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Notes -
Mayor Adams Announces Plan to Combat Retail Theft in New York City
https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/340-23/mayor-adams-plan-combat-retail-theft-new-york-city#/0
From the Mayor himself:
The plan is detailed as follows:
Establish two new diversion programs — “Second Chance” and Re-Engaging Store Theft Offenders and Retail Establishments (RESTORE) — to allow non-violent offenders to avoid prosecution or incarceration by meaningfully engaging with services to help address underlying factors that lead to shoplifting.
Install resource kiosks in stores to connect individuals in need to critical government resources and social services.
Launch an employee support program to train retail workers in de-escalation tactics, anti-theft tools, and security best practices to help keep them safe in the event of an emergency and to support employees who have been impacted by thefts.
To increase necessary enforcement against repeat shoplifters and deter organized crime rings perpetrating these thefts, the administration will:
Create a Precision Repeat Offender Program (PROP) in which retailers can submit dedicated security incident reports to the NYPD to better identify and track repeat offenders and facilitate stronger prosecutions by the five District Attorneys’ Offices.
Establish a neighborhood retail watch for businesses in close proximity to one another to share real-time intelligence with each other and with law enforcement in the event of a theft. This program builds upon the NYPD’s Operation Safe Shopper initiative created under Mayor Adams’ leadership as Brooklyn borough president to expand video surveillance camera usage among participants.
Advocate at the state and federal level for additional online sale authentication procedures to prevent the resale of stolen goods to build upon the federal Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) for Consumers Act, which goes into effect in June 2023.
Establish a New York City Organized Retail Theft Task Force, comprised of retailers, law enforcement agencies, and other stakeholders to collaborate and respond to retail theft trends.
From my end: What prompts this entire rigamarole in the first place? Why can't you just go to jail for repeat shoplifting?
On the other hand I have no relatable experience from my own environment with this sort of thing. Shoplifting was just something teenagers did to get a free Snickers, or the much more rare person stealing clothing. This kind of behavior seems so alien and weird. Can you really maintain 'normal' shopping culture with this sort of thing happening? Or will this be 'solved' by more technology and automation where the most you will see of what you buy is an image on a screen until you pay the machine. Moving us one step closer to real life idiocracy.
The government is supposed to be "doing something". Of course, they can not fix the problem - both for the ideological reasons (that'd require to recognize there are other issues in play than "systemic racism") and for practical ones (doing the police work that needs to be done requires resources that they'd rather spend elsewhere). But this is an excellent opportunity to distribute some of the taxpayers' money to a network of NGOs and other parasites created for this explicit purpose. I am sure this program will be a great success in what its true aim is - sucking millions out of the city budget and redistributing them to a myriad of grifters. It wouldn't do squat about shoplifting, of course, but that's only for the better - that means they can complain the current budget is not enough and ask to double it next year.
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The US criminal justice system is deeply broken. The court system is overloaded and the prisons are a nightmarish shitshow. As a result, in the US sending people to prison for repeat shoplifting would be an extreme over-punishment.
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A bit on the nose, eh? I can't tell if this was meant as a verb (i.e. the single line in this proposal propping up the rest of the bloviation), or as a noun (theater object to facilitate a more realistic performance). What a masterstroke.
Others have already mentioned that prosecution in the US is conditioned on local politics, that retail employees basically have their hands tied in responding to theft, and that there is a cultural factor encouraging and normalizing shoplifting and theft in subsets of big-city populations from a young age. This is probably the bulk of it. I'll add an unverifiable but anecdotally-reinforced personal theory that might have some effect on low-repetition shoplifting adding to overall increases from 2020 to end of 2022: I suspect wearing masks during the pandemic years (and indeed long after them for some people) tipped the scales on the risk-reward calculus for a lot of people, because a lot of people (wrongly) think they might get caught by facial recognition.
The local Walmart has large, conspicuous cameras set up at the doorways, ostensibly for recording crimes to be used in subsequent investigation or prosecution. That such subsequent investigation is rarely conducted is beside the point - to the average person, it sounds risky to get their face caught on camera while they're doing crimes. The marginal shoplifter could always wear a mask, but when they're the only one hiding their face, wearing their hoodie over their head indoors, or generally acting weird around cameras, they tend to stick out - it's not a stretch to imagine that the marginal shoplifter who's concerned about getting caught by cameras might also be concerned about looking obviously super suspicious. But when everyone's wearing a mask, hiding your face from the cameras is a free side-effect of a different normalized behavior. This might have emboldened a lot of marginal shoplifters.
