Current Events > Target closing stores in high theft areas

(+) Yeah! (+)

and this is why people shouldn't defend shoplifting by saying:
-but it's a multi billionaire company
-all losses are insured

now a community loses a grocery outlet and place to work

You can when you sell those stolen items.

I'm a proponent of ensuring all citizens have their basic needs met. That includes some form of UBI, guaranteed housing, food, utilities, etc. When people have their basic needs met, we have tons of evidence that points to a reduction in all kinds of negative behaviors like theft, violence, etc.

i am from the detroit area as well. When was this though? Didn't hear about it.

UBI would only work if inflation doesn't go up with it.

Bunch of stores closed, and everyone was wound up over, "It's because of theft and non-prosecution of shoplifters," but the stores had been on the to-close list for months before. Turns out, the market was oversaturated and multiple stores were competing for the same customer base.

aaah! I can't believe I fell for propaganda! grrr! I feel so stupid! Chiaki was right

;_;

The mask is slipping I see.

I wonder how much longer you've got. Maybe a couple of weeks?

-make new alt account
-farm karma on small community boards
-"hey guys, I'm a two month old, 50 karma account who is totally a centrist! Now I'm going to make endless topics slamming democrats while carrying water for republicans! Why aren't you debating me in good faith!?"
-"Im bored with pretending, and not getting the reactions I want." <<< We are here
-suspension train leading to banworld

And then

-make new alt account

God, what a life.

Baby formula is often stolen because its commonly used to cut drugs not because of a desperate parent

No, let them keep using their sob stories. Even if reality goes against their narrative.

I remember it because I'm fairly certain you were in the Politics board thread about it too when the story broke lol.

Tagged as a hardcore conservative and likely Libertarian.

Depends on the crime. Not all things that are illegal are morally wrong. I don't think stealing in and of itself is morally wrong and largely depends on your needs vs the overall wealth of who you're taking from.

So is burglary justifiable according to this logic?

https://twitter.com/AchmatX/status/1706855289142563157

Burglary and shoplifting are two radically different crimes. Burglary usually requires some kind of breaking in through an access you're not supposed to, well, access.

You're unintentionally conflating the scale of the crime in a way that makes it look much worse than it is.

Like Axiom said, they can steal the entire store, for all we care. They can literally steal a crane, pick up the entire store off its foundation, and take it to their house and I would not give one single fuck. Billionaire corporations are the enemy of humanity. They are an unstoppable cancer, ever-growing, never satisfied.

Inflation's been going up without it

Remember last time right wingers got their jollies off over this news only for months later the stores to admit it actually wasn't due to thefts at all and that was just their excuse they were using, and like typical right wingers they completely ignored that part.

https://jasher.substack.com/p/why-is-target-closing-stores

Unfortunately, crime makes an easy and simple boogeyman for complex decisions that may only be tangentially related to crime if at all. We are fortunate to have open crime data that allows for a deeper dive into the factors that may or may not be impacting corporate moves such as this.

Shit is pretty crazy out here in NYC. More and more shit is being put behind glass, and you basically need to have an employee shopping with you nowadays lol.

People just walk in, load up shit, and walk out. Tons of CVS and Duane Reades are closing down as well along with small businesses because the thieves don't care if it's a corporation or some mom and pop. This is definitely not a Target only thing.

The Target closing here is in East Harlem and was very convenient for lots of people nearby. There's 2 Targets in the Bronx that are even worse than this one and have NYPD inside the stores now.

New York Citys storefront businesses are experiencing what the police say is an increase in retail thefts, according to the New York Times.Statistics show that a relatively small handful of shoplifters are responsible for a major percentage of the crime, The New York Times reports.

A third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, the suspects were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said, according to the Times.

The New York times found that some of the criminals are careered shoplifters, while others are plagued by drug addiction or mental illness.

Eighteen department stores and seven chain pharmacy locations accounted for 20 percent of all complaints, the police said.

Over the past five years, shoplifting complaints nearly doubled, peaking at nearly 64,000 last year, police data shows. Only about 34 percent resulted in arrests last year, compared with 60 percent in 2017.

According to the publication, petty thefts drive the citys total crime rate up although violent crimes have to decreased.

