive people

The evidence for this happening in economically-meaningful numbers is scarce. What we do see happening is those productive people disengaging from that broken society—civically, physically and emotionally.

The evidence for this happening in economically-meaningful numbers is scarce.

It doesn't take numbers meaningful to California to have a meaningful effect on other states, where housing costs are massively skyrocketing due to an influx of new residents.

What does that have to do with crime? Could be people just getting priced out. Land in the western US is still more expensive and still getting more expensive than elsewhere, clearly it is in demand even more than it is not in demand.

I grew up in Colorado, and complaints about housing costs and traffic increases due to the influx of Californians has been a constant since the 1970s. At least.

I'm going posit that it's perception more than any actual changes due to fleeing 'fornians.

Could be, but one hears of a multiplying effect: numbers of households moving from California times the absolute housing price differences, in terms of money flowing into local housing markets.

Prices are rising in California too, so an exodus can’t be the explanation, probably inflation and investors driving prices up?

I grew up in Washington, where people were whining about Californians moving there and driving up property prices since at least the 80s, but I'm sure long before.

This doesn't prove someone's opinion that criminals are being coddled and productive people are being driven away.

I mean about a decade ago I would have loved to live on the West Coast. I'm sure I'm no great loss to you but there are a lot of people that you just will never get. Not to mention, compared to a decade ago, the cities in my home state are starting to adopt these policies.

I don't see how not prosecuting repeated offenders is not coddling, as pointed out, the guy ended up murdering. There's very much a cultural difference.

In what world is 500,000 people moving into the greater Seattle area over the past decade and raising housing prices into the stratosphere called 'Driving productive people away'?

This guy went on to kill is girlfriend then (possibly accidentally) himself. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/too-much-jai...

wow, that article is actually a really interesting take on the whole situation, and how there are no easy answers (both in this case and, i suspect, in many others (in sf and beyond)). these sorts of tragedies really highlight the need for a society-wide rethink on how to balance freedom/liberty with the ticking time bomb of negative externalities that certain, highly-justice-system-involved (especially when serious drug abuse issues are in play) offenders represent. at what point is someone "broken" enough from the pov of the rest of society that the humane solution necessitates a more interventionist approach? (not that forcible commission is at all a panacea, or even necessarily a viable/effective approach, of course). i think everyone would agree that letting these sorts of problems fester until they get bad enough that we can justify locking them up and throwing away the key is not a good solution for anyone.

but in Texas, how likely is the staff or the store owner to be armed, and actually confront you? No way that would happen in California.

I keep thinking of this event that happened to me in the UK, where laws are equally useless at preventing theft, and staff are just powerless to do anything about it. I chased down a shoplifter. I cornered him in an alley. He stopped, looked at me, and this brief conversation took place. (and nobody ever believes me, but I don't care; this really did happen)

Him: What are you doing?

Me: I'm chasing you

Him: why?

Me: Because you're a fucking thief!

Him: (confused)...nobody's ever done that before.

Me: (shocked) ... well, I AM, so fucking run!

He dropped the bag (which contained mostly expensive meat and cheese and some other expensive-ish items - apparently really common theft targets) - and ran off. I took the bag back to the store.

Now, I didn't give a shit about a 100 pound loss to Tesco, but if we've completely given up on the rule of law, I'm not sure that's a society I'm happy to live in.

I love a good foot chase!

Given the sentiments of your last paragraph, why did you choose to send the criminal away and return Tesco’s stolen beef?

I don't understand putting your personal safety at risk (who knows if he had a knife or something) over £100 of goods belonging to a £20B company. It's not like he stole your meat and cheese as you were shopping. Nobody is going to miss that cheese. Nobody is going to get fired over it. It's really not that important.

You mention the meat and cheese, but the comment explicitly disavows that motive.

P: I chased this guy for law and justice, not meat and cheese.

Q: why did you chase for meat cheese?

He said he chased the guy out of principle, but if that were true, it follows that he'd do the same thing if the guy stole a pack of gum, which is even more insane. Even the police won't chase someone down for stealing such small amounts. He's not the police, he's not the owner of the store, he (presumably) don't even work there. He has no skin in that game whatsoever.

The store has already accounted for shoplifting and shrinkage in their budget, and any steps they might take to combat it will be systemic via policy and by working with law enforcement to bust major groups (the subject of the actual article) and not one-off foot-chases.

You might argue that a store will charge higher prices in an environment with shoplifting than without, but how much does that really boil down to in terms of the customer's final bill? Bread becomes £0.02 more expensive in a store that has accounted for shoplifting? Does anyone care?

Finally, there is almost no secondary market for food, so, in OP's case, the guy was likely stealing in order to eat, and not to just fence the goods for money.

It's pretty normal to be offered freshly stolen meat and other high value food in pubs, in poor neighborhoods. It's happened to me lots of times. There very much is a secondary food market.

> You might argue that a store will charge higher prices in an environment with shoplifting than without, but how much does that really boil down to in terms of the customer's final bill?

This is clearly not about meat and cheese. This is about stamping out the attitude that some people have that allow them to walk into a store and just ...take stuff. This time it was from a large company. Next time it's from your house or car. What is the cost of living in a civil society where people don't routinely steal? Apparently, in a world where police are unwilling to respond it's acts like this. Thank you OP.

Well, the principle of the matter for one and some have personal courage.

Also, what you propose radically changes society for the worse. If Tesco can't assume a high trust environment to sell their goods, they will implement policies to protect themselves that are more expensive/less convenient for everyone. Thomas Sowell has written extensively about this.

Agree that OP doesn’t have a responsibility to defend Tesco from crime, however disagree that it doesn’t matter. It’s logical fallacy to say that crimes small enough don’t matter. By that definition a criminal that is robs billions of people for mere pennies wouldn’t matter. You have to look at the class of crimes. So if petty crimes are significant, then as a class of crimes it matters.

>> but in Texas, how likely is the staff or the store owner to be armed, and actually confront you?

At a CVS? Not likely at all.

In a fairly liberal area of PA I saw a manager of a Walgreens very aggressively (not physically) confront a shoplifter and yell out to never come to the store again. The punk tried to respond, but ultimately cowered to the anger of the manager.

In TX they'd be more intimidating, I'm sure. Unless corporate bans guns.

sorry, but in Texas, big box retailers do not use armed staff. Target, Wal Mart, CVS, Walgreens, Best Buy - I have never, ever seen a worker with a gun.

As a life-long Texan, this sounds ridiculous to me. A Wal Mart employee is more intimidating, simply because they're Texan?

This is not the 1850's.

> box retailers do not use armed staff. Target, Wal Mart, CVS, Walgreens, Best Buy - I have never, ever seen a worker with a gun

It wouldn't be the corporation arming the staff, it would be the staff arming themselves via a CCW/CHL. The first letter states 'concealed', so by definition you shouldn't see it.

>A Wal Mart employee is more intimidating, simply because they're Texan

Its less about any individual employee, and more about the general culture and nature of crime in the two areas. If I were a criminal in Texas, I would undoubtedly prefer crimes with less chance of confrontation.

That vast majority of retail chains would fire an employee who stopped a shoplifter with a firearm.

When I worked at Best Buy, loss prevention was very clearly instructed that using force to stop a shoplifter would get you fired.

Yeah in the areas I'm in where most stores have armed personnel they aren't worried about shoplifting.

You probably walk by people carrying guns every day and never notice

Even in the ultra-liberal Bay Area my Walgreens, Target and Best Buy employ armed security. I find it doubtful that Texas of all places doesn’t have armed security.

(Oddly I’ve only seen unarmed, tired looking security in CVS. Perhaps they’re too cheap to pay for armed gaurds.)

The only time I’ve seen an armed guard at a retail store in the southeast is when they have off duty cops late night at very high crime locations. It is extremely uncommon here for a Target or Best Buy to regularly employee armed security.

Most everywhere in Atlanta has armed security, CVS included.

