Target to close 9 stores across four states because of theft and organized crime
cnn.com
cnn.com
I don’t understand the proliferation of these ridiculous policies. San Francisco is a poster child for what happens when crime is made legal. Yet more municipalities follow in its footsteps.
Reducing incarceration should be the goal, but it needs to achieved by addressing those fundamental requirements.
This trope has little to do with the recent spate of property crimes that spiked right after criminal penalties were removed. These are not desperate people, but rather people who willfully and repeatedly exploit an opportunity to harm others without punishment.
Here's just one, as I'm on mobile.
https://crosscut.com/2019/10/whats-seattle-doing-solve-its-s...
There have always been crimes that aren't particularly well enforced, and lately the whole system is struggling to enforce low-level criminal law since prosecutors and judges' calendars are full, jails and prisons are full, and yet there is still more crime. Perhaps the difference between places (which all have the same laws on the books) is cultural; perhaps it's that "word got around", as per your link; but it's not because the law says it's not a crime.
I don't think it's really about not getting their basic necessities of life. More about just not knowing anything else to do with their lives.
Especially for smaller crimes like store theft, it would make a whole lot more sense to put them in community service so they will be surrounded by real communities with people focused on making an honest living.
And it's not about finding the knowledge. It's about constantly getting slapped in the face with it every day by being surrounded by people that don't even know anything else. It normalizes it.
Maybe it's time to look beyond the instinctive kneejerk response and see what really works.
We talk about how jail teaches criminals and hardens them, but what about all the opportunists seeing how they can just get free stuff without work. We substituted one failure for another, and made it worse for everyone overall.
There is no way to justify this lawlessness, unless you want to hasten our demise into UBI serfdom.
Maybe look at about every other first-world country in the world where it works a lot better. There's not many first-world countries that have crime levels this heavy and especially hardened violent and organised crime.
It could be caused by not just the penal system but also societal norms, income differences etc. A holistic approach is needed.
> We talk about how jail teaches criminals and hardens them, but what about all the opportunists seeing how they can just get free stuff without work. We substituted one failure for another, and made it worse for everyone overall.
I think this is part of the problem, the strong American aversion to any kind of government assistance to people that need it "because they don't work". It leads to really disadvantaged groups that in turn feel like outcasts and start behaving as such.
The challenge I see is that I agree with you, don’t know what to do, and no one seems to be proposing viable solutions.
Yes, it would be great to achieve what other “first-world” countries do to have such low crime. But what do we do?
What seems to be happening now is you have some locations stopping prosecution, crimes going up, businesses closing. People who don’t like crime, and can afford it, moving to suburbs. Or exurbs even with remote work.
These suburbs not only prosecute, but execute. I live in a suburb that activated the national guard because they thought people might riot and loot the lululemon. That’s an overreaction, I think. But the lululemon was not looted and it remains open.
I fear that in 10 years we’ll have a spiral of crime areas and rich people areas. I have little sympathy for the criminals, but the vast majority of people are good and can’t afford a $500k 2 bedroom condo in the burbs just to be able to get groceries and overpriced home goods from target.
When given a choice between 1) vote for change and wait and 2) vote for change and move to a secure location; I think people will continue to choose #2.
Live in hell? Are we still talking about shoplifting? Maybe society is finally getting some perspective and collectively deciding that someone walking out of a multi-billion dollar company with a shopping cart full of booze is just not that big of a problem to be solved in comparison to the actual problems actually affecting people.
It seems to deter shoplifting, right?
Seems like not jailing shoplifters is resulting in increased shoplifting based on increased shoplifting rates. And repeat individuals, not just more people.
So jailing does deter.
I think there are better ways to prevent recidivism than jail. But if the only options the state is willing to try are “jail” or “release over and over,” I think we need to choose jail until we can develop something better. And this will result in lots of people in prison.
Most of these repeat shop-wipers own fancy sports cars - they don't want regular, boring employment
The reason the US leads the world in incarceration is because the US has a lot of criminals: "If America put nobody in prison except for murderers and rapists, we would still have a larger per capita prison population than Germany (96 per 100,000 vs. 67 per 100,000). Not a single critic of mass incarceration has ever even attempted to come to terms with this reality"
Would you go loot an Apple Store if you didn't have "adequate" dental care? Would you rape and murder an Asian shopkeeper if you didn't have "clean water"? No, what an absolutely absurd hypothesis. And yet you people routinely state that is the reason others commit crime.