Shoplifting, retail theft and commercial burglaries have escalated dramatically in recent years, and as a consequence, the consumer experience has suffered, said Michael E. McMahon, the Staten Island district attorney. He blamed reckless policies for making businesses less safe and under constant attack from rampant recidivism.

Since 2019, there was a 53 percent increase in theft of items valued at less than $1,000 at major commercial locations, according to an analysis of police data by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Over the past five years, shoplifting complaints nearly doubled, peaking at nearly 64,000 last year, police data shows. Only about 34 percent resulted in arrests last year, compared with 60 percent in 2017.

https://www.silive.com/news/2023/04/nyc-shoplifting-report-says-327-people-committed-a-third-of-thefts-citywide-mcmahon-blames-reckless-policies.html

Maybe NY should try actually amending their broken laws and actually jailing the thieves? Sure seems a much better AND simpler solution than 95% of the city shrugging their shoulders and defeatedly saying, "I guess this is the new normal"...

It wouldn't be possible for these same criminals to be caught over and over and over again if the law didn't allow them to be released every damn time.

https://www.silive.com/news/2023/04/nyc-shoplifting-report-says-327-people-committed-a-third-of-thefts-citywide-mcmahon-blames-reckless-policies.html

Maybe NY should try actually amending their broken laws and actually jailing the thieves? Sure seems a much better AND simpler solution than 95% of the city shrugging their shoulders and defeatedly saying, "I guess this is the new normal"...

It wouldn't be possible for these same criminals to be caught over and over and over again if the law didn't allow them to be released every damn time.

You people are unironically supporting going back to 80s/90s Republican policies. What's next, bringing back stop and frisk? Cutting off hands for theft? That's not the way as all actual statistics, studies, and evidence shows that doesn't work. We don't really know what reduces crime other than the things we know that actually do like increasing education, reducing poverty, improving housing, investing in communities rather than disinvesting and deindustrializing which is what causes crime.

I understand that you don't feel safe, that you don't like crime, but what you're suggesting is ineffective at best and actively harmful at worst and is not guided by reality. When you see "stores are locking things down and hiring police, so therefore things are awful" that doesn't take into account those people also going on the same skewed sources you are and lacking the same perspective you lack (i.e. not recognizing that the increasing rates may not actually be increasing or may still be significantly lower than a time you surely think of as safe/better)

Lol @ anyone who takes this at face value.

Simping for criminality intensifies

You don't care about the thefts because you're not personally being affected... yet.

This. At the end of the day even the vandals lose. They make their communities worse.

NYPD in Manhattan is basically pointless. DA Bragg doesn't prosecute anything so wasting time arresting them is well, a waste of time.

Meanwhile, DA Clark from the Bronx does prosecute because she's not nearly as dumb as Bragg. She knows how bad the Bronx has gotten (worst in the entire city) and knows that it affects the lower class more than anybody. People at the 2 Targets in the Bronx get arrested right in the store now.

Crime has increased, especially in the Bronx. Thefts have gone up and violent crime is about 2.5x the national average in the Bronx and went up about 10% just between 2021 and 2022. I don't remember anybody's hands being cut off in the 80s or 90s and I was born here in the 80s. I also lived through stop and frisk and probably encountered the NYPD over a hundred times as a minority.

It doesn't really excuse any of this.

Crime went up 10%....from historic lows. Crime is 2.5x the national average.....up from historic lows in one of the safest large cities in the world. It's still lower than basically any time in any of our lives. I'm not saying it's fine, any amount of violence or theft against innocent people is not alright, but the reaction is not proportional to the change or the reality of the situation. This is what I mean by perspective. I referenced cutting off hands not because it was actually happening, but because that seems to be the mindset some of you are in.

But the important thing to remember is that brutal societies have brutal levels of crime and societies that take care of people have correspondingly less crime.

This is complete BS. Crime, especially violent crime has not been this bad since the early 2000s.

It's 2023. That's almost 20 years. Do you even live here or are you just quarterbacking from some Midwest shithole?

First, you're right, some types of serious violent and property crime have increased in NYC, sometimes even up to early 2000s level.

How is "crime" being measured in this instance (specifically referring to retail theft as pertains to the topic)? Are they counting number of instances where something is stolen, or number of persons arrested/charged/convicted of retail theft, or the value of the merchandise stolen? Because one person stealing $500 worth of merchandise could be considered "less crime" compared to 50 people stealing $5 each, but the first is a bigger hit to the bottom line.