It's not ever really geared at shoplifters though, as a lot of people seem to forget that shoplifting isn't really the biggest crime you can do in a store.

I don’t think it’s most everywhere in Atlanta because I lived there until 2 years ago (I still visit regularly), and it wasn’t the norm anywhere I regularly went. Atlanta is a big place, so I’m sure there’s room for variation.

Maybe there is somewhere in Texas where those stores employ armed security. I've never heard of it nor been to one. I think armed security is more a function of crime than of local sentiment towards guns.

Guards/security in Walgreens and Target carry firearms? Really? That boggles my mind (Canadian).

Texas is a big place, and as far as I'm aware, doesn't make it a policy to train individuals to be vigilantes.

If your anecdote proves anything, it is the relative safety of that liberal area of PA. The fact that a manager of a Walgreens was comfortable confronting a criminal without real consequences speaks to the level of danger they were in.

If you've spent time in any rougher areas of Texas (I have), you'd agree that physically confronting a criminal over petty theft, as a store manager, carries a huge risk of violent escalation—something you'd probably want to avoid in a city with a higher murder rate.

Why not? Plenty of folks from all walks of life down there get their CCW.

So given the opportunity, Texan bystanders with guns would shoot unarmed shoplifters?

Nah, a big section of the class you take to get your LTC (we don't have a CCW) covers just how screwed you would be if you did so.

...but...theres dumb people everywhere, so when you decide to shop lift in Texas the risk profile is certainly different than it is in CA.

"There's dumb people everywhere, so when you shoplift in Texas" reads a lot like like "Texan bystanders would shoot shoplifters."

Why on earth would you jump straight to that conclusion? Even if the firearm was drawn, which is a huge if assuming the carrier was attacked, almost all defensive gun uses end before a shot is fired.

Someone carrying a firearm should be more willing to nonviolently confront a thief than someone that's unarmed.

https://reason.com/2018/04/20/cdc-provides-more-evidence-tha...

Convenience store, pawn shop, or other stores in low income areas? Maybe.

The ones these people are hitting? Not a snowball's chance in hell. An individual could walk out with 10 baskets full of medicine and still not be worth the trouble to pull a gun for all the legal headaches that will bring.

All of the downtown CVS locations in Dallas don't even have checkout employees. It's automated self-checkout. You can just walk out of the store if you want to. Nobody is going to shoot you. Whoever owns CVS doesn't live anywhere near the stores.

Londoner here, true for big shops and supermarkets, off-licenses and corner shops will be equipped with a baseball bat behind the counter. Watched them dragging low-life thiefs to the back stores to be dealt with.

Friend of mine got in the local paper for retrieving his laptop from a grab-and-run, by being a regular competitive runner and dramatically outrunning the guy.

Can't imagine anyone doing that for Tesco, though. Especially unpaid.

...what? The average Texan, as it turns out, isn't literally Wyatt Earp. It would be shocking if a random Best Buy manager stopped a shoplifter with a firearm—not to mention probably in violation of Best Buy's policies for handling shoplifting.

The average cashier's ability to administer lethal force is probably not a major influence on the prevalence of shoplifting in Texas.

In Texas if you aren't otherwise in the commission of a crime, you may use a weapon to prevent a crime. And yet the news was not filled with concealed carry permit owners drawing on people to do exactly that. I never bothered to get a permit but a friend who did told me the instructor heavily emphasized if you did use your weapon it would be minimum $25k in legal fees even if exonerated.

Now that permitless carry is legal it remains to be seen if there's an uptick in vigilantism, but I have my doubts.

Likely Tesco tossed them right in the bin, however. I think it's overstating the case to claim that people robbing shops (especially big chains) is an indication that "we've completely given up on the rule of law" - at least, I find it unlikely that your erstwhile (if gormless) thief, emboldened by his huge haul of free meat and cheese, would choose next time to relieve you of your wallet. Robbing people is a much riskier game, even in a civilised (read "non-firearm-carrying") place like the UK.

I totally believe you, but I don't think that's laudable.

It's one thing to go after someone who steals from you or some other individual, but appointing yourself the vigilante protector of the grocer class is not about defending society, it's about your personal drives.

The food you returned almost certainly wound up in the trash (stores have no way of knowing you're not a weirdo who contaminates food for kicks), and the cost of administering 'rescued product' is more than that of just writing off the loss as a business expense, which you'd better believe they already budget around.

I think CA is an outlier. Super lax enforcement + huge population just puts up big numbers.

The SF city government seems to have realized that there's another way to make crime "go down": refuse to prosecute for anything, ideally make it pointless for the cops to even show up, until people stop bothering to report crime. Wow, shoplifting is at record lows!

I don't know if that was the intention or not, but that is precisely the outcome of SF policies.

It seems to apply to traffic, too. Sabotage the road system to prove that driving is terrible. A few extremely major streets were basically off road driving for a year while I was living there. Light timing is terrible at several intersections, guaranteeing gridlock. Traffic cops get stationed at the next intersection over, so nothing changes.

Mission accomplished: fewer cars on the road! But no money coming in either.

I will never not share Goodhart's Law when the opportunity arises: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". You couple that with redefining what counts as a 'crime', and bam, you get the situation SF is in right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Same with bike theft in Vancouver. Nobody bothers reporting it, so the statistics aren’t too bad

Isn't there any incentive for your claim on your theft insurance?

It's fairly uncommon to have insurance specifically for your bicycle, so most people would be filing claims against their renters' (if they have it) or homeowners' insurance. Given the size of those deductibles ($500 is the US average for homeowners', I would think Canada is similar [1]) lots of people would just buy another bike that costs less.

1: https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-in...

even for claims above deductible but still relatively minor (2-3x maybe?) it might not be worth it financially (in the long run) depending on your provider and any previous claims of course

In NL you can insure your bike for theft upon purchase ( or later ).

Exactly. Stop calling criminal activity "crimes", and then the stats look great. And, the local SF media participates and pushes the "crime is actually down" narrative: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/stats-sh...

We're approaching a strange post-empirical world where the right chart or graph can be used to justify any public policy, and often changing how the data for the chart is collected, analyzed and presented is easier than solving the issue. The collective anecdotes of thousands/millions of people can be dismissed because the chart says otherwise.

Disagree that crime in your neighborhood has dropped? Just because your car has been broken into and your neighbor got robbed doesnt mean there's a trend. Anecdotes arent data. Do you have a source for that?

This is a toughy.

People who don't believe in covid vaccines -- for instance -- are living in a world of anecdotes, untrusting of easily manipulable data.

But it's where we're at. In a world where you can't trust the data and your friends are addicted to consuming propaganda, what the fuck is truth?

In your opinion, did the multi-decade drop in American crime, regularly discussed by academics who have some tentative theories to explain it, happen or was it all faked?

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...

That was real and everyone can agree on that based on what they see as well as the data. However you can't go to a single SF neighborhood and find people that think crime has dropped recently. There are boatloads of articles about people having their cars broken into so often they leave them unlocked because replacing windows was so expensive. Videos of people shoplifting while security stands by and does nothing because of the laws. Articles about criminals that kill someone but had been in and out of the system for years with fairly severe crimes but always let off by a rouge DA or out on bail (or without bail because bail is racist).

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/sf-da-announces-homici...

??? A couple of months ago I literally saw a man get tackled for stealing ties from a high end store in SF nearby union square.

every time I go to target in the metreon, I see someone shoplifting a substantial amount of merch.

every. single. time.

usually what I see is someone with a roller luggage fill it up and then calmly walk out the door

No one considers that perhaps ever-increasing inequality in the Bay Area has also increased both the incentive to commit crime and the disincentive to prosecute it. It would stand to reason that the people who are desperate would be more desperate than ever, while the people who are well-off would be more able to eat the costs than ever. No one is happy but the dynamic is grotesquely sustainable.

