Is there any reason to believe claims like these? Do they ever come with actual evidence?
> 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...
It's that really the case? I'm actually curious - do we know if urban crime groups specialise?
“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 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.
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.
Nobody is doing it to feed their kids.
/s
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.