A Tiny Number of Shoplifters Commit Thousands of New York City Thefts | Hacker News Reader

A Tiny Number of Shoplifters Commit Thousands of New York City Thefts

nytimes.com

60 pointsasnyder33 comments

The RICO Act is criminally underutilized. Use these 300 street-level knuckleheads to take down the online fences that are orchestrating this whole racket.

eBay already looks like the mafia after that psychotic terrorism campaign against a blogger. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/investigation-ebay-employee...

Put their dons next door to El Chapo and these organized theft rings will be severely disrupted.

Long tail distribution is true with A LOT of different crime categories, no?

"A tiny number of drug-dealers commit thousands of NYC drug deals"

"A tiny number of vandals commit thousands of acts of NYC graffiti"

What is this article supposed to be telling us?

>> What is this article supposed to be telling us?

Put a few people in jail and you can have nice things again?

Other people will step up to fill the void. As long as the costs of crime are low and the rewards are high, people will do it.

Crack down on Amazon for distribution of stolen goods and a lot of these convenience store thefts will stop.

But it’s not like the shoplifter job is full and arresting existing ones opens up a spot.

More like there will be a continuous flux of people entering and leaving the habitual shoplifter role and to keep numbers low you have to keep enforcing.

To some degree, the shoplifter job is full like that. If these guys hit a few stores every week, those stores can't really be hit for the "good" stuff until the next week (or whenever they restock). There are only so many easy stores to hit.

As I understand it, the shoplifting operations in big cities are actually pretty organized and have a constant flux of low-tier thieves, but a few ringleaders who set things up and really do shoplift for a living. It's not inconceivable that if one of these guys is a ringleader and gets arrested that someone will come "fill that position." If they are affiliated with organized crime, they may even have job interviews.

That if you jailed these 327 people, crime would fall dramatically, and particularly in the neighborhoods progressives claim to care about.

That shopkeeper in the Bronx is not exactly Jamie Dimon. Society should try to protect him, and we _choose not to_.

For something like shoplifting imho counseling of these people would be the way to go for best pay-off. And then maybe long-term insight into what causes such pathology.

Agreed though. A choice is being made to not go after the small stuff. The shopkeeper should have the full force of protection, even over a bag of chips.

Much of the high volume shoplifting is actually a business. They ae in it as a job to make money. I don't think counselling would work like it would on a kid who shoplifted some stogies and candy a couple of times.

Are they individuals or is it gangs?

Stealing stuff and selling it through a fence is not a business. It’s organized crime. A racket.

You could effectively argue drug dealers and bookies are running an illegal business, and I would not disagree. They sell (illegal) goods and services to willing participants. The fences (eBay and other co-conspirators) are running a business too.

But shoplifting isn’t a business any more than muggings and “protection rackets” (give me a cut or I break your kneecap) are a business. It’s just violence.

Police don't solve crimes.

That jailing a very small number of naughty people would drastically reduce crime.

I get that. The article doesn’t answer the question of why these laws aren’t enforced when it comes to prolific offenders.

Shoplifting under $1k in NYC is punishable by a jail term of up to 1 year. The NYPD has a 5.5 billion dollar budget, and shoplifting is an absurdly easy crime to solve given that it almost always happens on camera. Prosecutors and judges aren’t going to catch heat for going after people with hundreds of offenses.

The interesting story to me is, what is going on with the mountains of money being shoveled at police and courts?

> The article doesn’t answer the question of why these laws aren’t enforced when it comes to prolific offenders.

Here is an article that does: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/manhattan-da-alvin-brag...

Cops don’t want to work anymore. Their fee-fees are hurt after the 2020 protests, so they’ve been doing a work slowdown. In a sane country, this would lead to mass layoffs and defunding of the police, but somehow the answer in this insane country is to reward the petulant children.

Can you imagine any other profession refusing to work for three years and getting a raise for it? The police are a gang, running a city-wide protection racket. NYC voters even decided it’d be a great idea to put a made man in the mafia in the mayor’s office. That’ll fix crime alright! /s

The pigs are eating all that slop in the trough, getting fatter and lazier. Why would anything change? They keep it up and they’ll get even richer! What kind of idiot rocks the boat when they have a $200k a year job where you can just play on your phone all day? Cops are scum.

This article doesn’t support your statement. It says “ Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said.”