Why unvoting? Of course it would be too easy for themselves justifying their actions blaming inequality, but if in some place life isn't sustainable for others but the super-rich... That's of course going to push people to commit more crimes.

> the people who are desperate would be more desperate than ever

This does not follow from increasing inequality. The poor do not get poorer, rich just get richer (faster).

> This does not follow from increasing inequality. The poor do not get poorer, rich just get richer (faster).

The poor stay poor. The lower-middle class becomes poor.

Maybe if the CVS/Wallgreens/etc took a different tactic. Don't let people inside. Take orders online or line outside, deliver or pick up at the door. Distribute more intelligently.

Everywhere else, stores can let people inside without crime being rampant, so obviously this isn't the problem.

What about only letting in people in who have phones attesting to a unique id.

Don't let in people without a device and ban people who are caught stealing once. If they force the doors and come in call the cops and prosecute for felony burglary even if they were only originally banned for stealing socks originally.

Share bad lists and stealing socks means that you are suddenly banned from every store in 100 miles.

Make exceptions for curbside pickup and pre scheduled trips to the grocery store/pharmacy where you will pay for the security that will walk around with you.

Expire people off the list after 5 years of one theft or never after a string of thefts.

For the normal customer nothing happens your phone silently attests from your pocket that you aren't on the list by pinging a service and retrieving a token not sharing your info with the store.

Losers here an alarm sound and a voice telling them to buzz off on penalty of jail.

> Losers here an alarm sound and a voice telling them to buzz off on penalty of jail.

If they're not going to jail for openly shoplifting, why do you think they'd go to jail for this?

Forcing your way into a place to commit a crime is automatically a felony in almost all states. This is true even if the planned crime would be a misdemeanor.

Why does it matter whether it's a misdemeanor or a felony, if Chesa is going to drop the charge either way?

At some point the government actually has to enforce the law. There is no system that can be imagined that obviates that.

That's exactly my point. But once we have a prosecutor who actually prosecutes criminals, then the crime levels will reduce without needing the phone ID system.

You’re making a mistake in thinking something has to happen. It may not, and things may just continue to go downhill.

This should not be necessary in a first-world country. Public institutions should actually do their jobs, or we should stop having to pay for them

> Public institutions should actually do their jobs, or we should stop having to pay for them

There's been a rather noteworthy series of protests over the past summer on the subject of whether or not it's worth it to pay for some of these institutions.

>let off by a rouge DA

By rouge do you mean red, as in left-leaning? Or rogue?

> That was real and everyone can agree on that based on what they see as well as the data

It’s a pretty well-observed fact (opinion polls etc) that most people across the country think crime has been going up over the last few decades, even as the crime rate has been going down.

So I don’t think “just ask people what they think” is a sound approach here. Most people are just wrong on this point.

That said I’m open to the general causal chain we’re discussing here; I’d just like to see some actual data on prosecution rates and crime reporting in SF.

You should change, “I’d just like to see some actual data…” to “I’d just like to see someones hand chopped off for stealing.”

murders are hard to fake. The rest of crime data is more subjective than people realize. I was robbed at gunpoint for 1$. I did not report the crime.

That’s really scary, over a damn dollar?!?

What was the context here if you don’t mind sharing, why one dollar and not your whole wallet? Why pull a gun?? Isn’t that a felony? Won’t police respond immediately to the report of someone threatening your life via brandishing a gun in public (more people in danger if not caught)?

Usually robbers pull the gun before determining how much money the victim has in their wallet.

They could ask the potential victim first, and then, if the value is too low, not bother pulling a gun. But all potential victims have an incentive to lie and say they only have $1. Knowing that, a rational robber would pull a gun without requesting the info first.

Regarding police responding immediately: you can't call the police until after robber has lowered their gun and/or left the scene. So by the time you call the police, you're no longer being threatened.

I was agreeing with your comment until I looked at the OP's reply, apparently the robber literally requested a single dollar. Super weird.

Still good to report it so they can look at cctv footage and figure out what criminal looks like pulling guns on people

They walked up and indicated they had a gun in their pocket. They had a buddy that was across the street. They asked for 1$ which is what I gave them. Other people I knew in the area were also robbed at gunpoint for 1$, but on their porch. They did call the cops.

As for why I don't know.

Also the police don't come quickly in most places. My wife was pistol whipped and it took 30 minutes to get a car to our house 1 mile from the station. Also I lived in a bad neighborhood for a long time so this may not be typical.

Damn sorry I can’t imagine how I would feel, would probably end up in jail or shot myself if some goon tried that to a loved one in front of me.

You should have reported the crime, because by not reporting it, you feed the people that are enabling it. You allow them to promote the idea that their policies are actually working. Then, you're more likely to have it happen to you again.

Ever try to report a crime that the police officer doesn't want to write a report for? They will do everything in their power to not write that report, including accusing you of crimes, or gaslighting you.

Our police has a website to put in the report yourself. In like a week it will change to 'reviewed' and nothing will happen. But it will end up on the dashboard as a theft under $5000 of whatever.

https://data.torontopolice.on.ca/pages/bicycle-thefts

Yes, I reported twice very small crimes (like stolen bicycle worth ~$50). Officers just filed the report, no questions asked.

Even murder is ambiguous over time, because trauma care has substantially improved. The same gunshot wounds that would have resulted in a homicide 50 years ago now are now just assaults (which may not even be counted) because of skilled ER physicians.

Are they really just assaults and not attempted murders?

Not as hard as some might think. Are manslaughters counted in the murder rate, does it matter if it's voluntary or involuntary? Do we put justifiable homicides in the murder rate? What if we can just charge it as aggravated assault. What about when there's no charge, do we write it out as a murder or a suspicious death until we have a suspect? Accidental shooting? Potentially self inflicted?

I would not be surprised if the murder rate reduction is significantly attributable to changes in statistical reporting. I know a few cities that play games with the numbers even on murders.

> In your opinion [...] was it all faked?

Please don't flamebait. The poster is talking about year-on-year changes in a neighborhood, not decade-on-decade changes in a whole country. The relevance of personal experience is drastically higher in the first case.

But I think it's worth noting that "crime is rising" and "crime is not rising" tend to be aliases for the real opinions: "crime is too high" and "crime is not too high".

It's all real.

Violent crimes had a multi-decade drop. SF is a very localized anomaly in regards to property crimes.

Definitely not localized.

Los Angeles and New York to name two other prominent cities, are drowning in an epic ongoing crime wave.

SF, LA, NYC all have the same malfunction in terms of city governance.

LA -

LA Mag, July 2021: "‘It’s a Puzzle’: Experts Are Trying to Figure Out What’s Causing L.A.’s Crime Wave"

A puzzle. Experts. Ha ha ha ha. Ha. Bullshit.

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/crime-in-los-angeles/

NYC -

"NYPD Announces Citywide Crime Statistics for May 2021"

"For the month of May 2021, overall index crime in New York City rose 22% compared with May 2020, driven by a 46.7% increase in robbery (1,182 v. 806) and a 35.6% increase in grand larceny (2,848 v. 2,101). Felony assault saw a 20.5% increase compared to May 2020 (1,979 v. 1,643), and shooting incidents increased to 173 v. 100 in May 2020 (+73%)."

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0603/nypd-citywide-cri...

Some of that is Covid reductions in 2020 (year over year comps), and some of it is still up considerably over 2019 figures. Murders in May were up 100% vs 2019 for example, burglaries were up around 17%. Felony assaults were up slightly vs 2019. Grand larceny was up about 25% vs 2019.

Is there a reason May 2021 should be particularly instructive vs year-to-date (YTD) for NYC? [1] has murders down 1.3% (299 vs 303) and burglaries down 24% YTD. Felony assault is up 5%, but overall crime is down 0.9%. It's definitely a stretch to say NYC is "drowning in an epic ongoing crime wave", given those numbers.

[1] https://compstat.nypdonline.org/2e5c3f4b-85c1-4635-83c6-22b2...

