Disagree that crime in your neighborhood has dropped? Just because your car has been broken into and your neighbor got robbed doesnt mean there's a trend. Anecdotes arent data. Do you have a source for that?
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/sf-da-announces-homici...
It’s a pretty well-observed fact (opinion polls etc) that most people across the country think crime has been going up over the last few decades, even as the crime rate has been going down.
So I don’t think “just ask people what they think” is a sound approach here. Most people are just wrong on this point.
That said I’m open to the general causal chain we’re discussing here; I’d just like to see some actual data on prosecution rates and crime reporting in SF.
There's been a rather noteworthy series of protests over the past summer on the subject of whether or not it's worth it to pay for some of these institutions.
Don't let in people without a device and ban people who are caught stealing once. If they force the doors and come in call the cops and prosecute for felony burglary even if they were only originally banned for stealing socks originally.
Share bad lists and stealing socks means that you are suddenly banned from every store in 100 miles.
Make exceptions for curbside pickup and pre scheduled trips to the grocery store/pharmacy where you will pay for the security that will walk around with you.
Expire people off the list after 5 years of one theft or never after a string of thefts.
For the normal customer nothing happens your phone silently attests from your pocket that you aren't on the list by pinging a service and retrieving a token not sharing your info with the store.
Losers here an alarm sound and a voice telling them to buzz off on penalty of jail.
If they're not going to jail for openly shoplifting, why do you think they'd go to jail for this?
By rouge do you mean red, as in left-leaning? Or rogue?
every. single. time.
usually what I see is someone with a roller luggage fill it up and then calmly walk out the door
This does not follow from increasing inequality. The poor do not get poorer, rich just get richer (faster).
The poor stay poor. The lower-middle class becomes poor.
What was the context here if you don’t mind sharing, why one dollar and not your whole wallet? Why pull a gun?? Isn’t that a felony? Won’t police respond immediately to the report of someone threatening your life via brandishing a gun in public (more people in danger if not caught)?
They could ask the potential victim first, and then, if the value is too low, not bother pulling a gun. But all potential victims have an incentive to lie and say they only have $1. Knowing that, a rational robber would pull a gun without requesting the info first.
Regarding police responding immediately: you can't call the police until after robber has lowered their gun and/or left the scene. So by the time you call the police, you're no longer being threatened.
As for why I don't know.
I would not be surprised if the murder rate reduction is significantly attributable to changes in statistical reporting. I know a few cities that play games with the numbers even on murders.
Please don't flamebait. The poster is talking about year-on-year changes in a neighborhood, not decade-on-decade changes in a whole country. The relevance of personal experience is drastically higher in the first case.
But I think it's worth noting that "crime is rising" and "crime is not rising" tend to be aliases for the real opinions: "crime is too high" and "crime is not too high".
Violent crimes had a multi-decade drop. SF is a very localized anomaly in regards to property crimes.
Los Angeles and New York to name two other prominent cities, are drowning in an epic ongoing crime wave.
SF, LA, NYC all have the same malfunction in terms of city governance.
LA -
LA Mag, July 2021: "‘It’s a Puzzle’: Experts Are Trying to Figure Out What’s Causing L.A.’s Crime Wave"
A puzzle. Experts. Ha ha ha ha. Ha. Bullshit.
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/crime-in-los-angeles/
NYC -
"NYPD Announces Citywide Crime Statistics for May 2021"
"For the month of May 2021, overall index crime in New York City rose 22% compared with May 2020, driven by a 46.7% increase in robbery (1,182 v. 806) and a 35.6% increase in grand larceny (2,848 v. 2,101). Felony assault saw a 20.5% increase compared to May 2020 (1,979 v. 1,643), and shooting incidents increased to 173 v. 100 in May 2020 (+73%)."
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0603/nypd-citywide-cri...
Some of that is Covid reductions in 2020 (year over year comps), and some of it is still up considerably over 2019 figures. Murders in May were up 100% vs 2019 for example, burglaries were up around 17%. Felony assaults were up slightly vs 2019. Grand larceny was up about 25% vs 2019.
