NYC Has A Shoplifting Problem… And Kiosks Aren’t Going To Stop It!

Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,

Like all Democrat-run cities that turned against police in 2020, New York City has a crime problem, including an explosive uptick in shoplifting. Fortunately for New York City store owners, Mayor Eric Adams has a plan. The problem is that, as with all lefty plans, it will cost money and almost certainly be completely useless.

Ever since the George Floyd riots caused leftist-managed cities to defund their police, all sorts of crimes have increased. In New York City, the crime that’s really taken off is shoplifting.

In the first eight months of 2021, shoplifting in New York increased by 30% over rates in 2020. Of course, one could argue that slowly ending the lockdown was what made the difference. However, that wouldn’t explain what happened in 2022. In that year, shoplifting went up by another 45% over rates in 2021, with an even better marker being the fact that it was 275% higher than a decade or so earlier.

Shoplifting may be a non-violent crime, but it has a disastrous effect on people in the community because stores, including big box stores, respond to theft in two different ways: First, they raise their prices; then when that proves ineffective, they pick up their marbles and go home by shutting down stores. In San Francisco, for example, Walgreens closed five stores due to shoplifting. Target, meanwhile, predicts that retail crime will cost it as much as $1.3 billion:

Crime-battered retail giant Target said it expects to suffer as much as a $1.3 billion hit to its bottom line because of “theft and organized crime,” according to the company’s first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday.

The Minneapolis-based chain said its profit will be squeezed by “$500 million more than what we saw last year” – when the company lost as much as $800 million from “inventory shrink.”

Considering that Target voiced its full-throated support for BLM and dug deep in its pocket to support the communist organization, one can’t help but notice an “actions have consequences” scenario at work. That’s a shame because Target used to be a very nice place. Now, though, aside from shoplifting, lots of people (me included) are fed up with its Pride shenanigans, which it’s now aimed at children. But I digress…

New York mayor Eric Adams seems to have been feeling the heat from merchants in New York City, so his office has announced a “crackdown on shoplifting plan.”

As always, though, when the government steps in to help, the devil is in the details:

Clown world intensifies. 🤡🌎

NYC plan to “crackdown” on shoplifting. 🤨 pic.twitter.com/4MHcnBgucn

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) May 20, 2023

And yes, that screen shot is real, not a Photoshop. According to Fox 5’s full report,

The new crackdown includes giving first-time offenders intervention programs instead of prosecution, de-escalation training for retail employees, establishing neighborhood retail watch groups to share information about a theft in real-time with one another and the police, and installing kiosks in stores to connect would-be thieves with social service programs.

One of the things that everyone has noticed about shoplifters is that they’re not starved, Dickensian-style waifs stealing a loaf of bread to survive. Instead, they’re organized gangs that go in and steal merchandise that has a good retail value on the street:

San Francisco pic.twitter.com/klaiesGE2C

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) May 16, 2023

Or if they’re eating what they steal, it’s party time, not starvation time:

Why is Walmart struggling in urban areas?

pic.twitter.com/jDQlStgBWp

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) May 19, 2023

What’s happening is organized crime:

Last Walmart in North Portland Closing Down … they cannot overcome the losses from shoplifting.

The people of Portland voted for this so retail stores are exiting. 🤡 🌎

🔊 pic.twitter.com/EyE6jrRTFJ

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) May 19, 2023

In other words, little police kiosks promising social services (which will augment all the posters about social services in the crime-ridden NY subway) are not going to change things. Nor will friendly little “intervention programs” affect what is hardcore criminal activity. The NYC plan is taking a flyswatter to an out-of-control wild boar.

I would say that the people of NYC deserve better but, actually, they don’t. This is what they voted for. It’s not just that Adams garnered 80.4% of the vote in Manhattan, 76% in the Bronx, 70.8% in Brooklyn, and 59.8% in Queens, with only Staten Island showing the good sense to vote for Curtis Sliwa (66.4% of the votes). It’s also that a total of only 1,125,000 turned out to vote, out of a city with a population that’s close to 9,000,000.

The only ones I feel for are the conservatives (some of whom I count among my good friends) who took the time and made the effort to vote. As to those people, I’ve heard that Florida’s a nice place, as are most of the southern states.