That’s how it works online. You may be trusted by people you know in person, but here you’re just another random stranger, and we don’t know where you live anyway. Don’t take it personally.

Creating trusted data is a social process that many forums aren’t designed to facilitate.

From 1993: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_know...

Humans like having justifications for their actions. We prefer the tool that can do 5 things to the tool that can only do 2. We like charts and graphs because we can use them to justify our policy positions. The trouble, as always, is that when you rely too much on metrics then the metrics become the target instead of the real thing (Goodheart's law). It makes you wonder how many (economics and sociology )studies exist to provide support for policy rather than further science.

It's almost like training an ML algorithm for the first time, it'll almost always find a bug in your fitness measurement instead of actually solving the problem.

Shoplifting is at record lows. Shoplifting is at record highs. Ah, forced perspective.

Baltimore, too

But the nice neighborhoods are hiring private security and in some cases threatening tax revolt

In The Wire, this is called juking the stats.

"Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels."

--Prez

That is a bad idea. It leads to vigilantism, or even worse, local organized crime steps in with attendant protectionism racketeering.

With the American System each year failing a larger and larger percentage of the population, while the upper elites continue to hoard wealth and starve the government, then it makes more and more poor people turn to illegal means to make money.

Much like drug gangs in the inner city. However this will also turn into the nasty spiral of gang-controlled neighborhoods chasing out legit economic activity and becoming even more poor.

What we need is a decent civil society. But America is an oligarchy and they've figured out how to use social media to block any meaningful populist progressive reform by organizing a sufficient opposition with astroturfing and fake news.

Yep, but if the police aren't going to do anything I find it hard to blame the people in SF Chinatown who started doing their own patrols: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-Chinatown-patr...

Do you think the government is starved? At what level of spending would it not be starved?

The government is incompetent at protecting people. Call the police and you'll see how it goes. And this is happening while the government is spending 13B per year. I wonder, where does the money go, if basic services are not provided?

I'd rather spend my money on a network of competing private protection companies if I didn't have to pay taxes for the police. Once the system is in place you can create all sort of charity based options - or tax funded, if you like the idea of forcefully stealing money from citizens' profit - to grant protection to those who can't afford it.

> I'd rather spend my money on a network of competing private protection companies if I didn't have to pay taxes for the police.

I'd prefer to fix the cops rather than sign up for a MetaCops subscription in my burbclave.

That looks like a Snow Crash reference (Neal Stephenson). Absolutely worth a re-read if you want to explore this scenario.

Edit: spelling

Unintentional consequences of the California three strikes law perhaps? Prosecutors unwilling to hand out mandatory 25 year sentences for petty theft?

Nice catch actually

This is not how the three-strike law works. You don't get a life sentence for petty theft.

Under Penal Code section 667(e), you can receive a life term if you are convicted of a serious or violent felony AND you have twice before been convicted of serious and violent felonies. See https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

That is how the law works after it was amended in 2012.[1] From the time of adoption in 1994 until 2012, even relatively minor crimes could result in a life sentence.[2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/us/california-convicts-ar...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-archives-steven-bell-the-bic...

You can do the same thing in education by closing down magnets schools and lowering the bar for everyone...

You don't even have to close them. Just remove merit-based admission, in the name of equity.

Then, because many students won't be able to keep up, the 'magnet' school will lower standards.

Corporations want taxes cut to nothing and complain when the public doesn’t want to protect their private property.

Funny how that works.

I notice it’s WSJ complaining.

More “government is inept” sentiment to justify private armies.

This is Sf, California. Hardly a bastion of small government.

If we stop labeling lots of things crimes, then of course crime rates go way down.

I think it's okay to mention the effect Amazon is having without blaming them. Ultimately online person-to-person trading is making fencing items easier and the people buying probably don't know they are purchasing stolen items. Amazon isn't the thesis, but it is disrupting the stolen goods market in the same way automoboles and highways lead to a spike in bank robbery.

I grew up in a poor area and we had a neighborhood fence. Let's call him 'Casey' since that was his name. Everyone knew Casey was selling stolen items and there was sort of a joke in the town about getting a 'Casey discount'. It sounds like Casey is probably operating an Amazon store now.

This has been flea markets and yard sales for decades though.

If each item had a unique id. And the stores could indicate unique ids that are stolen. The. Amazon & eBay could monitor and prevent stolen merchandise

Everything is easy if you assume a panopticon.

We already have the panopticon, we might as well get some fucking benefits from it.

As it is I'm paying both for hard drives in Utah for the NSA to store my contacts and photos and track logs, then again (formerly) for iCloud to do it a second time. It's inefficient.

You could probably get some milage with just a local store id and date on the box. If you want to get cute you could change the pill stamp.

A simpler way — just put all merchandise behind the glass. Any touching only with supervision of a store manager.

Sadly a lot of the more risky chains do this pretty regularly. I was in a best buy a few years ago where almost everything was behind glass. I wonder what that does to the minds of locals shopping and feeling like they're always under lock and key. It can't be healthy.

Also requires more staff to get the goods to the customer. It used to be normal for everything in a store to be behind the counter, and you got served. But self service is cheaper for the store, unless/until we reach a tipping point regarding thefts.

For many customers that eliminates the only advantage of shopping at a brick & mortar store. If you have to ask store staff for everything then it's easier to shop online.

Cities are destroying their own business districts and losing sales tax revenue by refusing to enforce shoplifting laws.

Then you need more staff.

I was trying to buy some allergy spray at CVS, and couldn't get anyone to unlock the case. So I left and ordered it online from Costco, at 1/3 the price.

Stores can become large vending machines with minimal staff

And what if the manager sees me put it in my pocket and walk out. Police still arent coming.

If it's actually organized crime, then they can be prosecuted under RICO statutes, which allows for much stronger sentencing than shoplifting ever would have. Robbery is one of the 35 crimes included under the "racketeering" umbrella.

Gotta be felonies though right?

I'm concerned about lawlessness, but if the only alternative is that $950 theft is a _felony_ that's messed up. This seems more like a case of not being able to deal with crime than lax sentencing.

Nobody will risk prison for $950 of stuff. If you make it basically a ticket, then you can easily get dozens of people to be able to steal a meaningful amount of stuff.

This is patently false, do you think people didn't go to prison prior to the law change? In fact, so many people were risking prison time for petty theft that is what led to enacting the law in first place to deal with the overcrowding in the state prison system, as summed up in this layman article: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299

> overcrowding in the state prison system

and so our solution is to change the law, instead of dealing with whatever is causing people to steal in the first place.

Theft is a grey area between non-violence and violence, I'd rather we deal with the root causes rather than just making it less of a crime.

If murders were overcrowding prisons, i doubt many people would be calling for reduced murder sentencing (although im sure some would)

The “root causes” of theft (and most crime) is social breakdown. It’s not poverty or need—or you’d expect far more crime in say India than in the US and you don’t actually see that.

If you stole $950 from me, I'd want it handled as a felony. Or if a misdemeanor, that you at least got jail time (after giving my money back). I do not want people thinking they can steal with impunity. Otherwise, can I have all of the tax dollars I've spent on law enforcement returned now please?

There should be a protest movement that steals $949 worth of stuff from the front garden of elected reps until it changes

0.96 sq.ft of manicured grass?

People will risk prison for a lot less than $950. Chicago isn't San Francisco, and if you're caught stealing a weed-whacker out of a garage, the police will mess up your year. People still break into my garage. I don't think felony sentencing has really any impact on these kinds of crimes; all it does is stuff prisons full of hopeless people.

That's not to say there isn't a policing solution to this problem! Just that dialing up consequences isn't it.

A simple solution is that the amount should be be based on the value stolen by the entire organization. RICO laws work much the same way with the mafia.

So, if your crew stole $10,000 worth of stuff over the past year, you’d be looking at a $10k theft charge even if you individually only stole $50 of merchandise.