This data suggests they are working and the legal system is letting people go. Are you sure your mental model and generalizations of the police are based on accurate data overall

As someone who lives in New York, this is roughly the story. Our DA has… different priorities at the moment. It’s not so much that police don’t want to make arrests, it’s more that they’re aware that even when they do, the suspect will be out with 0 bail very shortly after. Why bother?

The individual you’re replying to has some pretty strong opinions about police and their “fee-fees (?)” and that anger is showing their comment.

> Why bother?

Because they are paid to bother. Also if they’re in disagreement with DA, re-arresting the culprits will eventually lead to a downfall of type of DA policy and will lead to a change. Sure, there’s another way to get there and that is to let crime fester and pester the general population but again police are paid to intervene not say why bother.

Why bother writing code? Most of it will be discarded shortly after. Why bother having garbagemen? The garbage will just be there next Monday, like clockwork. Why bother doing any job at all? Death is all but certain after 120 years.

What other profession is allowed to behave like a nihilistic teenager? They're paid to do a job. There's always more work to be done in every job. Otherwise, it typically ceases to be a job rather quickly.

What part of New York are you from? You have some really strong opinions on the behavior of our police, I'm curious where you got them from.

There’s a lot going on here, wow. What part of New York do you live in? It seems we’ve had different experiences here with the NYPD. Ending your comment with “___ are scum”, whether you’re talking about gypsies, cops, Albanians, or software engineers isn’t really a good way to make your point seem well thought out or reasonable. If anything, it paints you as someone with some deeply ingrained hatred that’s clouding your ability to express yourself. I’m sure you can do better and I’d encourage you to try.

I see in search results that NYC refunded police in 2021 and 2022

Please don't fulminate on HN, regardless of how right you are, or feel you are.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I forget was the broken windows theory debunked?

Hmmm... It sounds like with 300 jail cells to protect the public, this is an easy problem to fix.

We need a better way to help these people live life without committing crimes.

My suggestion is a type of UBI that is immediate, fair, and would immediately be effective at easing some of the desperation these people must feel.

I propose a tower that drops money. $1 every minute. The price of such a tower in dollars would be just over a half a million dollars per year. It would serve as a tourist attraction, and a way for someone needing a few dollars to get them without begging, without stealing, without stigma. It would put dollars in people's pockets that would be spent at nearby businesses. I don't see a downside.

The town I live in, Pine Bluff Arkansas, has an organization called Go Forward Pine Bluff. They waste so much tax money it's unbelievable, and the things they do don't benefit the people.

I'm fighting them as hard as I can, and I hope to someday build a tower like that in this town.

To some degree, crime is just basic supply and demand. There's a certain amount of demand for crime, driven by loose security, lax enforcement, and easy outlets for stolen goods (who do you think is stocking the cheap deodorant on Amazon?). You aren't going to be able to fight those economic incentives with something like UBI.

Perhaps three hots and a cot?

Pareto principle. 80/20 law.

80% of x is caused by 20% of y.

80% of the sales come from 20% of the salespeople.

80% of the music played comes from 20% of the composers.

80% of the crime is commited by 20% of the people.

And not only that, out of those 20%, the 80/20 law still applies. of the 20% of the people who commit crimes, 80% of those crimes are commited by 20% of the people. And of those 20%, 80% of those are caused by 20% of them.

Same with wealth, music, whatever.

That's why, no matter what, most of the wealth will always be owned by a very small number of people. You can take all the money away from the wealthiest people, and in 50 years, the top 20% will own 80% of the wealth again. It will be a different 20%, but still, 20% will own 80% the wealth again.

It's also if you have a company with employees, 20% of the employees do 80% of the work. So you do NOT want to lose those 20% of the employees who do most of the work.

During the Wild West, those 327 people responsible for thousands of crimes in NYC would not have been allowed to continue operating. In the age of Bonnie and Clyde and Dillinger, repeat offenders (especially violent ones) were taken out of circulation one way or another. In the event of a societal collapse, these 327 would represent a predatory threat to other people and would have to be dealt with. I suspect that only in New York City could these 327 people continue as they have been doing. In certain states, they would already be out of circulation.

It is largely the people who are comfortable with the probability of getting caught but know that MOST stores have a policy to not engage with a shoplifter due to liability concerns.

Penalties should double for every repeat crime committed, both in terms of fines and prison time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com