The great American shoplifting freakout | Hacker News Reader

The great American shoplifting freakout

theatlantic.com

18 pointsTerretta18 comments

People stealing stuff is way up, and that's a really really bad thing. The fact that there's a bunch of different crimes for different kinds of stealing, and that sometimes the wrong word gets used, doesn't make it any less bad.

> People stealing stuff is way up

The article says the opposite, that robberies are down and shoplifting is up from 2020 which ”is still not enough to bring the area’s theft rate back up to pre-pandemic levels, which themselves had been dropping for decades.”

The best way to solve this problem in the quickest manner possible is to:

- Jackup the price so that the cheapest item is just above the state law’s minimum threshold for a theft that can be promptly filed by its district attorney.

Then you discount the item by its inverse percentage of its price increase … at the cash register.

- Problem solved.

I severely doubt that would work.

I merely co-opted the current legal framework for protection of merchants.

This is such a weird article. It seems to hyper focus on shoplifting and uses explanation like “oh, that’s armed robbery, not shoplifting”.

Yeah? That’s worse though?

When I read an article like this I remember to ask myself “what does the author want to be true?” Then you can start making sense of it.

Ding Ding Ding! The author is pushing a narrative, not reporting reality.

Yes, that's the point.

Its a common trick to lump things together but highlight one of them that's actually materially smaller to make something seem worse.

e.g. if you wanted to make an event where 1 person died and 20 suffered minor injuries sound even worse you could say "21 people killed or injured" and be technically correct but misleading.

But this article is doing that in reverse. Finding out that miscategorized shoplifting cases were in fact armed robbery, is worse, but author paints it as better.

I’m not sure what you are trying to say, the article does try to separate the types of thefts and dive into the details but my impression was that their discovery was the numbers were not nearly as bad CNN et al have been reporting or implying (and were actually still down from pre-2020 numbers, which had been falling for ages)

Semantic BS in the article but it's The Atlantic so not a surprise.

Akin to AOC's claim "it's not really theft".

This article is sadly a little disjointed in how it articulates the various problems, and I don't live in SF, so it's hard for me to assess the specifics that are being described there, but as someone who lives in NYC where there are similar concerns (and from speaking with police acquaintances) it seems like there are a few things happening:

- "Organized" rings of theft are nothing new - groups of kids (and adults!) figure out that product X are easily acquired, aggregated, and resold and there's a mini-wave of thefts of X - a few years back it was ice cream, Tide detergent has been a thing for a while, etc. These things get sorted out through some combination of the stores making product X harder to get (glass doors, sensors) and police arresting some of the folks responsible, and it drops off quickly.

- Random shoplifting is up a lot - from seeing a lot of this in nyc, it's usually the same thing - random person (often homeless) shuffles into a store, walks to wherever, grabs something, runs on out. A couple of times I've seen a store manager look at someone coming in and say "I just want you to know I'm watching you", and they turn around and head back out

- Bail reform/defund the police is a massive red herring - from speaking with cop friends, while they're annoyed about "defund" and bail reform, there isn't actually any evidence there's any correlation between the two, other that in some cases prosecutors were using bail as a cudgel to keep low-level offenders in jail. The cops in general feel that was a feature, not a bug, despite that not being the point of bail. Otherwise, overtime is up, violent crime has mostly stabilized or gone down, reopening of the homeless shelters have made it easier for homeless people to get indoors which reduces the amount of police interaction with them. The wave of police retirements in nyc were good for everyone - police pensions are dependent on your most recent (or highest?) two years of income, so pandemic + protests mean that lots of cops are going to make more money by retiring last year vs. the coming 4-5 years with budget uncertainty. For the rest of everyone staying, more overtime.

In my neighborhood, the overall response has been for uniformed, on-duty police to be posted in a lot of the stores during high-traffic times. From chatting with managers, it's had a huge benefit. The cops think it's boring duty, but it beats being out in the cold.

All this to say - there's lots of stuff getting stolen, but it doesn't actually impact the businesses besides them locking up more stuff (it's annoying to get toothpase now). There's no grand wave of organized crime, at least any more than there was before. Cops are not "under siege". Everything is fine relative to everything else that's on fire in the world right now.

People seem to be really mad about bail reform, especially in NY, but I don't understand why.

There are always more people than the jail capacity, right? So no matter who is released from jail and makes a news story by doing something awful, they must have been released because someone else appeared to pose a greater risk at the time. It's a tradeoff using the information available at the time.

So saying that bail reform is the problem seems to me to be saying that somehow, ability to pay is a better criterion than more logical reasons for releasing people. Everything online ranting against the reforms seems to just ignore the idea that there's a tradeoff completely.

Unfortunately, the people I know who care about this, while they can tactfully avoid politics if I do, seem beyond a reasoned discussion if I bring it up. They do know something about police work, so possibly they know something I don't.

There are indeed always more people coming into jail, and people going out. The big difference now is that there were many crimes for which the DA office might ask for significant bail that they now cannot. This matters because bail was a mechanism for taking people whom the DA saw as dangerous off the street.

Unfortunately this is not the point of bail, it’s to secure appearance at trial. Using it to keep risky offenders off the street is not part of it.

I don't see why using a combination of risk of fleeing and risk of reoffending to decide on release would be out of line.

I don't think much of appealing to definitions, which it sounds like you are doing - this is what bail is, so this is what bail is.

However, if the DA has less control over the decision, that doesn't seem obviously bad to me? And making bad decisions doesn't seem like it's inherent in the reforms?

> I don't think much of appealing to definitions, which it sounds like you are doing - this is what bail is, so this is what bail is.

Well, I mean, it’s the legal system, so definitions are literally a foundational piece. Bail is defined in state law as money provided by the defendant to secure appearance at trial. If we wanted to define it as “requiring more money than a defendant is able to provide to keep them in jail”, we could change the law.

But it became both, along with an abusive money-making tool for bail bondsmen. Also, prohibitive bail was much more likely to be requested for minority defendants compared to white.

And from my perspective, I agree that the DA having less control over the decision is a good thing. I was just trying to articulate the background and the position of the people who are anti-reform. I’d be in favor of some objective way of assessing risk of short-term reoffending, and then holding people for some limited time period awaiting dispensation of their case, but only if we can figure out a way to mitigate bias.

>Well, I mean, it’s the legal system, so definitions are literally a foundational piece.

Definitions are necessary to understand what a law is saying, I think we both agree. Not being a lawyer, I certainly have noticed that when I look up a law, it tries to define its terms in a precise manner.

Do you have a specific reference for "Bail is defined in state law as money provided by the defendant to secure appearance at trial"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com