It's a huge slow motion train wreck crushing the people who need help most. To help them we need to be less tolerant of such petty crime, more in proportion to the damage that it does.
We need to keep in mind most of this shoplifting is not out of desperation or people needing things in most cases. Despite what people like to complain the US does have some social programs and beyond that almost every major city I've been in has multiple food banks and other organizations that help with people in extreme need. I'm not saying they are perfectly adequate, and I'm not trying to be scroogesque by saying "are there not workhouses or prisons?", merely to point out that first off there are lots of people that are desperate that don't turn to retail theft. In order to frame the real root of the problem.
It's organized crime. Here's how the scam works, there are various drug addicts, they will do anything for their next fix, they are the ones performing the actual theft. They then sell what they steal to the middle managers who will give them money or drugs for the merchandise. The middle managers then turn around and deliver it to what I'll call "HQ" which then turns around and sales it online, and they are able to underbid their competitors by virtue of having very low operating costs.
There was a wonderful article about how this scam was being run with a baby food ring operating out of Florida, but it is a similar story in multiple areas.
I put this out there to disabuse some people of the seemingly naive notion that these poor shoplifters are noble "Jean ValJean" types trying to steal bread to feed their family, and the truth that many of them, although held captive in the throes of addiction and mental health crises, are cogs in a machine of organized crime which although viewed microscopically doesn't seem like a big deal, when expanded up cause true societal destabilization.
Target is't losing money because people are stealing gallons of milk they actually consume, it's because organized gangs empty the entire shelf of laundry detergent and flip it online. The romanticism here is ridiculous.
If we do our job of educating and providing very basic social services and opportunities for young people it turns out that crime rates get lower and we get to harness the collective human potential of a generation instead of paying to lock them up.
Unfortunately we have to rely on the better nature and responsible long term planning abilities of humans to get this done. One human might be able to stick to a plan that becomes impossible for 5.
Happy and well adjusted people form shoplifting gangs with the risk/reward calculus says that they can make a lot of money with 0 risk!
"Don't shoplift" is not some innate ethical virtue that humans adopt when they are happy and healthy; by trying to lean on virtues without maintaining a system for enforcing them you are simply spending down unquantifiable social capital in order to avoid making hard decisions.
That's laziness, it doesn't make it true.
People do not want to rely on their "innate" sense of social fairness while watching the people around them be rewarded for violating those norms. People hold those feelings because they see the people around them do the same. When that's not true, they feel like suckers, and if you push them, you will find out how not-innate that sense is.
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Edit: And yes, for most of human history, "traveling in the woods in unfamiliar territory" was asking for a brutal death. Read some Jared Diamond or something on his work in New Guinea. We have actively socialized ourselves, through hard work over centuries, to make this relatively safe.
That assumes they are desperate, and not just find it easier to steal than to work.
Source: I am a criminal and have spent a serious portion of my adult life in custody
I went to Caltech, perhaps the university with the most extensive honor system. It was wonderful. I never had to watch my back, or lock my dorm room door. The rest of the students liked it, too, and we watched out for each other. I don't know of any student who stole, but surely it did happen. Their fellow students would turn them in and ostracize them, so they usually just disappeared.
It's the way I want to live.
I've tried to use that in my life ever since. Sometimes, I get taken advantage of. But usually, I've found that people reciprocate, and it's nice. The D Language Foundation is run that way. We like it.
(In contrast, a friend of mine attended a different university. His second day, his dorm room was looted clean.)
The infamous police bureau Wibautstraat was just one street further and I would be the last to argue they were incompetent.
I live in SF, and when I see a man grab a rack of jackets at target and walk out, it’s obvious the act of a desperate and drug addled individual.
When I see an efficient group of people in a Lexus breaking into cars or luxury stores, or the groups reselling fenced merchandise on 24th and Mission, it’s obviously organized crime.
The one fuels the other. There’s little reason for a desperate man to steal 10 jackets (he only needs one or two), unless there is a fence willing to buy them. There’s little reason for organized crime to break into cars or shops when others are willing to do that work for them, they can focus on selling the goods on Facebook Marketplace or eBay.
White collar crime needs to be prosecuted. But that won’t help here.
It’s usually in the context that wage theft is a much larger problem than people realize - to the point that depending on which source you choose it’s either on par or larger than other forms of theft.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37703395
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37751850
You're right that they're not saying "wage theft is worse than murder", just "wage theft is worse than all other forms of theft"
It's important that it doesn't happen, but it's just a different order of magnitude of damage for the people sensitive to it.
I don’t think any marginalized community sees a single dime out of any white collar crime prosecution.
A lot of the crime isn’t just necessities. It’s basically stealing to sell on the side.
Yes there are exceptions of course but the people stealing things from Target and CVS are not selling those things to pay for their Mercedes. They're selling them to pay for basic necessities. That doesn't mean it's not a crime, and it shouldn't be punished, but it is a distinction worth noting.
