It’s not only NY, LA, San Francisco. Retail crime has hit Kansas metropolis | Hacker News Reader

It’s not only NY, LA, San Francisco. Retail crime has hit Kansas metropolis

cnn.com

43 pointsMinimalAction50 comments

> “There is a link between drug trafficking and organized retail crime,” Kobach told lawmakers in June. “Organized retail crime is a problem that is getting worse, not better. And it does not exist in a vacuum. These criminal enterprises often overlap with the trafficking of drugs.”

Is there any reason to believe claims like these? Do they ever come with actual evidence?

The only link between organized retail crime and any other illicit activity is money. If a group is into organized retail crime, chances are they are into other illegal money making schemes, as well. That doesn’t mean the different activities are somehow intrinsically linked together.

> If a group is into organized retail crime, chances are they are into other illegal money making schemes, as well.

It's that really the case? I'm actually curious - do we know if urban crime groups specialise?

Some do, some don’t, depending on the group and the location. Most would just drift to whatever gets them easy money.

“Organized” doesn’t even have to be that large, could be a small group of accomplices that then know another group who is fencing stolen stuff.

If jumping into a Target or Walmart with a large garbage bag filling it with stuff to sell later makes a few extra bucks, why not? The police and the store employees just sit there looking at you without any real consequences. So why not do it?

I don't think crime groups are that significant in urban crime or black markets. There are networks of the more absolutely free market, enabled by every legal restriction, and products reuse these networks in different paths to the profit of different participants.

This seems weirdly mixed between the paragraphs. 1 paragraph before they mention drug use / addiction like it's about getting money for drugs. In the quoted one it's about organised drug dealing. One of those makes more sense in theory than the other... But if the reporting can't get it straight, maybe it's not really documented either?

I think it's just a way to generate sympathy and outrage. Maybe to try to encourage tough on crime policies that might get more police in the area. I don't think there is a reason to believe at face value it without evidence.

Seems more like a distraction from the real issue and evidence of the connection between retail crime and poverty. Nobody has the political courage to call out the suppression of the American middle class as the defining factor.

Poverty?

I think the quote from Goodfellas sums it up nicely: For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.

Anecdote != Data.

The fact that it might be largely driven by poverty doesn’t preclude the existence of people who are not doing it because of poverty.

That being said, nothing about your quote says anything about even the quoted person not being driven by poverty.

It’s not even an anecdote, it’s a movie quote.

A good example are the catalytic converter thefts. It’s organized crime, easy money.

Nobody is doing it to feed their kids.

Ah of course, this movie quote is a very accurate representation of our complex, difficult reality.

So a quote from a movie is your counterargument?

It's not a counter-argument, it's an example of the attitude of criminals (based on the movie written about a criminal).

> Seems more like a distraction from the real issue and evidence of the connection between retail crime and poverty.

Except for the fact that most poor people don't engage in this kind of behavior. And frankly, to imply that people in poverty have no agency is paternalistic to say the least. We all have the capacity to discern right from wrong. If we choose to do bad things to others, that's on us, not anyone or anything else.

Prominent case currently being prosecuted in New York where "law enforcement [have] seized more than $3.8 million in stolen goods from Rubinov" [1]

> Roni Rubinov, accused of leading a New York City theft ring that disguised the stealing as isolated “smash and grab” incidents, even signed a lease in 2019 on a warehouse in which he planned to open a sort of “department store” of stolen goods, the mayor’s office said Thursday.

The New York Times connects this particular case to drug users [2]:

> “Mr. Rubinov, himself, preys on the weak,” Nicholas Fiore, the deputy inspector of the New York City Police Department’s central robbery division, said at a news conference Thursday. Mr. Rubinov often employed people who had a long history of drug use and of committing petty crimes, he said.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230525040442/https://www.bloom...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230513230507/https://www.nytim...

Well that's a stretch. The original quote says it's linked to the _trafficking_ of drugs, not just drug use. If this is the only link, they're being intentionally misleading.

What kind of policies are enabling this?

This seems to be a problem unique to large cities

The liability for a company when an employee intervenes in theft is too high. It’s much easier to let your employees stand by the wayside and replace the item. Most big box stores will punish employees who try to get involved. You gotta replace a lot of items before it’s more expensive than a multi million dollar lawsuit from the family of an employee that dies in a petty theft gone wrong. And these corporate policies shape the world.

