The US is rapidly backsliding from a high to low trust society so things like this are simply not possible in many areas. A few trials like this ran near me and shut down months later.
The recent problems have been:
District Attorneys deciding property crime is selectively enforceable for social justice engineering, and a knock-on effect of the police not bothering to do their job while having the gall to collect a paycheck they didn't earn.
Political divisions where a growing demographic of self-destructives wish to throw a Molotov cocktail into functional civilization. This explains why COTUS can't elect a Speaker of the House.
Many police departments in big cities are severely understaffed. Seattle is at 60% where it needs to be, and has the lowest number of officers since 1992 (while population is much larger than then).
Couple that with just being a bad job: you get blamed for not doing enough, doing too much, and...really, there are just way better jobs out there these days that offer as much money for a lot less stress.
We've seen plenty of issues with police that wildly escalate a situation, in ways that result in things like "burn-half-the-city-down riots".
In that atmosphere, it might be an intentional goal to minimize the number of "low value" police encounters. Stopping a shoplifter might recover $100 of merchandise, but you have to get it right an awful lot of times to recover for every time a trigger-happy cop loses his cool and the city has to pay a seven-figure settlement.
That is one way of putting it. Another and in my opinion more correct way is to conclude that some groups of people are looking for reasons to burn half the city down and find it in "police brutality" or "racism". When the police is just as brutal towards different groups of people the cities do not burn down.
You can have a look at the areas which gave heed to the calls to "defund the police" to find out whether that has led to a decrease or increase of crime. If the police were the cause of these problems you'd expect fewer problems when there are fewer police encounters. In actuality the result is the opposite and what most people who do not hold with the narrative expected: less police leads to more crimes committed.
No, reducing police presence in these dystopian areas is not the solution. A better trained police force with better tactics might be. Giuliani managed to turn New York around so it can be done if there is the will and the opportunity to act upon that will.
Giving up and giving in will lead to streets empty of stores instead of streets with empty stores which will promptly be followed by claims of "discrimination" and "structural racism" because there are no shops in those areas without a single person asking why those shops left. Giving up and giving in is not an option.
The US isn't rapidly sliding anywhere.
America is in super state of being both, high and low trust.
And by judging the current world trends it will collapse to one state pretty soon - the dead cat scenario i am afraid.
https://thecounter.org/supermarket-robot-automation-ai-organ...
It's still financially viable to assume a little extra theft risk here because you take a tenth of the time at checkout and use less than half the person time as regular self checkouts (which use a tenth of the time a manned checkout does). They massively increase throughout in large, busy stores.
> Not that there is a lot of data to suggest that this oft-discussed recent spike in retail crime is even real. In an earnings call earlier this year, for example, the CFO of Walgreens admitted that his company had perhaps “cried too much” about theft, and that its product losses had actually declined in the previous quarter.