I've lived in the same city now (not NYC) for 10+ years, so I'm moderately connected with all sorts of people and not just a bubble of affluent tech people. So I'll be real, I know some sketchy people that probably do drugs or at least know where to find some. What I don't know, however, is any "fences". That is, someone that traffics in stolen goods. Or maybe I do, they don't exactly advertise their services. I've never been offered speakers that fell off the back of a truck, however. Maybe that's just me being naive.
Anyway, to get to my point; turns out I do know fences - basically anyone with an Amazon account, and I know a lot of fuckers with Prime. For the low investment of polyfill bags and other shipping materials, and this one weird trick called stealing, you too can make money online! Just take your stolen goods, send them to Amazon, and they'll take care of selling them for you. All you gotta do is some computer shit, and some packaging, and then send it off to Amazon. Because your supply costs are cheap, you can undercut your competitors (but not by too much) and rake in the profit. Amazon supposedly is cracking down on this but I have yet to see any meaningful evidence of any real enforcement.
The economist article avoids naming names, but what you're looking for to get started is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
To further underline your point, if the chain is (thief)→(amazon)→(end user) then the fence isn't "anyone with an Amazon" account: the fence is amazon.
Except products like deodorant are considered health products. Amazon doesn’t just let you easily sell health products, you need to produce invoices, receipts, etc.
> Amazon doesn’t just let you easily sell health products, you need to produce invoices, receipts, etc.
I sure hope so.
Amazon seems to only carry many common household items through dubious 3rd party sellers.
On the subject of deodorant, I've received the wrong type from Amazon multiple times, including some that obviously came from a foreign market. I ordered Dove. That can't be difficult to source from the manufacturer.
I just want Target to bring back Subscribe and Save so I can ditch Amazon completely. Third party fulfillment ruined Amazon's store.
No, instead they reach out to Amazon to school a sweet deal directly. I think a lot of people forget that a typical retailer relationship is manufacturer => distributor => retailer. Large companies like Amazon often can (and do) negotiate directly with manufacturers, however, sometimes larger distributors can offer a better deal. This is why, for example, you'll sometimes find Amazon themselves selling fake SD cards.
Sure, but Amazon chooses the companies they buy directly from (its called Amazon Vendor Central) very carefully and they only buy from people who are already established 3rd party sellers on Seller Central, so im not sure these small time thieves are able to do that.
But it could be that maybe one of them is a legit seller/vendor and buys these stolen goods off of these crooks or doesnt even know about the fact that they are stolen.
There are lots of Facebook groups for amazon sellers where people often post “liquidation” sales so maybe this could be a way to do it.
> Except products like deodorant are considered health products. Amazon doesn’t just let you easily sell health products, you need to produce invoices, receipts, etc.
Isn't the chain: (thief) -> (fence) -> (Amazon) -> (customer)? If a fence sells his wares in a bazaar, the bazaar is the fence? No, the fence is the fence the bazaar is the marketplace.
There's actually an interesting point here. We can easily imagine a scenario where someone steals a bicycle, lists it for sale on Amazon, and ships it off to the customer themselves. Amazon was just a billboard in that case, kind of.
A fence is providing a few semiseparate services:
1. They will buy stolen goods. You get a lower price, but you don't have to face nasty questions like "how did you get this?"
2. They may assume the risk of policing. If you stole something surprisingly important and it gets thoroughly investigated, the fence goes to jail, and you don't.
3. They locate people who want to buy stolen goods. It's easy to conceive of this as a service they provide for their own benefit, after buying your stuff (#1), but in reality you can't really do either without the other one.
Amazon commingling inventory lets it provide service #2. The police can establish that a stolen object was delivered to an Amazon customer, but if it came from a commingled pool, they can't establish who sold it.
But Amazon's whole concept is to provide service(s) 1 and 3. This would make it fairly strongly parallel to a fence who, when the police show up, lets them know where to find you. But even then Amazon is still doing the largest part of fencing; usually the police don't show up. The hard part is locating the customers, and that's what Amazon does.