This sounds convoluted, and probably doesn't have a huge impact relative to the other mentioned explanations... but a couple of low-income friends have insinuated to me that the masking requirements made them a lot less worried about getting caught by facial recognition in their own personal escapades, so I don't think I can discard it outright.
I'm not American, but a lot of shoplifters seem to wear masks, based on this possibly biased sample:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QL4QOnl1uDw
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People do go to jail but then people complain about unduly long sentences for relatively minor offenses, overlooking the habitual aspect of it. So I guess it's more socially acceptable to accept many small thefts from a person than solve the problem once and for all with a really long sentence. This is why 3 strikes laws have been so controversial.
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Does this not come under "better identify and track repeat offenders and facilitate stronger prosecutions"? It looks to me like you're complaining about what could be just a stronger both/and approach. Treating jail as part of the solution but not the whole solution makes perfect sense to me.
No? "Stronger prosecutions" doesn't imply jail sentences.
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The reason you can’t just go to jail for shoplifting is the same reason you can’t have a working criminal justice system - any effective anti-crime policy will be functionally indistinguishable from an anti-black policy. Progressive policymakers and prosecutors have understood and internalized this lesson, and have decided to simply ignore criminal recidivism since the alternative is to throw thousands of black people in jail.
It really isn’t any more complicated than that, and it never has been. Crime wonkery always misses the point - these people aren’t looking for “new paradigms on public safety”; they are specifically doing everything they can to shield a favored demographic from accountability.
I see that Team "My outgroup is cartoonishly stupid/evil and has no useful motivations or genuine concerns that I might need to take into account" continues to be very popular around here.
My outgroup has had years to craft policy around these supposed "useful motivations and genuine concerns", which is how we have arrived at this juncture.
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yup. same for scrapping or diluting gifted ed programs. or colleges ignoring or discounting the SATs for admissions purposes.
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Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!
Years ago, for my sins, I worked in a small local grocery store (the tale of how to fuck over and exploit your employees while becoming a millionaire when a million was real money is one for another day).
On a night shift I was unlucky enough to be robbed by the professional thieves. The slickness of the job is that one distracts you by asking you to get them something off a shelf behind you/serve them at the deli counter while the other one grabs around for whatever they can lift - luckily the till was shut, but at that time when we sold lottery tickets the money was kept in a cashbox under a shelf, and Thief Two leaned over and grabbed that while Thief One distracted me.
Needless to say, my employer ate the face off me, but what could I do? Oh, and around the same time there was a spate of armed (for the value of "armed" when the thief had a knife) robberies from petrol stations and small shops, and my employer instructed us that should someone come in and threaten us with a knife to open the till, we should lock the till, throw the key where they couldn't get it, and be prepared to be stabbed to protect our employer's precious sweet money. I think the expression on my face probably conveyed "Hump that for a game of soldiers", because they became quite insistent on how it was my duty to risk injury or death so they wouldn't lose out on a day's takings.
This is why (1) I think the teens who shoplift for a laugh, as well as the idiots on the reddit site who go on about how it's not stealing and besides the stores have insurance, etc. should get a damn good slap until they have this nonsense knocked out of them and (2) there are people who shoplift because they genuinely have no money and are hungry or their kids are hungry. The vast majority are not these cases.
They're professional thieves and they will use kids and even babies in their stealing (it's an old trick to bring prams or buggies into the store, hide the goods under the child, then scream your head off about 'don't touch my child' if a shop assistant or security guard tries to search them).
Re: security guards - now that anyone can walk into a store, grab something off the racks or the shelves, and walk right back out while telling you to fuck yourself, because any attempt to even lay a hand on them is ASSAULT, THAT'S ASSAULT, I'M SUING YOU AND THE STORE, there's not much they can do in reality.
