A nationwide retail theft epidemic cost the United States close to $100 billion in 2021. Stores are being forced to raise prices or shut up shop, insurers are refusing to help, and smaller mom and pop stores are being left behind. In this series, Mayhem on Main Street, the Washington Examiner will investigate the causes behind the scourge of shoplifting, the role of the cartels, the cost to stores big and small, and the complicity of lax prosecutors. Part four will focus on law enforcement of retail theft. To read parts one, two, and three, click here, here, and here.
Retail giant Nordstrom’s flagship store in a San Francisco mall permanently closed this week, marking the latest store to fall as the city grapples with a glaring exodus of brick-and-mortar shops.
The cause of the closure, according to a mall spokeswoman, included “unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area.”
RETAIL THEFT DELIVERS AN ECONOMIC BLOW FOR COMPANIES AND COMMUNITIES
She said the closure “underscore[d] the deteriorating situation in downtown San Francisco.”
Union Square, San Francisco’s commercial hub, has lost nearly half of its stores since 2019, a local survey found.
Retail crime in urban areas is one of the well-documented factors for these store closures, but an increasingly accommodating environment for organized retail crime and viral surveillance footage capturing brazen incidents of thievery has magnified the problem.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento were found by the National Retail Federation to be “hot spots” for organized retail crime for the last several years, signaling the problem may be statewide in California.
Chicago and New York were also annual hot spots, as were Houston, Atlanta, and Miami.
The survey’s findings suggest that neither red nor blue states are immune to retail crime but that a pattern of rampant theft can be found within populous, Democratic-run jurisdictions.
At the state level, one point of contention in combating retail theft has been the dollar threshold at which a misdemeanor becomes a felony. Proponents of raising the thresholds in states want to reduce prison time and claim the dollar amount should be adjusted for inflation.
Critics say allowing theft of higher-dollar items to be deemed a misdemeanor is wrongly reducing punishment and therefore encouraging crime.
California has been the poster child for this controversy, raising its threshold in 2014 via Proposition 47, a ballot measure bankrolled by Democratic megadonor George Soros. After its passage, theft of items under $950 could only be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, if prosecuted at all.
Republican state lawmakers and vulnerable Democrats have in recent years pushed to repeal the provision.
“Enough is enough, we need to fight back against the criminals who are stealing from our communities,” Bakersfield Assemblyman Rudy Salas, a Democrat, said in a statement last year, lamenting the “unintended consequences” of Proposition 47.
While its advocates say it has reinvested would-be incarceration money into other means of criminal prevention, the state’s most recent recidivism rate report calls that claim into question. California’s rates of prison returns and repeat convictions are among the highest in the nation and have stayed steady for the last decade.
The state tried to course correct in 2020 with Proposition 20, which would have classified more crimes as nonviolent felonies, but Californians rejected the measure by a margin of about 24%.
And earlier this month, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, finally moved to address retail crime, launching a task force because “no Angeleno should feel like it’s unsafe to go shopping,” she said.
Regarding larceny thresholds, they can vary greatly from state to state. Pennsylvania’s is $2,000 and New Jersey’s is $200, for example. California’s threshold, while relatively low, is only one factor. Penalties in place for larceny, local prosecutorial positions, and policing are other top considerations for combating retail crime.
In one case in 2020 that reached the Tennessee Supreme Court, prosecutors indicted Abbie Welch, a repeat shoplifter, for misdemeanor theft but also added a burglary felony charge because the Knoxville Walmart she stole from had previously banned her from the store. She was convicted on both counts and received six years in prison. Retail associations filed briefs supporting the tougher ruling, and the high-profile nature of the case now exists in Tennessee as a natural deterrent for repeat offenders.
That case stands in contrast to other prosecutorial decisions, such as those that occurred in blue cities during the stunning incidents of mass looting captured on video in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd protests.
In New York City, 118 people were arrested during looting incidents in early June that year in the Bronx, and a WNBC analysis found that the Bronx district attorney dismissed most of those cases. The analysis found at the time that 19 had received convictions, most of which were light and resulted in no jail time.
A similar pattern was seen at the time in Manhattan. The current top prosecutor there, Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg, came under intense national scrutiny by Republicans this year for taking a “soft-on-crime” posture while also indicting former President Donald Trump on years-old white-collar charges that had already been vetted by the federal government.
“Democrats belittled victims of New York’s crime crisis,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a member of congressional leadership, said at a hearing focused on Bragg. “Republicans are focused on the fact that DA Bragg refused to prosecute these crimes. We are giving victims a voice.”
The Bronx’s Democratic district attorney, Darcel Clark, has served in her role since 2016 and was heard advocating reducing jail time as recently as June.
“Not everybody deserves jail or prison. Sometimes, their circumstances bring them into the criminal justice system,” she told NY1.
While retail crime has largely been dealt with on a state-by-state and district attorney-by-district attorney basis, the problem has, at times, risen to the federal level, particularly with large-scale and organized operations, such as those run by Mexican drug cartels.
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The Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Boiling Point in 2021 to counter “organized theft groups” and announced this year it had made more than 60 arrests and seized more than $10 million in stolen assets as a result of the initiative.
A joint federal law enforcement investigation called Operation Booster Buster resulted in more than two dozen arrests last year.