Perhaps the definition is that to be a fence you have had to buy the good and take ownership (and responsibility) for the goods yourself. You then resell them to pass on ownership. Otherwise you're just providing services, whether that's storage, transport or whatever. So do Amazon take ownership, or do they just sell them on your behalf?
I think this would be a stretch on their part: unlike a storage company, these products get put into an SKU bin in the Amazon warehouse. They get mixed with other Amazon stock, show up in inventory DBs, and are ultimately shipped in Amazon-branded packages with Amazon-originated shipping labels. Users track their packages containing these products on Amazon's website.
Help me understand here: how is blaming amazon any different to blaming the post office (who are also an intermediary here) or the payment processors and banks? None of these groups actually know theft is involved in the transactions they're facilitating.
>Because your supply costs are cheap, you can undercut your competitors (but not by too much)
or, take the other approach, and sell it slightly higher. this will easily remove the suspicion that you are selling stolen goods. in fact, you might get more sales from people deliberately looking to not purchase from the lowest price seller. it's genius, and i see no fault in this plan whatsoever.
Amazon makes it easy to sell especially with FBA. That's as much a good thing as it can be misused. It allows new businesses to get started when they cannot afford to handle shipping to customers themselves.
I think this conversation will be measuring string. Too many variables. What size container? What's the weather like where you are? How much do you put on each application? What do you do day to day? What's the weather like where you live?
I live in Australia, and I am really active. Safe to say I will be sweating a lot more than someone living in Alaska who's a homebody, and so may use a bit more deodorant.
Perversely, I often find my use of deodorant increases in colder weather. Primarily this is because where I live, people seem to want to compensate by adding one degree to the thermostat for every degree it falls below 21—inside in winter can be absolutely boiling.
This is made even worse by the fact that in order to leave the building (or when you first arrive), you're dressed for the outside weather.
A database of serial numbers alone wouldn't be sufficient. Counterfeiters frequently copy real serial numbers and print them on fake products.
There are more effective means such as tamper resistant RFID tags, but those aren't cost effective for cheap items. And often no one bothers to check anyway.
Any individual labeling of goods is not cost-effective even on not-so-cheap items.
I've seen implementing individual labeling of items in two cases first-handed. Both were required by new regulations and both almost kill small companies.
Cost of new equipment (readers, dedicated computer which can work 24/7 in real world in the hands of non-IT people), IT system (you have only one vendor, of course, as it is government-required system, and you can imagine quality of this solution, as it is written by government contractor), support for this IT system and integration with existing POS and ERP (by 3rd party company), all these costs are tremendous in practice. If you are not reseller or distributor but producer, you need additional hardware (typically very expensive one) to apply tags to items on your production line.
Unique tags prices are negligible here.
I've seen this for small custom brewery (with very rudimentary bottling line) and for small imported/distributor of fine and exotic alcohol. Both companies are alive, but they were forced to get loans when implemented new regulations about individual-per-bottle tags, and it was long and painful process in both cases.
Who will pay for this? You. And me. In both ways: some business goes out (think: your nearest papa-n-mama grocery store, which struggles to compete with big supermarket chain already), and other business will rise up retail prices to cover expenses to implement supply-chain control systems. As there will be expenses on all steps from producer to retail store, these expenses will accumulate.
And we already pay (with taxes) for police. Which work is to catch thieves.
UPDATE: And as sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33740337) points out, it is not one-time expense for any business in supply chain, as they will need to scan all these tags, and have (much) more warehouse/retail space workers or pay more for more hours. Always, forever.
I think serial numbers would be enough to stop the vast majority of people selling stolen items.
It would require companies to track serial numbers that go into the store, and serial numbers of items put on shelves, or otherwise legally leave the store. After a while, it'll be clear which items & serial numbers were legelly sold vs. stolen. And, to address the original point, copied stolen serial numbers still aren't any good.
The serial numbers of stolen items get reported to the authorities and/or Amazon, and it becomes their legal problem. As another post in this thread poins out, pawn shops have to do something similar to check for stolen items. So there is some sort of legal framework in place.
Im not saying that this should be i plemented or anything, I'm just trying to say that individual serial numbers might work. It will not be easy to implement, and cost money. But so does rampant theft. Maybe it's worth pursuing.