A misdemeanor can still get up to 6 to 12 months in jail depending on if it is a gross misdemeanor or an aggravated misdemeanor, so I’m not sure I buy the theory that the downgrade from felony in 2014 is why these shoplifters are not prosecuted.

Not to downplay the seriousness of theft, but there's something to be said about the scale. A few people working in an uncoordinated fashion is a crime problem; a structured group essentially working in symbiosis with a retailer's systems (and its blindspots) sounds more like a system design issue on the community and company level. Why do these people need or even want to steal so much? How can a company sustain these kinds of losses? It seems like there are inefficiencies to consider from several vantage points.

One of my observations coming from Bangladesh, where policing is pretty inadequate, is that criminal law is really there to prevent the growth of organized crime. So you have to think about crime as a system not in terms of individuals. Harsh punishment may not deter a given criminal. But it may well make it hard to recruit dozens of low level people to engage in low value illegal activity that adds up to something significant.

That doesn't seem to be working so well with drugs. We've filled prisons with people engaged in low level illegal activity but we don't seem to have made any dent in illegal drugs. In fact, probably the opposite.

Well, looks at Japan and Korea for a counter example. There is much less prosecution of low level drug crimes now and an increase in the amount of fatal overdoes from illegal drugs

That just means that it’s hard to regulate criminal activity where the “victim” (buyer) is a voluntary participant.

But laws like RICO—which allows low level goons to be held liable for the whole enterprise’s crimes—absolutely decimated the Mafia.

The difference is that drugs are a victimless crime. Vast networks can operate outside the law, because no one has any incentive to defect. Outside extensive and ubiquitous surveillance, it’s virtually impossible to disrupt a disciplined drug distribution network. Maybe you get a few lucky hits here or there from random traffic stops or the like, but it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

In contrast victim crimes like theft create a huge surface area of vulnerability. Every time the crime is committed, by definition the criminals are interacting with an adversary who’s extremely motivated to collaborate with law enforcement. Victim based criminal networks are basically unscalable and extremely short-lived for this reason. Unless the political classes are complicit and refuse to let law enforcement do their job of protecting victims.

This is basic supply and demand. Supply side enforcement for drugs is unlikely to be successful. Increasing the enforcement only raises the reward for doing it eventually as the market dictates someone will step in to fill the role as long as supply demands it.

On the other hand the reality is that there is a limited supply of drug users. Demand side enforcement could end the "war" quickly.

Enforcement of sellers is dumb, people selling drugs isn't the problem. It's their usage that's what we want to stop so the enforcement should be on that side.

Not very limited. In my country basically everyone uses drugs. It's a "work hard play hard" mentality.

And no you can't prosecute buyers. They are white middle class people.

That would work if humans were rational and intelligent.

We have 20 year old people who end up in jail for life because they assassinated someone. It's insane, they're doing it for just 20000 euro!

The fact that Amazon will fence stolen goods for a thief is absolutely part of the story. Used to be a whole criminal enterprise to be able to make money off of stolen goods. Now, anyone can start shoplifting and turn that into cash through FBA. If you can find someone selling something for cheaper, you can turn around and sell it online via Amazon FBA. Turns out, stealing is a great way to drive down costs (assuming no morals). There's absolutely a wider societal discussion to be had, but lowering the bar on how to make cash via shoplifting deserves some recognition as well.

That's nothing new, flea markets and yard sales have been and still are wide open to fence goods. I would say Amazon FBA is actually upping the bar on selling stolen goods its kind of a lot of work. Plus you have to pay FBA fees and the Amazon commissions.

"Pawnshop" is the wrong word. A "Pawnshop" takes your goods for collateral and loans you money. A "fence" is somebody who helps thieves sell stolen goods.

A pawnshop might be a front for fencing, but Amazon doesn't function as a pawnshop at all.

[This comment was a reaction to the title of this post, which was fortunately changed.]

I’m actually surprised no-one has set up an online pawnshop, Klarna meets eBay.

Shipping costs make this probably a bad idea.

You would have to do it as a social marketplace. You could post the items you want to pawn and local independent 'shops' could offer the item. Essentially, a reverse Craigslist with pawn dynamics backed by eBay style profiles and feedback.

That sounds like a good idea tbh.

It would be way too easy to scam them. Pawnshops need to validate the quality of the item and determine if it’s legit. Most Pawnshops will also sell on ebay.

This is exactly what people said about eBay, no?

How can I put this. The clientele who are using eBay is not quite the same as Pawnshops. I’ve seen someone get off a city bus with a massive TV heading into the pawnshop. I doubt the person owned the TV and the pawnshop was known as a fence. It had a walk up after hours window that was open late. Although it’s much more common for homeless people to have phones these days than when I saw this occur. Junkies will find junk that’s for sure.

I thought pawn shops were places you could sell random stuff and buy random stuff, never knew they loaned money!

When you "pawn" an item, you get a short term loan with your item as collateral. If you don't pay back the loan they sell your item.

With interest, of course.

It's the oldest form of credit, the collateralized loan.

100%. Pawnshops are basically high interest collateral loan shops. This is saying that Amazon is a fencing operation. But then again this has been a major use for eBay and similar as well.

They're not great places to take stolen goods either, at least not generically, for anything with a serial number or distinct characteristics. Every item that get's pawned or sold in a store goes into a searchable database like LeadsOnline [0]. My family owns a number of pawn shops and we got a very low number of stolen items, the most common was someone stealing from family.

[0] https://www.leadsonline.com/main/index.php

Mods, please correct headline.

This hardly a story about Amazon. It's a story of how Northern California's choice not to prosecute theft has resulted in a massive increase in criminal activity.

That CVS has to privately hire security in the face of $10 million/year of goods being brazenly looted out of its stores has little to do with any Amazon policy and more to do with the policies adopted by local district attorneys.

The clickbait/bias just gets more and more brazen.

100% this.

I wonder if the savings to society for police/court time is worth the increased cost of goods from shops paying for their own security? Will this become another barrier to entry for small businesses?

Can you link to some sources on this?

edit: I'd seen this mentioned recently, but hadn't realised it was a long running culture war thing so it had already been discredited by research years ago:

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

That's 2018. Wr're here in 2021 watching videos of stores being actively raided.

Have you got any videos of statistical trends or other evidence that what you believe is actually true? Or are we just working from viral anecdata?

> According to federal data, adults with substance-abuse disorders make up just 2.6 percent of the total population but 72 percent of all jail inmates sentenced for property crimes. Addicts are 29 times more likely to commit property crimes than the average American. Furthermore, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics found, “[39 percent of jail inmates] held for property offenses said they committed the crime for money for drugs”—the most common single motivation for crime throughout the justice system.

In other news, the Sacklers got away with making Billions from creatimg addicts.

Just one more reason why we should be providing legal drugs to addicts, instead of feeding the enormous black market.

Walgreens and Target and other retailers are shutting down stores and changing the hours so they close earlier. Presumably they’re not doing that because they watched a viral video.

I've worked in retail before (walmart) as a 3rd shift stocker, ages ago.

Never once would I even consider saying anything to a suspected thief. In fact, I walked away from at least 2 times where I knew people were destroying the spider-alarms on electronics in the pets aisle. It is not worth my personal safety in saying anything, especially for someone making $9/hr.

Maybe that's the wrong approach. But it's not my stuff, its not my role I was hired in as, and not worth any personal injury I might receive. I will intentionally give a blind eye to petty or professional retail theft. Let security deal with it.

Wake me when wage theft is prosecuted anywhere near as seriously as shoplifting. Both have been estimated to cost the economy around $40 billion per year in the US. (Simply search “shoplifting cost in us” or “wage theft cost in us” and find your favorite estimate. They’re surprisingly close.)

> Wake me when wage theft is prosecuted anywhere near as seriously as shoplifting

Given the article is about the effects of not prosecuting shoplifting, time to wake up?

The article also describes some companies forming their own quasi-police departments staffed with former cops.