[1] https://compstat.nypdonline.org/2e5c3f4b-85c1-4635-83c6-22b2...
Creating trusted data is a social process that many forums aren’t designed to facilitate.
People who don't believe in covid vaccines -- for instance -- are living in a world of anecdotes, untrusting of easily manipulable data.
But it's where we're at. In a world where you can't trust the data and your friends are addicted to consuming propaganda, what the fuck is truth?
--Prez
1: https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-in...
But the nice neighborhoods are hiring private security and in some cases threatening tax revolt
Mission accomplished: fewer cars on the road! But no money coming in either.
Then, because many students won't be able to keep up, the 'magnet' school will lower standards.
Funny how that works.
I notice it’s WSJ complaining.
More “government is inept” sentiment to justify private armies.
Under Penal Code section 667(e), you can receive a life term if you are convicted of a serious or violent felony AND you have twice before been convicted of serious and violent felonies. See https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/us/california-convicts-ar...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-archives-steven-bell-the-bic...
With the American System each year failing a larger and larger percentage of the population, while the upper elites continue to hoard wealth and starve the government, then it makes more and more poor people turn to illegal means to make money.
Much like drug gangs in the inner city. However this will also turn into the nasty spiral of gang-controlled neighborhoods chasing out legit economic activity and becoming even more poor.
What we need is a decent civil society. But America is an oligarchy and they've figured out how to use social media to block any meaningful populist progressive reform by organizing a sufficient opposition with astroturfing and fake news.
I'd rather spend my money on a network of competing private protection companies if I didn't have to pay taxes for the police. Once the system is in place you can create all sort of charity based options - or tax funded, if you like the idea of forcefully stealing money from citizens' profit - to grant protection to those who can't afford it.
I'd prefer to fix the cops rather than sign up for a MetaCops subscription in my burbclave.
Edit: spelling
I keep thinking of this event that happened to me in the UK, where laws are equally useless at preventing theft, and staff are just powerless to do anything about it. I chased down a shoplifter. I cornered him in an alley. He stopped, looked at me, and this brief conversation took place. (and nobody ever believes me, but I don't care; this really did happen)
Him: What are you doing?
Me: I'm chasing you
Him: why?
Me: Because you're a fucking thief!
Him: (confused)...nobody's ever done that before.
Me: (shocked) ... well, I AM, so fucking run!
He dropped the bag (which contained mostly expensive meat and cheese and some other expensive-ish items - apparently really common theft targets) - and ran off. I took the bag back to the store.
Now, I didn't give a shit about a 100 pound loss to Tesco, but if we've completely given up on the rule of law, I'm not sure that's a society I'm happy to live in.
The average cashier's ability to administer lethal force is probably not a major influence on the prevalence of shoplifting in Texas.
Now that permitless carry is legal it remains to be seen if there's an uptick in vigilantism, but I have my doubts.
At a CVS? Not likely at all.
...but...theres dumb people everywhere, so when you decide to shop lift in Texas the risk profile is certainly different than it is in CA.
Someone carrying a firearm should be more willing to nonviolently confront a thief than someone that's unarmed.
https://reason.com/2018/04/20/cdc-provides-more-evidence-tha...
In TX they'd be more intimidating, I'm sure. Unless corporate bans guns.
As a life-long Texan, this sounds ridiculous to me. A Wal Mart employee is more intimidating, simply because they're Texan?
This is not the 1850's.
(Oddly I’ve only seen unarmed, tired looking security in CVS. Perhaps they’re too cheap to pay for armed gaurds.)
It's not ever really geared at shoplifters though, as a lot of people seem to forget that shoplifting isn't really the biggest crime you can do in a store.
It wouldn't be the corporation arming the staff, it would be the staff arming themselves via a CCW/CHL. The first letter states 'concealed', so by definition you shouldn't see it.