It’s hard enough to get them to unload you when all they have to do is count pallets like “yep, 22 pallets of potatoes” even harder when they have to break down pallets to count individual cases and would be impossible if they had to verify every single item by serial number.
Even when I used to deliver to individual grocery stores it was difficult because they didn’t plan for unloading the truck on the schedule and they had to stock the shelves before the store opened so more often than not they just got their stuff off the truck as quickly as possible without even doing any sort of verification, just pull the pallets with their store number and let the department heads deal with it in the morning.
It sounds like a valid idea but the amount of labor would be astronomical.
Attorneys General, likely. Amazon would be found selling stolen goods, told to clean up, they wouldn’t, and there’d be a kerfuffle and suddenly it would be one of the items that is harder to list (try listing Milwaukee cordless equipment on Amazon now for example).
This is what happens (in theory) with GSM mobile phones. GSM devices have a serial number in the form of an IMEI which can be blacklisted from networks if stolen [0]. There are, of course, still ways round it as detailed in the wikipedia entry - e.g. the blacklists are national ones, and organised groups can "just" ship the phones to another country and sell them there.
Even so, as you intimate, it does make it _harder_ to resell stolen phones.
Interesting, got more info? Which corporations provide the ID card? Are retailers legally obligated to ask for it? Do retailers get fined by the gov't for every non-ID'd transaction?
This _could_ be taken to mean that Tesco employees get a 20% discount if they flash their Tesco ID card, which sounds completely normal to my American self.
Amazon knows that the deodorant it’s selling is not discontinued or clearance. It knows Old Spice isn’t giving some mom and pop a better wholesale deal than the world’s largest retailer either. There’s no legit reason for there to be “other sellers” for that product, or really most any product it itself sells.
Amazon barely knows who is listing products on their site, whether the products are even legal, and sometimes they can’t even tell what a “product” is.
The only pressure on them to do it would be money. And not in "someone decides to not use them to buy some stuff" but getting sued for hundreds of millions
This is just false. There are "grey markets" for basically any major product.
Quality King Distributors is one company that dominates this space and has been sued many times (they win nearly every time on the basis of the first sale doctrine and are responsible for [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_King_Distributors_Inc.....) case) for undercutting manufacturers. Example: Dollar General sells some prepaid phones at prices substantially lower than on eBay/Amazon but in limited amounts per customer. Companies will hire a bunch of runners to go buy the max amount of these phones to resell (or unlock and export to other countries). Or: "Diversion"/products that are intended to be exported to another country actually being reimported, liquidations/bankruptcy auctions etc.
Lots of manufacturers and distributors who play by the rules don't like this because grey market distributors will undercut MSRP on places like Amazon so they will report the listings as fakes to get them removed.
In the big $8 million bust a few years back in the Bay Area, it turned out that they were paying street criminals more to steal specific items like toothpaste, but the police were frustrated by Amazon’s lack of assistance in figuring out all of the involved parties. Can’t find the specific article at the moment but that really stood out to me at the time.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan, it means "Accuser" and "Adversary". Apparently (according to my foggy memories of a video essay about some high-art film) Satan was originally just the dude that would accuse you of all your sins you committed while mortal.
Let me guess, he got concerned about job security when all those monotheistic religions and their high horse morals developed and so he decided to actively prop up the supply side?
I have bought a lot of books from Amazon, and if you look past the scrubbing with a marker, it's always some library within America - so yes even books from Amazon are just books taken from public libraries.
Like the other poster said, that's what libraries do when they're done with books. I help at my kid's school library, mostly shelving books, but also processing discards, which is remove from catalog, remove or mark over the barcode and library stamps so the book doesn't come back, then the librarian has to do some procedural junk and if nobody at the school wants the books, they get sold to a used book wholesaler and then hopefully to someone who wants it. The wholesalers don't pay much, but it helps buy new books the discarding has made room for.
That's not necessarily a smoking gun; public libraries often give away old books they don't want to keep around anymore. About a quarter of the books in my personal library are ex-library books, but none were stolen.
Of course if it's some popular in-demand book, it was almost certainly stolen. Most of the free library books I've scored are 50 year old textbooks about obscure/obsolete topics.