This country is in no danger of prosecutors around the country failing to prosecute shoplifting. But the country is in danger of these quasi-police forces extending their reach. There are people posting here working on automated checkout systems which will absolutely be used to perform more general intelligence... either for the company's or The Company's purposes.

Also... are we to believe that organized crime rings are a problem that the courts are unable to deal with because of some meddling prosecutor? Loss from retail shipping was one of the mafia's prime rackets! Jimmy Hoffa was the IBT president!

Large numbers without a comparison are difficult to understand. Is 10M a large or small number in this context?

CA has 1,180 CVS pharmacies. [0] Northern CA has 40% of CA pop. [1] Assuming regular distribution of CVSes in CA, there are 472 in Northern CA. 10M is 21k/store. Is that a lot? Not certain.

0. https://www.scrapehero.com/largest-pharmacies-in-the-us/

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_California

How much is it DAs vs cops just not wanting to do their job to prove what they said would happen is true?

Cops don’t always arrest based on the law, but what they feel like doing. See Oregon where they decided not to police proud boy protests and tend to arrest anti-white supremacist type protestors much more.

How much is it the cops found they can prove their own point? If I make a bet that I’ll get last in a race, I’ll run slower. If one claims some policy will slow them down and They don’t actually have an incentive to win, Then there’s a chance they’ll slow down to be right so people will do what They say in the future.

What incentive do cops have to arrest or charge theft when cops keep saying it’s CA laws that are causing thefts to rise? They can make themselves seem right by not arresting people.

The DAs literally don't prosecute people. It's not the cops.

My leo friends have said its morally wrong to arrest someone for something they won't be prosecuted for.

There's reasonable evidence that this is how the Sicilian Mafia started: lack of effective state enforcement of laws and property rights... Creating a situation where private security forces arise, offering protection from gangs of thieves and perhaps protection from the security force itself. Obviously, this is not what cvs is doing, but lack of effective law enforcement can lead to unusual and unexpected "solutions."

> choice not to prosecute theft

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

"The judicial branch of California explains on its page about Prop 47 that the new law “reclassifies certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.” Thanks to Prop 47, shoplifting offenses involving property valued at less than $950 are prosecuted as misdemeanors, not felonies, but they are still prosecuted. Such offenses are punishable by up to six months in county jail."

Get your facts straight before spreading disinformation.

Also worth noting that California's felony threshold is still much lower than most states (i.e. it's easier to get charged with a felony), including conservative ones that are usually "tough on crime." And the Bay Area's cost of living is higher as well.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/10/felony-threshol...

That's a nice unattributed quote you've got there. Now for some actual data that say the exact opposite:

"The numbers show the prosecution rate for shoplifting cases involving a misdemeanor petty theft charge for a loss of $950 or less fell under [San Francisco DA Chesa] Boudin, from 70 percent under former District Attorney George Gascon in 2019 to 44 percent in 2020 and 50 percent as of mid-June 2021.

Prosecutors filed charges in 116 of 266 cases presented by police involving petty theft in 2020, compared to 450 of 647 cases in 2019, according to the data provided by the District Attorney’s Office."

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/data-shows-chesa-boudin-pros...

Using data from two years without accounting for any confounders (a pandemic??) has approximately zero statistical rigor. Have you:

1. Considered the prosecution rate in other cities?

2. Controlled for other independent variables that might affect the prosecution rate?

3. Performed a statistical test to determine whether the decrease in prosecution rate is within normal historical variance?

If the answer to any of those questions are no (which, from the article, they all are no) your claim is not intellectually honest.

> "In an interview with The Examiner, Boudin said the decline in prosecution rates for shoplifting cases is a reflection of the “difficult choices” his office had to make during the pandemic, when the Hall of Justice closed most of its courtrooms and city officials decided to largely empty the jails, in part to prevent an outbreak."

That's nice.

The problem is crime is skyrocketing and people who think they can fix it just by busting heads with more cops really haven't a clue. The increase of crime is a symptom of wicked inequality that is perpetuated and even cherished by the upper class. This is just a side-effect of greed. More cops won't solve it.

There are quite a lot of folks in this thread claiming that they are not prosecuted at all in SF. As in police don’t even bother showing up. I’m not living there so I’m not sure what the on-the-ground situation is, do you mean that this is not the case?

That's nice. Now, tell me, how many misdemeanor thefts has the San Francisco County DA actually prosecuted since he's been in office?

It doesn't matter what the judicial branch says on paper. What matters is the process. In California, the decision to prosecute a misdemeanor must happen within 24 hours of that misdemeanor happening, otherwise it won't be pursued? Reclassifying something as a misdemeanor, when combined with other policy choices around misdemeanors, means that a fraction of them are actually prosecuted. So, you get your facts straight, please.

Any data to back up your claim (that rate of theft is positively caused by "less" prosecution)? Would like to see an analysis that controls for confounders as well (like effects from a pandemic).

A friend of mine is a manager at a Safeway. He says a typical store might lose six figures worth of product in a year. In a bad neighborhood it's not uncommon to lose over a million dollars a year.

They hire security personnel, but people figure out that a) even when security catches you, they are not allowed to restrain you and b) the police do not respond to shoplifters (in certain jurisdictions they are not allowed to.

The stores are responsible for the cost of missing inventory - they credit it back to the manufacturers. Stores already run tight margins, so this cost ends up getting paid by reduced headcount at stores (except for security, if it's bad enough) and directly in prices.

And this is in the grocery space, where there's very little secondary market for the stolen goods!

I noticed my local Home Depot has done away with the security tag scanners at the front of the store, apparently in favor of a cluster of new cameras above all the exits. I wonder if we're headed for just having an AI watch everyone all the time in the store like the automatic-purchase grocery stores Amazon was setting up. Either that or they discovered that it was better for their bottom line to put real security around the power tools than bust people for stealing trivial things.

Ultimately high value things will get secured behind a clerk where you take a picture card of what you want to them.

Stores will use cameras and AI to build a comprehensive case against someone or group and then notify the police. That will be enough for a warrant etc...

Probably a startup or two in this space. I am sure home depot or CVS will invest in your series A.

Interestingly I was in Best Buy and this is what they’ve done.

From a month ago, they're working on some new methods where power tools won't work until they're activated at the register.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28035458

Slightly adjacent, fighting credit card disputes feels the same way. A company can prove without a doubt that it's a legitimate charge, only to have the case go to pre-arbitration; which in many cases is too costly to fight without certainty of winning.

Some goods serve as an alternative currency, like bottles of Tide laundry detergent:

https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/...

My wife introduced me to the world of underground baby formula. It's frankly shocking how many people she knows who make money off of it (either shoplifting, Medicaid fraud, or as a way of converting WIC into cash).

I would love to hear more about this, particularly the Medicaid fraud angle.

- get baby diagnosed with formula allergy

- get Medicaid to pay for supply of $30-40/can hypoallergenic formula

- sell hypoallergenic formula for $0.90 on the dollar

- pocket cash

Eventually all stores are going to require a membership or deposit before letting you enter, like Costco.

I mean, you can just run into a Costco, grab something, and run out. No one can stop you.

In Costco's favor, they don't have a lot of valuable things that you can just walk with that aren't just a cardboard voucher.

Costco sells jewelry and laptops.

Yes, but are they where people can just pick them up, or are they in locked cabinets?

> In a bad neighborhood it's not uncommon to lose over a million dollars a year.

Then the store closes, then you get a food desert.

Followed by a smug article decrying the entire situation from some smug blogger.

Not usually the entire situation - usually just lamenting greedy corporate fatcats rather than the literal inability to maintain a business based on the margins, volume, and shrinkage.

Why don’t these greedy wealth hoarders simply run their business at a loss? Are profits really everything to these fatcats? /s

Why are they not allowed to restrain a shoplifter? In Germany, that's covered by the "anyone's" right: if you see someone commit a crime, you can detain/restrain them until the police arrives. Some restrictions apply, like for example having to watch the crime yourself etc but for shop security staff it's enough rights

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festnahme#Jedermann-Festnahme

They're allowed in a legal sense, but the store often orders security not to physically intervene because of the potential legal liability if either party is injured.

