> "Though the spike seen in the data generates more questions than answers, one thing is clear: A single (albeit large and busy) store’s decision to report a majority of its shoplifting incidents doubled the entire city’s monthly shoplifting rates."

Seems like the logical solution would be an objective academic study, where anonymous trained observers (e.g. present/former loss prevention types) count all the number of thefts. The stores would allow the observers to make the count by whatever means appropriate, e.g. whatever monitoring the stores currently use, additional hidden RF tags that wouldn’t be cost-effective otherwise, etc.. Then anonymize any stats for public release. No attempt would, or would be allowed to, be made by the observers to intervene. When the welfare of an entire City is at stake, it seems a worthwhile activity. For objectivity sake, the academics should be from out of state.

More direct and certified identification of actual theft than comparing units purchased in inventory v. actual purchases of said units. Should make it possible to then quantify thefts by employees v. shoplifters.

Arguing about data gets the City nowhere. Find out what’s actually going on. The sooner, the quicker.

It’s interesting that they would present statistics and then say “statistics are flawed so you can’t draw any conclusions”. If the number of reported incidents went down, even if retailers only report 10% of incidents, wouldn’t that still indicate a reduction? Are they suggesting that there’s a hypothesis that cases are going up yet, for some reason, people stopped calling the police?

It feels like a case of “we wanted the stats to show one thing, but it didn’t, so let’s cast doubt on the stats.”

How to respond to crime - Enforce existing laws, else voters will eventually make the necessary changes.

Non-paywalled copy https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/one-target-store-o...

> As San Francisco remains locked in a fierce debate over how best to respond to crime, shoplifting has become one flash point of the battle, dividing people across sharp political lines.

It's interesting how one political party is perceived as "pro shop-lifting." I never would have imagined that would be a position any reasonable person would take.

It's basically Not In My Backyard. Voters don't live in the areas they talk about.

i think the progressive are less 'pro shop-lifting' and more about 'how can we stop our police from murdering our brown citizens'.

i dont see this is going anyplace good, but at least dont misrepresent the intent

It isn't about anyone dying, it's about crime stats that show that brown citizens commit a disproportionate amount of crime. If no one is incentivized to report crimes, then problem solved! No more racist crime stats. No need to actually address the cause when you can just redefine the issue so it's not a problem anymore.

It's the same reason BART doesn't release footage of subway crimes anymore.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...

Also, who's getting murdered by the sf police? https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/published-repor...

> 'how can we stop our police from murdering our brown citizens‘

Speaking of not misrepresenting: it’s not murder if a person is killed lawfully.

From a purely legal point of view with the current laws, yes. But it's especially in this context not actual misrepresentation but rather the point of discussion.

They criticize the process of people being killed that they find to be unethical/ unlawful. From their point of view the 'killing' of a citizen in those cases is murder. What is and what isn't murder is maybe from a 'legal' point of view clear in those cases (in the discussed country) but this neither applies to all countries nor does it account for the ethical view of this 'killing'

The US police have killed 20 [1] unarmed people in the US in 2021 overall. Given that about 50% [2] tend to be black and Hispanic, I would put it at 10.

That is a statistically tiny number. Making the squares of the 10 shootings safer for pedestrians would save more people than stopping police shootings.

The magnitude of the reaction should never be the metric for urgency. Statistics serve as a much better proxy, especially when the methodology isn't outright false.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585140/people-shot-to-de...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Regarding misrepresentation… The MSM has a good portion of people thinking Rittenhouse killed ‘brown’ people.

Maybe they could avoid police interactions altogether by not committing crimes?

Do you genuinely believe that committing crimes is the only way to have an interaction with police...? Why? Why do you think cops won't racially profile and pull over anyone they want, respond to situations based on personal biases instead of rational decision-making, and force an interaction with anyone they want?