> But surely Amazon is literally handling stolen goods? Is there a smoking gun email?
If Amazon were a mom and pop fence, the local cops could bust them in a sting. But Amazon is a huge megacorp, so even if the cops try to catch them in a sting nothing will stick because Amazon will claim their shear scale rendered them completely oblivious to everything and therefore not criminally culpable.
If you can identify your stolen goods at a local or huge chain pawn shop and your local police feel like helping you can absolutely be made whole by following a process.
If you can prove Amazon has or sold your stolen goods you can absolutely be made whole by following a process.
I don’t really think our system errs on the side of justice but I think the remedies available to victims in these two scenarios are about appropriate to the respective scenarios.
Chains in Manhattan put stickers on the merchandise that tell you where it came from. While you could remove them, it’s a PITA and cuts into your margins. If you don’t remove it, there is a clear signal to Amazon that these are stolen goods.
There’s a whole industry based around arbitraging price differences between Amazon and brick and mortar merchants. Just search YouTube for “get rich with FBA”. How would Amazon know if it was stolen or retail arbitrage?
Wow this opened me up to a whole new world. Even managing to flip items with a 1% loss would let you spend $25k for only $250 (the amount of spend you need on delta co-branded cards to hit the MQD waiver for up to platinum).
Who wants to buy a $10 deodorant from a NYC CVS when you can buy the same thing for much cheaper online. The thieves are only accelerating the demise of overpriced brick and mortar stores. Plus the experience of going into a CVS and having to press a button and wait for an employee to hand you a deodorant is horrible. (Not condoning theft, but at least the free market is speaking here somewhat)
> "Who wants to buy a $10 deodorant from a NYC CVS when you can buy the same thing for much cheaper online."
The reverse is usually true in the UK. Amazon is great for convenience, but most of the time, physical pharmacies and/or supermarkets are cheaper for these types of products. Not to mention discount stores like Poundland.
The first result on Amazon searching “men’s deodorant” is 4 for $15.66 [0] so less than $4 per stick.
These are about $10 in a bodega or cvs in Manhattan.
[0] Dove Men+Care Antiperspirant Deodorant With 72-hour sweat and odor protection Extra Fresh Antiperspirant for men formulated with vitamin E and Triple Action Moisturizer | 2.7 Ounce (Pack of 4) https://a.co/d/dR2J1B0
What a nonsensical argument. Deodorant is a consumable good. In scenarios like this, 40$ for 4 == 10$ for 1, because you consume it at a steady rate, and what you don't buy now you will pay for later
Compare to an extreme example of a market selling one watermelon for 5 dollars, and 5 watermelons for 15. Sure, the latter is a better deal, but I definitely have no use for more than one melon, and the arbitrage opportunity is not worth my time. In the same sense, I and many others do not need more than 1 deodorant at a time and I would rather save my space.
Do you know what that is? I typically buy 4-5 sticks at a time when my local pharmacy has a sale on the one I like, so I buy deodorant like once a year.
Or international arbitrage. Lots of stuff sold cheaper in USA than other places. Even stuff like a big bottle of ibuprofen or allergy pills are much more expensive in Canada.
While arbitraging deodorant sounds silly, I have bought EU roll-on deodorants online before because they're not much of a thing in North America. And they don't melt into a mess in a hot car.
The trick is to get it on clearance. Some local stores will sell for a massive discount off amazon.
I do more ebay as I won't touch selling used on amazon but in the past I have bought pallets of new stuff at local auctions and sold them on amazon for significant profit. Ended up with several cases of Ember mugs once. Forget the price per mug but think I paid ~$600 and sold em for ~$2400 on amazon.
Sometimes consumers sell something they decided not to use. Either directly to another consumer, or to an aggregator who can turn a profit on the consumer's loss by obtaining lots of previously retail bought goods.
It's sunk cost fallacy to just think "I must use this thing if I can only sell it at a loss."
You can tackle a problem from multiple directions. So while direct prosecution is important, cutting off a method for converting stolen goods to money is also important. As soon as that method become unprofitable, the activity will either stop or switch to something else.