It's not necessarily that they can't legally do so, but it's against the policy of every single store. If you do so as an employee, you will most likely get fired. No amount of merchandise is worth risking an employees life. Healthcare is a mess over here, but we do generally have that part right.

Restraining a shoplifter could lead to liability issues for the employer. For example, if the shoplifter injures the employee, there's a workplace injury that goes on the OSHA record, you have an employee who is out for some amount of time, it could increase insurance rates, and it could lead to the employee getting shot if the shoplifter were particularly violent.

Additionally, if the shoplifter gets injured, they may sue the store for the injury they sustained.

Most of the US does allow a citizens arrest to be performed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_arrest

Who's gonna detain some meth head with knife for minimum wage and risk getting killed for poverty wages?

Honestly a lot of security guards would have fun subduing a guy like this (as heroically as possible), and that's why the stores have policies against it.

There’s zero incentive for anyone to do so. Best case scenario they get a pat on the back. Worst case scenario they get killed or permanently injured/disabled. There’s no reason to put your life on the line for a corporation that will put nothing on the line for you.

In the US, we generally have "Shopkeeper's privilege", which lets shopkeepers detain a person reasonably suspected of shoplifting while an investigation happens. Usually that involves just calling the police, or taking their picture and telling them they're banned for life, and then letting them go.

I think GP knows shopkeeper's privilege exists and is asking why stores often don't let their employees use it.

I think they know it exists in their legal tradition in Germany, but not necessarily that there was an analog in the US.

Exactly, I didn't know it's also legal in the US. Even more so confuses me - why hire security at all, if they aren't doing their job?

In Germany, you'd fire the security if they wouldn't go after thieves. Also, there are no liability problems... But then, people with guns or knifes are very rare.

Boosting has been going on since the 90's in NYC. Back in the day i used to work on 34th/7th ave in NYC s selling leather jackets in a rinky-dink store about 500 square fee. The boosters came in groups some from Brooklyn some from uptown. They would boost across the street from Macy's and sell the stolen goods right across the street or on the streets. They would go store to small shops and sell Georgio armani , versace to the employees who worked there and to tourists on the streets ( those brands where hot back then) some boosters even started taking orders,. there were independent operators( not with the pack) and others who would roll with the pack. Each booster specialized in boosting a product. Some would only do designer clothing while others would lift electronics and they would sell to tourists on the street or store clerks working in shops, I even bought a nice Armani suite from them one day. They had figured out how to beat all security alarms in macy's and someone then figured out that you could return what you stole from Macy’s without a receipt during the holidays so boosters then started to return what they stole back to Macy’s and Macy’s would cut them a check for it. This was around 1995. Some boosters tried to lift stuff from the store I was working in and I had to go and stop them , one time we had throw down right in front of our store to get the leather jackets back. I even had to go run after a few. Macy’s security guards can’t do jack. The cops had more important things todo I guess. The boosters would grab and bag and just run out the door and into the train and vanish. They had some aluminum foil around the bag they put the stuff in so the alarms did not go off. They would go downtown. Uptown and after the city got to HOT they started going to the suburban malls. It was like a syndicate. I guess it’s still happening now.

I worked at a mall in the 90's in two different stores. One was a clothing store, and 'home shoppers' made up the majority of the thefts.

The way it works, is you 'place an order', and someone from the theft ring steals what you want, and in a few days you get your items at a discount from the 'home shopper'.

I remember my dad would buy some random clothing items from a friend of a friend who had things in the trunk of his car. I never thought much of it.

When I worked at JC Penny I then saw how it worked. You'd have random individual shoplifters (they'd leave all the tags and stuff from the clothes in the bathrooms or dressing rooms), or you'd have multiple shoplifters come in at once, fill their carts and then dash out the door, getaway car waiting for them.

Store security couldn't do much, if you tackled the people you'd get fired, so the best defense was to jam up the automatic doors with empty shopping carts, that way they could only leave with what they could fit in their hands.

It wasn't much different at the electronics store I worked at afterward. PC add-in cards would end up missing, empty boxes found in the appliances on the other end of the store, sliced open so they could be fished out the bottom. There go the new $300 3Dfx cards...

And the organized shoplifters came in at night, just before close. You'd have 5-6 people come in, and all head for the CD aisle. We'd page for customer assistance, and anyone still working in the store would head over. They'd fill their coats with CD's and again run out the door, getaway car waiting.

All you can do is get them on camera, record the description or license plate of the car, and let the police know, and let the other stores know. Our internal email system had a ongoing thread of the shoplifters they'd seen lately, because they would hit every store in the state.

Back in the old days, you asked for items the clerk got them and you paid. There was too much theft in the old days for open shelves. Now we leave it open and trust - which has now been massively abused has expanded to fill that void. The clerks were labor intensive, but the similar robots to used in Amazon warehouses could serve people at a screen, the order assembled, paid and then handed to the client - much like online order and deliver - but in person. These huge costs will force this. Small stores will go to the old one at a time model service - most do this with cigarettes and liquor. It is a fine tuning of the retail chain that I feel will inexorable be forced upon us.

Amazon's co-mingling of inventory facilitated large-scale theft by enabling stolen goods to be sold along-side legitimately sourced items. One has to wonder: at what point does Amazon's reluctance to improve supply-chain integrity venture into the territory of aiding and abetting crime?

One possible scenario: more and more stores like pharmacies where there aren't as many people "window shopping" or shopping for fun anyway, therefore not much spontaneous shopping to lose out on, will become pickup-only places where you cannot physically enter the store, you can only buy online and pick up at the window. It would probably require less square footage and less direct labor.

Going to CVS is a timesink now that I have to walk around and ask employees to open cases for me.

Why can't they use vending machines?

Hang on, we’ve had literally thousands of years with stores where you could pick up an item and run away, but don’t.

There is now are organized shoplifting crime groups, and your solution is to design specialized vending machines for teeth whitening strips, phone chargers, etc?

I’m not saying it is a net good to deploy violence on poor people. But don’t you suppose that society would benefit overall if there were physical and clear legal consequences to shoplifting?

Or do you really want the world to use vending machines for everything? Aren’t you concerned about climate change? Where do you suppose all those vending machines would come from what how are they powered?

I found vending machines on amazon, problem solved

Initially I was considering this would be farming more senseless production to China where you can feel good about the pollution because it isn’t seen, it isn’t tallied, and they won’t conform to economic policies designed to curb it. Ignoring the potential for slave labor and poor working conditions. Then you have the shipping of vending machines from China to all over the USA. Power, parts, these are made cheaply to fail so probably while more replacements than parts.

All to treat 99% of people like criminals because we lack the conviction to actually do something about a shoplifting problem.

But I have changed my mind. I was not aware vending machines are available on Amazon.

These aren't "poor people." They make a good tax-free living from stealing.

Online order for pickup is close, at least if you can wait 6-8 hours for the order to process.

Had this same experience with a Walmart a week ago, btw -- it took me 15 minutes to find one item I was looking for, and by the time I realized that it was behind a glass door I'd already seen the lines of 8 people waiting for an employee to help them get what they wanted. At that point, I did the math on sunk vs further costs, set down the rest of my purchase, and went on to pay twice as much elsewhere and consider it a bargain.

The pandemic really created conditions that helped me realize how much of retail shopping is a waste of time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

"The retail executives and police officers emphasized the role of organized crime in the thefts. And they told the supervisors that Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950, had emboldened thieves."

What’s the point of police or security guards?

When the prosecutor refuses to prosecute anyone, there's no point at all.

Maybe spend those millions on lobbying state and local governments to address the reasons this has become a problem in the first place. Also, all either does is make the products we have to purchase that much more expensive since, you know, the retailers are passing those expenses to customers.

