The great shoplifting freak-out

The first indicator that the theft-wave narrative may not hold water is that stories about it tend to garble terms and numbers. They pair broad statistics about the commonness of shoplifting or larceny of any kind with lurid descriptions of brazen armed robberies (which aren’t included in any shoplifting stats, because they are a different crime entirely) to illustrate a narrowly defined problem: organized retail crime. This is identified as repetitive, mostly nonconfrontational theft for profit, whose perpetrators strive to evade detection and keep each theft strategically below local dollar thresholds for felony larceny. Misdemeanors don’t attract law-enforcement attention, the theory goes, so criminals are able to strike again and again and flip their hauls to fences, who consolidate millions of dollars of stolen goods into inventory for online storefronts, where Amazon and Etsy and eBay shield them from detection and punishment.

Whether any of these offenses—simple shoplifting, organized theft, or violent smash-and-grabs—are actually happening more frequently overall is, at best, ambiguous. If we look closely at crime statistics in San Francisco, which news stories paint as the epicenter of this crime wave and whose crime stats are often used to illustrate these stories, the idea doesn’t seem immediately ridiculous. Robberies, which is where smash-and-grabs generally fall, are slightly down citywide from 2020, according to the San Francisco Police Department, but larceny theft, which is where shoplifting would fall, is indeed up more than 19 percent. In the city’s central district, where expensive fashion boutiques and other kinds of retail outlets are clustered together, larceny theft was up 88 percent from 2020 as of early December, when CNN used the number to demonstrate the dire nature of San Francisco’s crime problem.