Nice policy. I'll tell you the three things this will achieve:
(1) Sweet
(2) Fuck
(3) All
As for "second chance" for non-violent etc. that might work if it's a kid and you get them young enough before they've started their career of petty juvenile crime and you get them out of their home environment of thieves and worse. Leave them in their criminal family and the environment of "take the suckers for a ride, wrap the social workers around your little finger, spout the line about how it's all society's fault" will undo any good you try to do.
If it's adults, forget it. You have women training their four year old kids to be thieves, what snowball in hell's chance do you think they're going to reform? Here's a typical case plucked from the headlines in my own country, which leads me into the "connect individuals to critical government resources and social services".
You think the woman in that case isn't connected with social services etc.? You think that her lawyer, representing her after 158 previous convictions, isn't going for the sob-story angle about "Murphy had lost her job and fallen into homelessness because of a “bad drug addiction” in hopes that this time yet again a judge will fall for it and go easy on her?
As for "train employees in de-escalation tactics", oh yeah that's gonna work. "Oh please, Ms. Shoplifter, I know systemic racism and poverty have impacted you which is why you're grabbing a carefully calculated amount under what would get you done for a felony, but if I just ask you nicely you'll hand everything back".
Sure.
Such policies achieving sweet fuck all is the feature, not a bug.
"So where's the part where we start catching criminals and punishing them?"
"That's the neat part, we don't."
As @CriticalDuty mentions above, any sort of effective policy would mean more blacks in jails and prisons, which is unacceptable to those who consider black lives to matter more.
The laundry list of soft-hearted, impotent plans-for-action that excuses the agency and accountability of criminals sounds like right-wing parody, complete with forced acronyms for do-nothing programs and task (lack of) forces.
Pretty typical anarcho-tyranny, when shoplifters have greater protections than the employees or good Samaritans who try to stop them.
At this point we might as well just drop the act and have third base coaches stationed at store exits, to enthusiastically wave shoplifters out the store.
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This. I work American retail, and this entire policy is insanely funny because it’s so obviously stupid.
Why would anyone engage with “RESTORE” to avoid jail time when it’s already pretty rare to be caught, and even if you are, you won’t be prosecuted, let alone go to jail. Why would they try to get into these programs (which seems like an admission of guilt) when you could do nothing? At best those sorts of programs will basically move theft from the customer facing parts of the store to the back room and teach thieves how stores work so they’re able to steal better. Nobody with a brain is going to let thieves into this program at their store.
"Your Honour, my client is a single mother of three children and if she is sent to jail, there will be nobody to take care of them. Yes, she has 140 previous convictions, but she only went out robbing expensive goods because she fell under the influence of her boyfriend who persuaded her to do so. The fact that when arrested she was walking around with a Gucci handbag which is one of the items she stole should mean nothing. We ask the court to consider a remedial sentence since there is now a programme to teach people "it's not your fault you went out robbing, it is down to structural poverty and systemic racism and in fact you should be getting reparations" and she has a place on it".
Oh, that will be a beautiful thing to see in operation, the grift.
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Part of this entire tragedy is that there are decent, lower middle-class/working-class black people who are tired of this shit, think it's bad, hate that their neighbourhoods are turning to shit, hate that being black is automatically associated with crime, think the pond scum who behave like this should be punished - and white liberals will flat-out ignore them and talk over them in favour of showing off how good allies they are in regards to "anti-white fragility, anti-white supremacy, against anti-blackness, etc."
The question is, of course, how many of them change their voting behavior based on this?
Because if those votes reliably end up in the same hands every time, it doesn't really matter what their more nuanced opinions are.
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I agree completely. One of the biggest tragedies is that White virus signaling is creating racism and destroying Black communities.
Because of all the crime and theft, a lot of people are less likely to assume that a black person in their vicinity is “safe”, at least until they know for sure. People are more likely to assume trouble from even innocent things (I could see the bike incident as a misunderstanding, but why would anyone in that situation assume it’s not a scam or an attempt at a crime?). You might think twice about hiring blacks as well. This doesn’t help black# move up.
At the same time, nobody who can afford the rents outside of the hood wants to open a business there. Even before this crime wave, most businesses in that area have bars on the window and guns behind the counter. Even that’s no longer enough, as it’s basically forbidden to try and stop crime in progress and calling the cops is as waste of time. So it’s basically no business zone. Which means no goods nearby available to those people and no jobs (making building a resume very difficult).
I think honestly a tough on crime approach is what helps minorities.