Most of it is fabricated and fudged statistics as part of publications catering to corporate PR and the pro-surveillance narrative anyway:

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-organized-crim...

If the # of crimes goes up 10x or 20x, and the police department stays the same size, you really think they are going to triage chasing down all the petty crime?

Right before the pandemic the gov't run liquor stores in Ontario were being robbed of stock in the middle of the day. Staff called police and then stood back. If police bothered to appear it was usually hours later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_t5WHvPv1g

Possibly organized boosting, but as soon as word spread it became wildly popular for a few weeks.

What the could do is engage and pay there employees a living way and say promote stewardship of the neighborhoods the do business in?

https://twitter.com/mkonikov/status/1433413878285848578

In my experience retailers are lying in a bed of their own making. They have had more than a decade to implement RFID based UPCs and have steadfastly resisted it at every turn because of the few pennies it adds in the supply chain. While not perfect RFID allows for much better security controls that the status quo. Instead they continue to underinvest in adequate technology skills and will just rely on shady third party, privacy destroying, false positive generating facial recognition.

How would RFID help?

The issue is that when they do catch someone shoplifting the stores do not want to apprehend them themselves for various legitimate reasons such as safety of their employees and customers, liability if they make mistake, and police that will not come and arrest the caught shoplifter (either they have too much other more serious crime to deal with, or the prosecutor's office won't prosecute).

RFID tags would not address any of that.

Stores are switching to self checkout. Clearly the math works out for them but it makes stealing a lot easier.

> Clearly the math works out for them but it makes stealing a lot easier.

It makes outsider theft easier, but it also reduces the number of staff needed, and the majority of theft (from my understanding from people who have worked in Loss Prevention, the overwhelming majority) from retail establishments is insider theft.

Could a setup like with Amazon Go stores help here? Let in only customers with a verified account.

Maybe. That would be the last place I shop, though.

The shoplifter gangs will just jump over the turnstiles. I imagine any store impervious to this attack wouldn't meet fire safety requirements.

Huh? Have you never seen turnstiles with tall plastic barriers? It would take quite a lot of strength to jump over 4–5 feet.

Ive gone to many retail stores at night an they have almost no one working there they are victims of efficiency and the people working there dont care about the store they are not paid enought to care ... if your making 7 dollars an hour in a retail store in Boston you by default hate your employer

    retail theft accounts for around
    $45 billion in annual losses

Is that in the USA alone?

Anyhow. Another 45 billion reasons ecommerce and crypto currencies will grow.

You cannot steal a product from a website. And you cannot make fake payments with Bitcoin.

I would hope so or expect so. How is this news surprising.

California is racing to the bottom, isn't it?

There's an irony to the top comment on an article about organized shoplifting being a link to archive.is to get around the paywall. Especially given all the "tough on crime" and "rule of law" talk in the comments.

Reading the article doesn't make it disappear from the website. If I went to a bookstore, read one of their books in the store, then put it back on the shelf and left without buying anything, would you consider that to be shoplifting too?

No, obviously not. But if you scanned the book, put it on archive.is and invited all the visitors to Hacker News to read it I think that might be copyright infringement. IANAL so setting the precise legality aside, in terms of economic harm (which many here have brought up regarding shoplifting), how is this different?

If I just told archive.is the title of a book, and they went to get it and scanned it in and put it on their website, they might be guilty of copyright infringement, but I don't think I would be.

I thought that was EBay?

remember when the police used to do it before they got defunded. now the richest corporations can buy private police to protect them and small business are left without any defense

UBI might fix this. Criminals, as a rule, aren't doing it for lulz.

It's like the free speech problem. Don't combat the bad by trying to stamp it out. Combat it by providing a better option.

Wouldn't people just collect UBI AND steal? The article explicitly mentions that most of the people doing this are also receiving state and feral unemployment benefits

If UBI (or feral benefits) fulfilled their needs then I doubt that they would resort to crime.

For some reason, I just don't think the people described in this article are moving millions and millions of dollars of makeup and over-the-counter drugs every year in order to keep their basic needs met.

> Wouldn't people just collect UBI AND steal?

Yes, they would. Great example: Turkish + Arab Clans in Germany. They usually collect benefits, aren't asked to work, and are heavily involved into crime.

Never understood the point of UBI. We have food stamps, welfare, and a wide assortment of government safety net programs. UBI would just be all those things on steroids. Why would hard working people want their tax money going to others who aren't contributing? The whole concept would lead to mass dependency on the government, which is the worst thing that could happen.

"as a rule"?

This appears to be part of a long running PR campaign by large corporations that are happy to lock up poor, mentally-ill and drug-addicted people at the taxpayers expense if it lets them fear monger, while at the same time stealing from their own employees.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/923844907/when-shoplifting-is...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/San-Fr...

There's some telltale signs that people are trying to swap between thefts and violent organized theft in a dishonest way, trying to conflate the two.

They're also using it as cover for closing stores that they were going to close anyway.

Yes i have seen the articles to much if the same content in different places to be spontaneous

Let's suppose there is a real problem with shoplifters effectively being immune from punishment, would you expe t there to be little news coverage?

I don't care if they're rich, poor, mentally-ill, or drug-addicted - if someone breaks the law, there needs to be some sort of punishment. Letting them off is just enabling repeat offense and signaling to other criminals that this behavior is tolerated as we have seen.

s/punishment/response

I think I realized that America is lawless when no one who matters went to jail for torture during the Afghanistan/Iraq wars. Shoplifting is a drop in the bucket compared to that, so I have no sympathy for "tough on crime" rhetoric anymore.

Why would they need "cover for closing stores that they were going to close anyway"? They can basically just close them, and no one's going to stop them or cause a problem. Why would they need "cover"?

They’re already lobbying for more policing and stricter sentencing, this is free PR from a gullible press, who won’t check to see that many of the store closures were previously announced with different reasoning given.

You believe that retailers secretly hate the mentally ill and drug addicts, and are engaging in a decades long nation wide secret conspiracy to get them thrown in prison?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that they probably just don't like people stealing from them.

Are these two things different?

Did the fossil fuel industry take part in a decades long, ongoing conspiracy to deny and downplay the impacts of their pollution (we'll just skip over the wars and revolutions and lead poisoning) or do they just like when people give them money?

I think this is an example of conflating two classes of crime. There are effectively two classes of shoplifter: the professional and the desperate amateur. The activists who wanted the sentencing reduction probably did not have organised gangs in mind. But the gangs are taking advantage of the light rules.

This is something we miss a lot in discussions of crime. For instance, laws against possession exist because of the crimes associated with drug use. People who use drugs who wouldn't otherwise cause any crime are a sort of collateral damage of these rules.

It's often remarked how drug laws are disproportionately enforced against the poor, but I have always regarded that as a feature and not a mistake (as awful as that is for equality under the law). No one really cares about the banker snorting coke because he isn't robbing gas stations to get his fix.

> But the gangs are taking advantage of the light rules.

Not only that, but it incentivizes amateurs to become professionals. Theft becomes a viable career under lax laws. And crime begets poverty, so I suspect this creates quite a few more "desperate amateurs" some of whom will become professionals and so on.

> And crime begets poverty...

Doesn't this get cause and effect backwards? You have no job, no prospects, so you turn to crime. How does the reverse narrative work?

The store can't afford to stay open because of all the crime, so it closes and lays off all its employees, who are now all in poverty.

It’s a cycle. Crime drives away money and poor people are more likely to resort to crime. It’s super difficult to reverse this cycle, which is why we ought to keep a clear berth.

Also, isn't seven years a pretty big lag time between cause and effect here?

Brazen thefts like this have been happening for years around the country. I used to work retail (loong ago) and the store would actively let people walk out with expensive merchandise and do nothing to stop them. So I really doubt the change in law has anything to do with this.

More like 2020 was fucking miserable and goods shortages & unemployment drove people to take up lucrative careers in organized theft.

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