Shoplifters Gone Wild

Marc Fisher has this story with the above title in The Atlantic, mirrored here on msn.com. It’s a long piece on the surge in shoplifting, well worth reading in its entirety. Here are a few highlights.

Whereas many on the right see the rise in shoplifting as proof of a nationwide moral collapse, many on the left deny that it’s even happening or that it is a meaningful problem. Shoplifting is one of the hardest crimes to measure, because only a tiny proportion of cases are ever reported to police.

Later in the article, the underreporting problem is backed up with striking evidence:

In one study, criminologists spent the spring of 2000 to the spring of 2001 monitoring surveillance video in a major national chain drugstore in Atlanta. They determined that about 20,000 incidents of shoplifting took place in that one store, compared with only about 25,000 larceny-theft cases reported to police in the entire city in 2001.

Wow. Actual incidents in a single store exceeded reported incidents in the entire city, and a large city at that.

Excuse-making from the cultural left is part of the problem.

Beginning in the late 1960s, and especially after the publication of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, a different conception of shoplifters emerged, one that continues to dominate on the intellectual and political left. In this view, oppressed people steal to assert their power in the face of a society determined to keep them down…. The idea that theft was both a reflection of social need and a form of political resistance became more entrenched on the left after protests—and, in some places, looting—erupted around the country over the murder of George Floyd, in 2020. Some commentators explicitly lumped shoplifting in with looting as a justified expression of frustration and rage.

Lack of consequences is a big part of the problem, as we have noted many times on this blog, though there is a movement in the other direction:

In the early 2000s, many cities and states began easing the consequences for shoplifting. Dallas police stopped responding to calls about thefts under $50 in value. In 2014, California voters approved a referendum reclassifying thefts of items worth $950 or less as misdemeanors.

Now the clamor for safer stores is pushing the pendulum back toward enforcement. In the past few years, states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Louisiana have ratcheted up penalties, especially for people caught stealing in a group. Next month, Californians will vote on a referendum that would toughen penalties for shoplifting, essentially undoing the reforms voters approved just a decade ago.

That last sentence is an overstatement. Proposition 36 does not “essentially undo” Proposition 47. It is a partial correction.

In the end, Fisher concludes: “But the surge in shoplifting is one piece of a larger collapse of the social forces that once restrained wayward behavior at least as much as the law did: trust, guilt, and shame.”

In other words, the view he attributed to “many on the right” at the beginning of the article is correct. It is a nationwide moral collapse.