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Yeah. As Chris Rock put it decades ago: "a black man that got two jobs, going to work every day, hates a nigga on welfare". Nobody hates the trashy black underclass so much as decent black people who are busting their asses to get by and have to tolerate these other people's bullshit.
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This seems like a problem that could be easily solved with creative thinking. What if you took all the major cities and made them 'special security zones', something like airports? All kinds of arbitrary rules apply in airports, shoplifting should be easy to ban. Or send in the National Guard, send in paratroopers. There's a precedent for overruling local authorities who refuse to obey the feds on social issues.
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yeah, sell drugs online = huge sentence if caught, even if once.
but shoplift dozens of times while not crossing state lines = slaps on wrist or nothing.
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These are professional gangs. they ransack stores and steal thousands of dollars of merch at a time. It's not at all like teenagers shoplifting out of boredom or for an occasional CD here and there. Sometimes they use kids due to less severe punishments. It needs to be treated as an organized crime problem, not just a behavioral one or economic scarcity one. The above solutions are useless and fail to do that.
The fed. govt. needs to get involved, to lessen the burden from states in charging and imprisoning these offenders. this is an instance where states do not have enough resources to fight the problem, and shows the limitations of states' rights. bail reform is a problem too. Instead of trillions wasted on education and other useless or overpaid stuff, divert that $ to prison spending where it's needed most. The ROI from putting away criminals, who impose a cost on everyone, is way greater than spending trillions to raise reading scores by .001%.
Why are states limited?
states may not have the resources to imprison and prosecute a lot of shoplifters . prison overcrowding is a problem for state governments, which means releasing prisoners too soon like during covid. the federal govt. is not limited in this regard.
I would guess state capacity is larger than federal.
federal is only 10% of total prison population but federal budget is obviously way bigger and can easily scale to accommodate more prison spending.
Well yes federal government has more budget true. But crime has historically been the province of states and they are the ones with the expertise.
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Diversion programs are a problem, not the solution. Adams may not be able to fix Bragg-caused problems, but here he's making them worse. And with New York defense law and corporate policies being what they are, "training retail workers in de-escalation tactics, anti-theft tools, and security best practices" amounts to teaching them how to say "Here's the money and portable valuables, please don't hurt me!"
If that was how it would work out, it'd be great. But I'll tell you what will happen; back when I worked in local education, there was (still is) a programme for early school leavers (the idea is you get the kids who drop out of full-time education before legal school-leaving age and get them into a programme that will give them some basic life skills, some training, and steer them towards doing job courses rather than hanging around idle and getting into petty crime. They get paid a training allowance to make sure they attend).
The problem is, as soon as some budding Napoleon of Crime ended up in court, the first thing their lawyer did was plead with the judge that Junior Capone here was going to turn his life around and had a place on said course, so sending him to jail would ruin all his chances.
Very often the little tyke had no such place, because we didn't want him, because we knew he had damn-all interest in turning his life around. But judges love to show off that they're not the bad old judges of the past and even if they're middle/upper-middle class and well-off, they're down with the youth and the underprivileged, so this often worked.
So then we'd get lumbered with someone only interested in weed (they'd smoke right outside the front door of the building), porn (guess what they went looking for with access to computers during IT training classes), and easy money, who had no intention of doing anything but going back to their life of petty crime once the programme was finished. They had terrible attendance and no interest at all in learning anything, and indeed would spend class times winding up others to cause a melt-down so the staff were busy dealing with the results of that and Junior could skive off.
So I'm forecasting that even for adults, it will be a case of "yes, Your Honour, my client was sent on three different programmes which he failed to complete or even attend, but this time it will be different if you give him a chance on this new programme!"
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More diversion programs = more programs to cycle through before admitting some defendant has run out of excuses.
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Because the DA’s in New York won’t file the charges because they don’t want to prosecute crime. This isn’t actually a problem mayor Adams(who has fairly reasonable and realistic policy prescriptions in general, even if this is a ridiculous rigamarole) can solve.
Yes, it’s ridiculous that organized retail theft has gotten so bad that stores can’t stay open, given that places with more reasonable policies where teenagers stealing a snickers still won’t see any jail time but professional criminals will be in the pen, but it’s what Eric Adams has to work with.
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