>A Wal Mart employee is more intimidating, simply because they're Texan
Its less about any individual employee, and more about the general culture and nature of crime in the two areas. If I were a criminal in Texas, I would undoubtedly prefer crimes with less chance of confrontation.
When I worked at Best Buy, loss prevention was very clearly instructed that using force to stop a shoplifter would get you fired.
If your anecdote proves anything, it is the relative safety of that liberal area of PA. The fact that a manager of a Walgreens was comfortable confronting a criminal without real consequences speaks to the level of danger they were in.
If you've spent time in any rougher areas of Texas (I have), you'd agree that physically confronting a criminal over petty theft, as a store manager, carries a huge risk of violent escalation—something you'd probably want to avoid in a city with a higher murder rate.
Can't imagine anyone doing that for Tesco, though. Especially unpaid.
The ones these people are hitting? Not a snowball's chance in hell. An individual could walk out with 10 baskets full of medicine and still not be worth the trouble to pull a gun for all the legal headaches that will bring.
Given the sentiments of your last paragraph, why did you choose to send the criminal away and return Tesco’s stolen beef?
Also, what you propose radically changes society for the worse. If Tesco can't assume a high trust environment to sell their goods, they will implement policies to protect themselves that are more expensive/less convenient for everyone. Thomas Sowell has written extensively about this.
P: I chased this guy for law and justice, not meat and cheese.
Q: why did you chase for meat cheese?
The store has already accounted for shoplifting and shrinkage in their budget, and any steps they might take to combat it will be systemic via policy and by working with law enforcement to bust major groups (the subject of the actual article) and not one-off foot-chases.
You might argue that a store will charge higher prices in an environment with shoplifting than without, but how much does that really boil down to in terms of the customer's final bill? Bread becomes £0.02 more expensive in a store that has accounted for shoplifting? Does anyone care?
Finally, there is almost no secondary market for food, so, in OP's case, the guy was likely stealing in order to eat, and not to just fence the goods for money.
This is clearly not about meat and cheese. This is about stamping out the attitude that some people have that allow them to walk into a store and just ...take stuff. This time it was from a large company. Next time it's from your house or car. What is the cost of living in a civil society where people don't routinely steal? Apparently, in a world where police are unwilling to respond it's acts like this. Thank you OP.
It's one thing to go after someone who steals from you or some other individual, but appointing yourself the vigilante protector of the grocer class is not about defending society, it's about your personal drives.
The food you returned almost certainly wound up in the trash (stores have no way of knowing you're not a weirdo who contaminates food for kicks), and the cost of administering 'rescued product' is more than that of just writing off the loss as a business expense, which you'd better believe they already budget around.
Here's an excellent clip about a famous criminal living free in Seattle that happily expounds on his illegal activity: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868
The evidence for this happening in economically-meaningful numbers is scarce. What we do see happening is those productive people disengaging from that broken society—civically, physically and emotionally.
It doesn't take numbers meaningful to California to have a meaningful effect on other states, where housing costs are massively skyrocketing due to an influx of new residents.
I'm going posit that it's perception more than any actual changes due to fleeing 'fornians.
This doesn't prove someone's opinion that criminals are being coddled and productive people are being driven away.
I don't see how not prosecuting repeated offenders is not coddling, as pointed out, the guy ended up murdering. There's very much a cultural difference.
So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.
Walmart and Target, among others, reportedly monitor small thefts and let you get up to the felony threshold over multiple incidents before swooping in.
> In TX can You Legally Shoot & Kill a Shoplifter? The short answer is…not unless they somehow injure you in the process of committing the theft, making it a robbery. “During the process of committing the theft” would include while trying to escape with the property... One thing that is UNIQUE to Texas is the ability to use deadly force to protect property, even if you are not in fear for your life.
Even though I doubt CVS security guards are trained the shoot shoplifters, the preception that this is a possibility would deter low level criminals tasked with shoplifting
http://legas.legrandelaw.com/criminal-justice/in-tx-can-you-...
