Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I remember one take I had in 2024 after the election.

We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.

Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.

But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.

View on HN

The whole retail theft epidemic (and the ensuing Union Pacific cargo theft ) was a corporate scam perpetrated by local news and law enforcement PR departments.

It wasn't at all. There's still a serious problem with shoplifting. Wal-mart would not be removing self-checkout if this were just a PR campaign.

At my local CVS, they just started locking up the bulk candy. You don't take the the sales hit and the expense of those locking cabinets unless you have a real shrinkage problem.

>Wal-mart would not be removing self-checkout if this were just a PR campaign

They absolutely would.

Shrink has not gone up

The National Retail Federation, which publishes those numbers yearly, has stopped publishing those numbers to hide that fact.

There are real shoplifting problems but they are extremely local. Your local police department needs to stand up and do their fucking jobs to identify and take down the organized crime perpetuating it.

I would not have believed the shoplifting thing if I hadn’t seen it.

Walked into a CVS midday in SF. There were even cops not far away. Poor rent a cop in there is just yelling “police have been called” while three or four people are roaming around grabbing stuff and putting it in black bags.

The rest of the shoppers are going about their business, so I do too. I figure if the robbers mess with a shopper or anyone else that’s felony assault and that breaks the grift. The grift is to rip cheaper stuff they can resell but below certain thresholds. Was pretty sure they’d have no weapons too since that would make it a felony.

By the time I’m checking out with my melatonin gummies and toothpaste they’re taking off.

I can break one stereotype though. They were white. They were wearing masks but looked like probably white teenage dudes.

I mean why not. Teen hormones and free money.

It was surreal in a way I’m not describing well here. People were not even reacting.

I heard it was organised crime loading up on stuff it could sell at informal locations.

This is willful (intentional) ignorance.

No, it really was a hoax perpetuated by companies that want to sell security services to retail chains and other groups that want more police funding. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/01/the-shoplifting-...

Like how Cloudflare wants you to think every unprotected website gets DDoSed.

Have you ever read any investigative journalism about those crime stories? Or about local crime news via papers and television? Those two news sources are starved for news stories and law enforcement agencies have well funded PR arms (one should wonder why this is) and their associated affiliated unions/associations are quite eager to become the primary(only sometimes) sources for news (one should wonder why this is true for stories even from supposedly neutral reporting like AP and NPR). Theft has existed since there has been trading - we see plenty of examples of this with nesting/courting animals with rocks and sticks, but this "crime wave" whenever the USA status quo of law enforcement/prison industrial complex is threatened or new prisons/private prisons need to be justified is blatantly obvious.

> You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.

Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.

In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.

It’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people.

The idea poor people are somehow criminal is a myth that needs to be eradicated.

> t’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people

There is not such a strong distinction. Organized crime groups often use poor people who have few alternatives as the pawns of their theft and fencing operations. People with other better options don't usually take up petty crime as a vocation.

I would say that many people with better options take up sophisticated crime as a vocation. Obviously poor and rich people choose vocations a little differently.

There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.

Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too. Poor people do not benefit from stores closing, or having the stores closest to them have everything locked up.

> There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.

"Criminality" is too broad a characterization. It covers both assault and petty theft. I never said the poor are more criminal as a group than any other group.

People in poverty are more likely to commit petty theft out of need. Similarly, people who are very wealthy are more likely to commit large scale tax evasion out of greed. Both are financial crimes, but they are not committed equally by both groups.

> Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too.

Yes, and so does giving people in poverty a step up out of life circumstances that make them more likely to commit petty crimes (like shoplifting).

Similarly, punishing large scale financial crimes by the wealthy (something that has basically stopped of late) would benefit everyone, from the poor to the wealthy. In fact, punishment may be the only disincentive for financial crimes by the wealthy, since they don't want for anything else.

> enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores

Yes and no. Enforcement deters career criminals by increasing the cost of doing business. Improving society means fewer honest people have to turn to crime.

> insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them

Right, so career criminals. See above.

My point is, increasing enforcement will not help against petty crime, because you gotta feed yourself somehow. The people on the lowest rungs of society dealing crack cocaine or acting as the front men for fencing rings - they got nothing to lose. In fact there's more than enough reports of people letting themselves get caught at some petty crime before winter hits so they got a few months in jail where they're at least fed and have a roof over their head.

But it can and will massively help against large scale white collar crime. When you got dozens of millions of dollars in wealth, now you have the means to make more out of it (honest or not), the incentive to make more out of it - and also, a lot to lose, should they get caught.

> increasing enforcement will not help against petty crime

I disagree. Career criminals also do petty crime.

> It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them

I'm a fan of an idea I ran across recently. Instead of calling Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, etc the richest people in the world, we should call them the greediest.

"Greediest man in the world Elon Musk promises robotaxis" hits different than the "Richest man" version

Don't say "Billionaire Jeff Bezos does <thing>", say "Champion of Greed Jeff Bezos..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com