NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Recent news stories describe a shoplifting surge, but this narrative conflates an array of very different offenses into a single crime wave said to be cresting right now, all over the country, in a frenzy of naked avarice and shocking violence. Smash-and-grabs are awful, but they're pretty rare (and already very much felonies). Nevertheless, a handful of viral videos and some troubling statistics from retailers and industry groups have set Americans on edge during the year's most economically essential shopping season, wondering if the mall where they buy their Christmas presents might be next. The deeper you search for real, objective evidence of an accelerating retail crime wave, the more difficult it is to be sure that you know anything at all.

To determine what, if anything, is up with shoplifting in America, we have to answer two questions: Is theft really more common than it was in the recent past, and is current theft really more severe or harmful? You would think that answers to both of these questions would be readily available, if only because the topic has been discussed so much, but the reality of the situation is not quite so clear-cut.

The first indicator that the theft-wave narrative may not hold water is that stories about it tend to garble terms and numbers. They pair broad statistics about the commonness of shoplifting or larceny of any kind with lurid descriptions of brazen armed robberies (which aren't included in any shoplifting stats, because they are a different crime entirely) to illustrate a narrowly defined problem: organized retail crime. This is identified as repetitive, mostly nonconfrontational theft for profit, whose perpetrators strive to evade detection and keep each theft strategically below local dollar thresholds for felony larceny. Misdemeanors don't attract law-enforcement attention, the theory goes, so criminals are able to strike again and again and flip their hauls to fences, who consolidate millions of dollars of stolen goods into inventory for online storefronts, where Amazon and Etsy and eBay shield them from detection and punishment.

Whether any of these offenses--simple shoplifting, organized theft, or violent smash-and-grabs--are actually happening more frequently overall is, at best, ambiguous. If we look closely at crime statistics in San Francisco, which news stories paint as the epicenter of this crime wave and whose crime stats are often used to illustrate these stories, the idea doesn't seem immediately ridiculous. Robberies, which is where smash-and-grabs generally fall, are slightly down citywide from 2020, according to the San Francisco Police Department, but larceny theft, which is where shoplifting would fall, is indeed up more than 19 percent. In the city's central district, where expensive fashion boutiques and other kinds of retail outlets are clustered together, larceny theft was up 88 percent from 2020 as of early December, when CNN used the number to demonstrate the dire nature of San Francisco's crime problem.

You've gotta admit, that's a worrying number. Except, as you might remember, 2020 was kind of a weird year--people stayed home and many stores were closed for months at a time, which helped make the year's crime statistics, to put it mildly, unique. In San Francisco, the murder rate was (and still is) up, but recorded larceny thefts were way, way down compared with 2019. Robberies were also down by almost a quarter. This year, the 88 percent increase in the central district's larceny reports is still not enough to bring the area's theft rate back up to pre-pandemic levels, which themselves had been dropping for decades.

So far, this dynamic holds true for much of the country, according to FBI statistics. In 2020, the most recent year for which data are available, reports of robbery and larceny fell off a cliff. If we see a big jump in the near future, especially in violent smash-and-grabs, it's worth asking how much the recent media attention itself contributed to the spike. Research has shown that sensational news coverage can influence potential offenders to adopt highly publicized tactics in copycat crimes.

Tweet   @brothersjudd