A corporate policy that says don’t get involved or stop a theft is one I can certainly back. A retail employees life is not worth the goods being taken.

Also you’ve gotta be an idiot to try to prevent theft in an American store (especially one you don’t own). It’s a really good way to get shot and killed for no reason at all.

This stuff will get gnarly as it invades the more armed parts of the country, both for perpetrators and for people trying to prevent it.

I suspect there was some adjustment to insurance norms behind the scenes also, given the recent covid-19 lockdowns and resultant drop in foot traffic.

In the end there is a cost to petty crimes. It's not the policy makers that could just push through and make it work as they wish. The business will show that whether it's viable

It's a tough situation from what I've read about it.

Someone steals $500. What do you do?

Charging someone alone costs thousands.

Putting them in jail costs tens of thousands per year and has some serious negative externalities (what happens if they have kids? what if this knocks them off the economic treadmill and they're forced to continue stealing as the only option to them?)

And then you have organized crime organizing hundreds of people to commit the same petty theft. But they're hard to find and catch.

I think the resolution won't be laws changing, so much as stores changing to be harder to shoplift from. Already places are experimenting with more of a fast-food style order at the front on a tablet, and the clerks will bring the goods to you from the back. Or a shift to more of an online ordering world, where shoplifting is close to non-existent (though package theft and credit card fraud are problems).

The problem is organized crime, and it’s worth pursuing even though it’s hard.

This organized crime happens throughout the distribution chain, from the docks to store shelves. Changing store layouts or ordering online won’t fix the problem.

Law enforcement is the correct tool to combat organized crime.

As far as laws changing, there’s a bill to create a national center focused on coordinating responses to this theft between local, state, and federal levels: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...

Totally agree going after organized crime is key, and didn't mean to imply otherwise.

Defer it until they reach at threshold and then charge them every time or at minimum detain them for a few hours period. Crime follows a pareto distribution like everything else.

We just need to make convictions profitable. If justice remains a cost then it will be done incompletely. I would sell the organs from convicted shoplifters.

We have the same thing happening at the top end. Companies just ignoring paying rent, arbitration fees and deferred prosecution is the biggest scandal, "promise us you wont do it again and we will forget about it". The goal of any larger company now is to get too big to prosecute.

Wage Theft is the largest form of theft by miles, but we don't see endless news articles writing about how it represents a failure of law and order. Curious.

Wage theft doesn’t create the same kind of fear as someone shoving a gun in your face and taking your property.

I don't know about you, but I'm way more afraid of falling homeless and into that spiral of despair than any possible person with a gun.

> I'm way more afraid of falling homeless and into that spiral of despair than any possible person with a gun.

Said the person who's clearly never had a gun pulled on them.

trauma's no fun. I'm grateful I've never had that happen to me. have you? how was it? how did you process it?

Called the cops, described gunman and weapon, replaced the watch he got. Continued to walk late at night, tried to woolgather less.

Nobody is shoving a gun in people's faces in these stories about retail crime. People are just taking stuff off shelves and not paying for it.

What I find curious is how often comments like these are made without posting a link to any kind of source. I’ll just admit I have no idea what wage theft is, and I’d argue most people don’t know either. Can you enlighten me, or provide a source that explains it? And if you feel so strongly, why not post something to HN about it so we can all discuss?

Wikipedia has a pretty good description, sources, and recent US-based examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

Wage theft is self correcting in the bigger picture. People with better options will go for those options. People who perform better than they are paid will tend to have better opportunities.

Focusing on wage theft also fails to account for all the cheating employees do like slacking during lulls instead of being productive as expected.

Then why hasn't it self corrected?

Why do you assume it hasn't?

Because wage theft remains common.

You're missing the point entirety.

I don't believe that's true.

Povrty

I think it's more uh, consumer side changes than anything else. Just like the Internet has really changed the way people play games and do hobbies, it's changed crime- there's more knowledge, better strategies, etc.

The ability to re-sell it on Amazon for profit.

There are more factors than Policy alone. Education, Culture, Policy, Behavior, Reward, and Punishment should be considered.

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