Shoplifting Stats

The Council on Criminal Justice has this report on shoplifting statistics. As we have noted on this blog many times and the report acknowledges, these stats have to be taken with caution because they only measure crimes reported to the police. When no-consequences policies lead people to believe (often correctly) that the police will not do anything anyway, reporting likely drops, thereby concealing an increase that may result from the same policies. Further, the report notes, we do not have the backup of the National Crime Victimization Survey that we have for crimes against individuals. The NCVS does not survey businesses.

With that big caveat, the report does have some interesting data. Among the “key takeaways”:

• Shoplifting incidents reported to police have rebounded since falling dramatically in 24 large American cities during 2020. But whether the overall tally is up or down compared with pre-pandemic levels depends on the inclusion of New York City. With New York’s numbers included, reported incidents were 16% higher (8,453 more incidents) in the study cities during the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2019; without New York, the number was 7% lower (-2,552 incidents).

The big drop during the pandemic was, obviously, because of the big drop in people going to stores and stores being open. What about the 2023 v. 2019 numbers? I’m skeptical that even without New York overall shoplifting is actually down. A drop is reporting is almost certainly a big factor there.

• Comparing the most recent trends, from the first halves of 2022 and 2023, Los Angeles (109%) and Dallas (73%) experienced the largest increases among the study cities; San Francisco (-35%) and Seattle (-31%) saw the largest decreases.

Why might that be? Los Angeles and San Francisco are, of course, in the same state, so statewide policy doesn’t explain the gap. San Francisco now has the most effective district attorney it has had in a long time, while Los Angeles is still stuck with George Gascón. But shoplifting is, to a large extent, prosecuted by the city attorney in LA. (It is not in SF, which has a unique form of local government.) Seattle elected an effective city attorney in November 2021. See this post and this post. The choice of prosecutors could be an important factor, but of course we can’t tell for sure with these kinds of statistics reports alone.

What we can be sure of is that there is far too much shoplifting, and “non-violent offenders” are not harmless. The harm they cause is real, increasing costs and reducing choice for honest people. Shopping in a store versus shopping online has its pros and cons, but rampant shoplifting adds a major additional cost to the “brick and mortar” stores, skewing the economics.

For a host of reasons, we did to disabuse ourselves of the notion that “mere property crime” is harmless, and resume dishing out real consequences to thieves.