Look at these stats from a supposedly anti-incarceration institute: https://twitter.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1698911461031190835
For those released from prison for a violent crime, the risk of committing a murder is 1%. Wow that sounds low. 1% would be 1000 murders per 100k! Comparing it to country-wide stats, that would make it the most violent country on the planet by a factor of 200. A 1% risk of murder is an insanely high number. And a 71% chance of recommitting another violent crime!
This is a case where the FBI needs to put some old-fashioned boots on the ground and rip the rings, themselves, apart.
Pawn shops have sets of laws that apply to them in order to prevent them from being fences for stolen goods. Do those same laws not apply to Amazon?
Not true. First, attaching penalties to the theft will reduce the pool of willing thieves. Second, under threat of prosecution, the thieves can turn on their handlers and cooperate with investigators. But when the law states that there are no consequences for theft, there is also no incentive to do this.
You say this, but Prohibition and the Drug War both provide direct counter-evidence to that statement.
There is always someone desperate enough to be on the bottom rungs of criminal organizations.
You reduce organized crime by taking out the leaders.
Whether someone chooses the path of crime out of desperation depends on one's culture.
If the crime organization has an hierarchy then it might be easier to take out the leaders.
You take out the leaders by arresting the weakest link and working up.
You may enjoy watching The Wire. Aside from being maybe the best tv show ever, they go deeply how to take out organized crime (and the societal issues driving crime).
What law, in what jurisdiction, states this?
> Under current state law, shoplifting merchandise valued under $950 is considered a misdemeanor and often not investigated.
The law classifies it as a misdemeanor. Police aren’t investigating and prosecutors aren’t prosecuting.
So it’s an issue of enforcing law vs technically having a law.
Cities can individually choose to change this and deter shoplifting by prosecuting this as misdemeanors can still have up to a year in jail.
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/shoplifting-san-fr...
And this isn't exactly the same thing as the law saying there are no consequences, which is what the parent poster was claiming.
Not when the other option is starving.
Has the rate of starving skyrocketed in the past few years.
I want to understand your logic as it seems strange to think that starvation has anything to do with these thefts at all.
You might think it’s barbaric, and if not done correctly it is. Done properly it is a safe punishment which would dramatically reduce recidivism.
You might not mind going to prison twice. You will definitely mind getting caned twice.
Make it embarrassing.
No criminal record. No jail time, which costs a lot of money to tax payers. Just an ass whooping.
“#iwasarrestedbypaulblartandmustincludethishashtagforever”
Incapacitate 300 people and reduce crime by 33%? What a deal!
"While retailers and the NRF are increasingly saying crime is cutting into profits, losses from internal and external theft last year were largely on par with historical trends. They made up 65% of total shrink, the survey found.
External theft, which includes organized retail crime, was again reported as the largest source of shrink last year at 36.15%, but that was slightly below 37% in 2021. Internal theft, or goods stolen by employees, rose slightly to 28.85% from 28.5% in 2021. Process and control failures and errors made up 27.29% of shrink in 2022, up from 25.7% the year prior."
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/organized-retail-crime-and-t...
I doubt Target or other are "trying to have us believe". Closing a store is quite a big business decision, it's not likely they are doing that in order to promote a thesis.
While I don't dispute your numbers, it is entirely possible that they are correct as an average, but Target has 2000 stores in the US, and they are closing only 9.
I mentioned 9 out of 2000, hoping that it is self evident that a statement about stable average theft over 2000 does not contradict the fact that in the extremes you can have a large increase in theft that results in unprofitable stores.
These people are also more usually on the side of cops. Especially when it comes to “rioting”. The events of 2020 has allowed for a new boogeyman to be used in these decisions and it basically softens the impact.
These are all growing or at least stable cities with strong economies. It seems unlikely that they were forced to close these stores for some reason and was forced to come up with a post hoc rationalization.
- We closed a store due to a miserable economic outlook: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2023/08/12/consumer...
- We closed a store due to crime
Some people assume if you're denying the retailers' claims on theft, you're really just burying your head in the sand about crime... but no.
Target is a corporation. A decision like this is not made so transparently and neatly that you can package up it up in a headline. Whatever ends up as the headline is what Target wants to signal, not just to the market, but to its own stores and employees.