My mom worked at Macy's and reported endless problems with organized shoplifting in the 1980's and 1990's. One time a whole family came into the Men's clothing department after her shift, the dad kept the clerk distracted, the mom and the kids took a few racks of suits and loaded them into their car.
She said that the security guards were loathe to use force on anyone because Macy's could get sued; that didn't stop shoplifters from running over a security guard in the parking lot.
I worked at a supermarket where the security was entirely undercover (probably because they were more afraid of us stealing than the customers) and I knew nothing about the security until the day I saw a massively overweight woman tackle a man who was leaving the store.
I read this book
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Mafia-Ethnic-Succession-Organiz...
which describes similar organized theft organizations working in the 1970s, how the goods were fenced, etc.
In the south someone is likely going to call you out for that, at which point a confrontation may ensue and it has a much higher likelihood of a gun being involved.
I've been called out by presumably minimum wage employees before for opening food in the gas station while waiting on family members to finish shopping or use the restroom.
There are studies that show people from the south are more aggressive and take much more personal offense to perceived disrespectful behavior.
Can you point to where your scenario has happened?
Because I’m all for hypotheticals, so long as we admit the rarity and precedent before saying there is a problem.
I've never once seen a security guard in a Texas CVS. It actually sounds preposterous to me. Charging $3 for a 20oz soda is the real crime.
In contrast victim crimes like theft create a huge surface area of vulnerability. Every time the crime is committed, by definition the criminals are interacting with an adversary who’s extremely motivated to collaborate with law enforcement. Victim based criminal networks are basically unscalable and extremely short-lived for this reason. Unless the political classes are complicit and refuse to let law enforcement do their job of protecting victims.
But laws like RICO—which allows low level goons to be held liable for the whole enterprise’s crimes—absolutely decimated the Mafia.
On the other hand the reality is that there is a limited supply of drug users. Demand side enforcement could end the "war" quickly.
Enforcement of sellers is dumb, people selling drugs isn't the problem. It's their usage that's what we want to stop so the enforcement should be on that side.
And no you can't prosecute buyers. They are white middle class people.
We have 20 year old people who end up in jail for life because they assassinated someone. It's insane, they're doing it for just 20000 euro!
So, if your crew stole $10,000 worth of stuff over the past year, you’d be looking at a $10k theft charge even if you individually only stole $50 of merchandise.
and so our solution is to change the law, instead of dealing with whatever is causing people to steal in the first place.
Theft is a grey area between non-violence and violence, I'd rather we deal with the root causes rather than just making it less of a crime.
If murders were overcrowding prisons, i doubt many people would be calling for reduced murder sentencing (although im sure some would)
That's not to say there isn't a policing solution to this problem! Just that dialing up consequences isn't it.
I grew up in a poor area and we had a neighborhood fence. Let's call him 'Casey' since that was his name. Everyone knew Casey was selling stolen items and there was sort of a joke in the town about getting a 'Casey discount'. It sounds like Casey is probably operating an Amazon store now.
As it is I'm paying both for hard drives in Utah for the NSA to store my contacts and photos and track logs, then again (formerly) for iCloud to do it a second time. It's inefficient.
Cities are destroying their own business districts and losing sales tax revenue by refusing to enforce shoplifting laws.
I was trying to buy some allergy spray at CVS, and couldn't get anyone to unlock the case. So I left and ordered it online from Costco, at 1/3 the price.
The story isn't about people selling stolen goods on Amazon. It's about organized theft operations. One way to stop theft is to reduce the ability to sell stolen goods, but that infringes on ownership rights of a large number of people that want to sell things online. I'm sure large corporations would love it if you can't buy their goods second hand.
At the end of the day, protecting property rights is a job for the state. Since it sounds its being organized, the criminal organization might be exploiting recent changes in sentencing and prosecution:
> Retail investigators blame changes in sentencing laws in some states for an uptick in thefts. In California, a 2014 law downgraded the theft of less than $950 worth of goods to a misdemeanor from a felony. Target recently reduced its operating hours in five San Francisco stores, citing rising thefts.