Wow, I'm really surprised I hasn't heard about this before. Part of me wants to believe that the new reporting system accidentally refiled every historical report or something, but if that was the case, you'd think someone involved would have been willing to say that in response to a question.

That doesn't explain the decline in shoplifting reports over the last decade. Presumably if all stores had been doing whatever that Target was doing (and I note that the store in question dropped back down to normal levels the following month), the overall rates would have been three times as high... and dropped at the same rate over the course of a decade.

Trying to interpret trends in garbage data is a fool’s errand, and the store dropped to “normal levels” presumably because it stopped reporting incidents.