Pretending theft isnt a problem is naive at best but lets be honest its agenda pushing.
At Target's scale any operational risk is large enough to be held up as justification for closing a store, and no single operational risk is why they'd close one, let alone 4.
They could have thrown darts at a board and anything from consumer spending to labor to climate change would have applied without a single fabrication: their footprint is just that large. In the end Target framed this as closing stores for safety reasons: https://corporate.target.com/press/releases/2023/09/Target-C...
Target did not choose to close stores for safety reasons. They're facing massive economic headwinds, a tepid outlook, and need to close cut costs. I shopped at one of the stores they're closing last week: people steal out of stores with infinitely worse margins than Target, and it's safer than stores down the block.
They didn't just look at safety like the press release implies, they looked at a laundry list of factors: ones that the people who wrote that press release wouldn't even know exist, and decided on a strategy, then iterated on that strategy and the positioning until it came out like it did.
_
I really thought I headed off the inevitable political soapbox speakers by stating as plainly as two letters that my comment wasn't political commentary but somehow you turned "n" and "o." into... "I think it's ok that they're stealing".
Not all of us have had our brains so absolutely rotted out that everything is part of a political agenda. Maybe it's because I wasn't born here but at the end of the day I can't relate to the kind of animalistic governance-turned-team-sport sickness that some people seem stuck on.
> Not all of us have had our brains so absolutely rotted out that everything is part of a political agenda.
You are actively participating in a heavily politicized forum and are perfectly aware of the current cultural and political zeitgeist. I don't believe your holier-than-thou claim.
One Target accounts for half the shoplifting in the entire city of San Francisco. https://sfist.com/2021/11/24/half-of-all-reported-sf-shoplif...
Things got worse since then and they're now robbed an average every 10 minutes: https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/09/every-10-minutes-downtown-...
It has more security than the store closing, and has more homeless people due to its central location: Target didn't close it because it makes more money.
There's no agenda in not being deluded enough to think Target won't put profit over safety.
The press aligns with the lived experiences of literally any person who shops at those stores with any regularity.
To think that Target stores in the heart of SF and Seattle couldn't have enough business to be profitable outside of theft is what is "deluded". The primary cause of these particular stores being unprofitable is clearly theft and crime.
Whether you realize it or not, you are simply not making a serious argument. You have no evidence for your claims. You are pushing an agenda.
I live in Brooklyn and things like toothpaste and detergent are in lock and key in Target. I just end up ordering them on Amazon.
On average. Across all stores. Across the whole industry. In 2022.
It's not missing. They are closing 9 stores where this clearly doesn't hold up.
And those stores are in cities with extremely lax policies towards theft.
So Target is closing them down.
I suspect all these store closings have less to do with theft and more to do with rent and cost-cutting measures.
[1] https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/vine-city-howell-...
[2] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/these-walmart-store...
The US could set up an internal Australian where people are sent to learn to live proper community life away from distraction.
This of course would be after institutionalizing the mentally ill.
This cost of security or in extreme cases forced store closures is the price of systemic inequality. Or in other words, the dividends of having a large, stable middle class can’t be cashed in everywhere.
Inequality is certainly a factor! But ultimately, large criminal organizations are turning shoplifting into a business. I don't think that efforts to support a "large, stable middle class" will help much with that.
I think Trump polarizing left vs right caused this knee jerk reaction of Progressives to push harder on no cash bail policies, restorative justice, etc.. Being tough on crime does not equal being a fan of Trump. It means you want people to take responsibility for their actions by being removed from society for a predetermined time.
This has nothing to do with Trump or right-vs-left. Cash bail is simply a privilege that those with money enjoy (to not go to jail while awaiting trial), that those without money don't. Perhaps some have suggested that in order to right this wrong, everyone should get free bail, but I think it would work equally well to hold everyone awaiting trial in jail (no bail).
No cash bail makes sense for first offenses, but if someone has a second, third, or 10th arrest while still awaiting trial bail should keep going up.
There’s a difference between someone being wrongly arrested for shoplifting and losing their job and custody of kids because they didn’t have $500 and someone being arrested 5 times in a week for the same crime.
People asked for rehabilitation instead of punishment. All politicians did was stop punishing (some) property crimes and call it progress. No meaningful attempt at building a rehabilitative system was ever made.