I don't think anyone is shoplifting for food, at least in Seattle where food banks are stocked and ask few questions. They do shop lift for drugs, which is why LEGO, baby formula, and laundry detergent sections are locked down at many discount stores. It is shoplifting LEGOs to sell via a fence (this is very organized now) to get money to buy fent (often the shoplifting ring will give you drugs straight for the LEGO set you lifted).
The vast majority of the poor in the US are.. obese. Not fat, but clinically obese. For whatever failings we have, feeding the poor and the masses is not one of them. Typically when kids do "go hungry" they are Middleschoolers or younger with... abusive parents. (Which is why free lunch programs work, it bypasses shitty parents).
You expect 15 year olds to be transgressive. But when it's endemic among certain 50 year olds - that's when you have a real problem.
First, you've made the assumption here that all the shoplifters are black. The data does not support that. Most shoplifters are white kids with drug problems.
Second, you've made the assumption here that all Black people in the US are descendents of slaves. That's also incorrect and ignores hundreds of years of migration from a rich variety of countries.
Third, no, shoplifters aren't shoplifting because of "generational nihilism". They are feeding drug/alcohol habits.
You keep claiming this without qualification. It is probably very regional, but most shoplifters in my city (Seattle) are mostly white unhoused neighbors who are usually in their 20s-30s and have drug abuse problems. They aren't white suburban kids (although I'm sure it happens in the suburbs, just not in our urban area).
Obviously the shoplifters are going to be a subpopulation of the area they live in - if you live in a predominantly black neighborhood, they will trend to be more black, if you live in an older neighborhood, they will trend to be older, etc etc.
But basically the whole benefit of shoplifting is that it solves both your money problem and the "accounting for where money has gone" problem that occurs with substance abuse. If you're running a successful business and then snorting all your cash flow, that's going to show up in your books (or to your parents if it's your allowance money, etc). To sustain a substance issue, you need not only money but money reasonably free of attention.
To point three, drug/alcohol habits are often hereditary and communal. Not sure why generational nihilism and feeding drug/alcohol habits are mutually exclusive.
Between the subprime mortgage crisis and hooking 50 million people on OxyContin, this shit really takes a bite out of people's savings.
If people are desperate enough to eat the seed they know they need for the next crop, policing seed use more strictly won't make the people less desperate for food. In fact, it probably makes them more desperate.
Why would you think being less tolerant of shoplifting would make the people less desperate?
??? Petty crime by any reasonable definition is an inferior good, above a (not actually all that large) income people stop doing it. It's not entirely clear how punishing it harder is actually going to help until you actually help the truly desperate. Now, once you do and the only people left shoplifting have no claim to any kind of "well I had to because I couldn't afford <necessity>" then you can bring the wrath of god down on it.
It seems like nowadays 'punishing at all' is a serious issue. If the police say they won't show up for theft under a certain dollar amount they've basically made it legal to steal up to that amount.
>"until you actually help the truly desperate"
Food banks and welfare programs exist. I feel like sympathetic people are ignoring the fact that some people realize they can do illegal things because it gives them an advantage, not solely because there is no other option.
We can talk about honor and the nobility of suffering or whatever your catholic school taught you but the reality is that humans need a certain level of comfort before they stop doing things that are considered desperate acts to get there. You steal the stuff you can't afford that gives you comfort and puts you ahead enough that you still have money to make rent. Things like laptops, phones, tvs, video games have a high comfort/risk ratio and significantly raise your tolerance to the shittiness of the rest of your life.
If the question is "when is theft permissible" most people aren't going to agree that stealing "laptops, phones, tvs, video games" is okay because it will make the thief feel better about how shitty their life is.
You either deal with this or will forever be demonizing the very people you want to help because they're not behaving in the way you've decided they should to be worthy of sympathy.
I'm not demonizing anyone and this choice of words shows a gross misunderstanding of how most people feel about theft.
>"because they're not behaving in the way you've decided they should to be worthy of sympathy."
What's so wrong about this? I can definitely lose sympathy for someone who makes the choice to break the law and harm others when they could have chosen a non-violent alternative that would have probably helped the more. When that happens they should face consequences, be judged, and hopefully be rehabilitated.
Did a double take on this one. There are plenty of scenarios where stealing is honorable.
My three assumptions here are that some people are starving, stealing to eat is the canonical excusable crime, and that 'just get a job' is not a solution. If you disagree with any of those, then that's your opinion but we have nothing further to discuss as we start from a different premise.
You're absolutely correct, we disagree on premises about the world. Have a wonderful day, I'm sorry for what amounts to a nonsensical response on my part.
And overdue rent is what happens when you make bad decisions like spending your money on drugs and alcohol
Have any of you ever even been in dire straits? Because those of us who have are not as tolerant and that’s not meaningless
It's wild how people who people who've never experienced being poor don't get economics of it. You don't steal food, that's stupid because the risk/reward is terrible, when your phone breaks you steal the iPhone because that takes $1000 off your budget.
I tried to bake that idea into the phrasing but it clearly didn't land.