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. 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. Smash-and-grabs are awful, but they’re pretty rare (and already very much felonies). 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. Before dawn on a November day in New York City, thieves used a hammer to smash their way into a closed Givenchy boutique and left with $80,000 in designer duds.īut wait. At a Louis Vuitton boutique in an Illinois mall, more than a dozen robbers overwhelmed sales clerks and made off with $120,000 in loot. At another Nordstrom, this one in Southern California, thieves were caught on video assaulting workers with bear spray. The incidents these stories use to illustrate the problem are genuine mayhem: At a Bay Area Nordstrom, police say, as many as 80 thieves executed a coordinated attack on the store.
To stabilize their businesses and make their communities safe, these executives, advocates, and officers say, they need different changes in both local and federal law. Employees don’t feel safe in stores, and understaffing makes theft even easier. Internet platforms where criminals profit are indifferent to pleas to shut down illegal storefronts. Bail reform means that thieves are roaming the streets before they stand trial. The stores are losing the war.Īccording to the retail executives, industry advocacy groups, and law-enforcement officers who have described their failing battles against these attacks, the problem has been building for years, but a spate of recent changes in laws and attitudes has threatened to tip American shopping into chaos: Felony-theft laws, they say, are now too permissive. In the process, they’re endangering people’s lives and sapping corporate profits.
#The very organized thief christmas edition windows
Thieves smash windows at luxury clothing stores, go full-on Supermarket Sweep in the aisles of drugstores, and sell their wares undetected on Amazon or eBay or Facebook Marketplace.
The attacks are common, and they’re escalating in severity.
On local news and in national publications, they paint a shocking picture: Across the United States, retail stores are fighting a war against large, violent, highly organized criminal gangs. You’ve probably seen the shoplifting stories, if only because there are a lot of them.
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