Is there a wave of retail theft? Data tell a more complicated story than the headlines.
For the past 18 months, America has allegedly faced a shoplifting tsunami. You’ve probably seen the videos: a wave of people, masked and hooded, flooding out of a high-end department store, clutching thousands of dollars of merchandise. From San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York City, it seems like shoplifters are getting not only more prolific, but more audacious. Retailers and law enforcement officials—not to mention conservative commentators—have been quick to claim a nationwide crisis, driven by soft-on-crime policies.
But is that really what’s going on? Writing recently in The Atlantic, columnist Amanda Mull raised some doubts. She notes that much of the evidence for the shoplifting surge comes from scary but rare anecdotes, backed up by industry statistics based on private data that the public can’t double check. Mull’s criticisms echo progressive activists, who have downplayed a story they see as a threat to criminal justice reform in big, blue cities.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Dispatch
______________________
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in The Dispatch