I live in a pretty violent east coast city. I give you credit for at least talking in terms of specific time periods and places, that's a lot better than the others, but you're still not seeing the whole picture.

First, you're right, some types of serious violent and property crime have increased in NYC, sometimes even up to early 2000s level.

However, here's some important things to add for context: Other serious crimes have continued to plummet and are half what they were in the early 2000s.

The early 2000s was itself well in the middle of a decades long major drop in crime rates across the board. Crime rates, even at their worst this year and last year are nothing compared to what you likely considered your safe childhood.

Just like the drop in crime we saw from the 80s/90s up to 2020, the rise in crime was universal, it happened everywhere, including conservative areas without progressive laws or prosecutors. It seems to have had something to do with the pandemic, not any specific policies anywhere.

The US already has incredibly aggressive police and we already lock up a greater portion of our population than anywhere else on the planet. All our localities already spend a disproportionate amount on law enforcement, funds that came at the expense of things like education, housing, job training etc. What's the evidence that locking more people up is the solution?

Finally, the crime spike that's happened over the last few years is already leveling off. It appears that it was a two-three year spike in certain crimes that is already heading back towards the historic lows they came from.

All of that paints a very different picture than what's typically painted when this topic is discussed.

Again, this is complete BS. It may be true in other parts of the country, but not NYC. Why not name your city so I can look up the data there?

I grew up in the hood around gang violence from the 80s to the 00s, which is why I don't want things going back to how unsafe they were. Telling people "at least it's not as bad as the 80s and 90s" is dumb as shit. Shit is clearly bad here and those of us that have lived here have clearly seen it get worse and not better, especially since nowadays the violence is completely random. Spare me the historic lows BS.

Staten Island really makes the whole city look safer. These are the stats for violent crime.

744.2 for NYC as a whole in 2022.
520 is the average for the country for 2022
Staten Island 2022: 359.8
The Bronx 2022: 1,290.2

These are also the numbers for 2015 and 2021 to show that they have definitely gone up.

2015
The Bronx 553.2
Staten Island: 137.3

2021
The Bronx: 1,039.0
Staten Island: 265.8

So, while State Island was half the national average in 2021, and it increasing to 359.8 meant a 40% increase, it's really not that serious. Now the Bronx going from 1039.0, already 4x Staten Island, jumping up by 20% to 1290.2 is very serious. That's one of the highest numbers in the country. The only places beating that are places like Detroit.

This is ignoring that Mayor Adams, a former cop, won with the help of the black and Hispanic communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx because they wanted this shit to stop. So he finally started increasing enforcement in the past year and the murder rate mostly has gone down.

Not to mention, cops don't even take down any reports for shit anymore, so any statistics are not really reflective of the reality. Literally the NYPD got caught and is being investigated by the Justice Department for not reporting rape and other sex crimes properly and getting victims to recant or not pursue.

People will point to a national trend for the drop in the 80s to 00s, but Dinkins, Giuliani, and Bloomberg did have a hand in bringing it down in NYC. That's the whole point, their policies were extremely discriminatory, like stop and frisk, but they worked. They definitely had a hand in helping, and I absolutely hated it because I would get stopped just for walking around. It doesn't mean we go back to it, but whatever this is right now isn't working and I haven't seen any real evidence that it's getting any better.

I don't like telling strangers on the internet where I live. But I live in an east coast city with higher crime than NYC. Also, I was directly reading from the NYC crime stats from:

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/crime-statistics/historical.page

There's no real indication that NYC tough on crime measures in the 90s/early 200s did anything because the same results were achieved everywhere at that same time, with or without stop and frisk etc. We're not really sure what did it.

I'm not saying that crime rates are acceptable in the Bronx or that they haven't gone up. What I'm saying is that most people are not proceeding based on reality. For example, the historic lows thing is not BS, it's an observable, nationwide fact. And what I'm saying is that what the places like the Bronx and Detroit have in common is extreme neglect and disinvestment from wider society, not lack of police cracking heads and making arrests. That's what needs to be fixed and that's what was worsened by the pandemic, Alvin Bragg is not the problem.