Regulating legitimate business activity out of existence to support progressive prosecutors ideas about shoplifting and street crime is the opposite of a solution.
Knowing your suppliers and that their goods are legitimate is a pretty basic function of a business, and calling people progressive to enforce that is a bit strange.
Amazon isn't a pawn shop. They have a lot of choice when it comes to dealing with known businesses.
It is a valuable activity that Amazon and eBay will ship any product to anyone at a fair price with a minimum of obligatory hoop jumping.
The more pressure they receive from the public and regulators to put a stop to those dastardly shoplifters, the more room Nike has to stop people from selling Nike shoes without a badge of certification from Nike.
Selling stolen goods hurts everyone, which is why it's a crime. It hurts the companies being stolen from, it hurts competing businesses who have a hard time competing legally, it hurts consumers, who get reduced choice due to reduced competition, and it hurts communities when their local chains shut down because organized crime has a place to fence their goods.
It's mind boggling that folks are defending the ability to sell stolen goods, while wanting to harshly punish petty theft.
I am not promoting "punishing harshly petty theft" I am suggesting that the direction current prosecutors are going is to not punish theft at all.
I am also not denying that Amazon and eBay can operate as easy targets to fence stolen goods. What I am suggesting is that demanding Amazon "do something" about goods that fell off the back of a truck essentially means that any seller who doesn't get an Official Licensed Dealer badge or equivalent from a name brand company cannot do business on the internet.
The only way to combat this from Amazon's side is to ban all sales not authorized by the original manufacturer. There's no way for them to tell on their end whether goods were legitimately purchased or not, and any system used to track these sellers or prevent them from operating would give big brands a "delete" button on sales of their products worldwide.
As someone who is not a fan of software licensing for physical goods, this terrifies me, and bringing that regulatory environment as a response when we aren't willing to prosecute people for these crimes seems a bit much.
> I am suggesting that the direction current prosecutors are going is to not punish theft at all.
Your suggestion would generally be incorrect. Prosecutors in _some_ jurisdictions are choosing not to prosecute petty theft, but when organized crime cases are brought to them, they are prosecuting them.
Police, however, have done a poor job of investigating these crime rings, and in some cases have chosen not to make arrests to push a political agenda.
More enforcement against petty theft won't stop the organized crime problem.
You're going to an extreme on how to stop the illegal sales. Amazon could, for instance, stop allowing sales from any company that has fenced illegal goods through them. They could only allow well established businesses that have existed for x years to sell, or heavily inspect companies younger than x years. They could get lists of well-known resellers from manufacturers and heavily inspect businesses not on those lists.
If local pawn shops can do it I think Amazon can do it.
You seem to have a weird position that Amazon is some innocent player in this exchange -- they are making money from every one of these illicit sales. They enjoy benefit from looking the other way -- its not that there are no processes that can halt or greatly reduce the problem.
Theft is prosecuted ffs, the issue is that it has become so lucrative (because of the easy way to convert the stolen items to money via amazon/ebay) that the system is being flooded by people stealing. In no reality can you catch 100% of shoplifters, but there is a reality where you make both sides of the act more costly with less reward (high chance of getting cought and prosecuted + hard to gain value from the goods).
> It's mind boggling that folks are defending the ability to sell stolen goods, while wanting to harshly punish petty theft.
I’m not seeing anyone defending selling stolen goods just saying it’s nearly impossible to tell where the goods come from.
Product gets refused for various reasons and the trucking companies aren’t really in the business of selling goods so they just get rid of it. I’ve seen them refuse a whole pallet because one box was run into by a forklift before.
Sometimes they tell you where to take it, sometimes they tell you to just get rid of it (usually only if it’s a couple cases) and if it’s not something you particularly want you just find some random person who does want it or a dumpster.
Not to mention all the other cases people have explained in this thread.
Right, pawn shops are held to a higher standard. They have a relationship with the local police and are made to keep records. Amazon is a better fence than your average pawn shop.
> No it isn’t. That’s a pretty basic part of living in a country with rule of law.
This is an incorrect framing: the law is that companies must know their suppliers, at least to the extent that they can demonstrate good faith compliance with laws around stolen, counterfeit, smuggled, etc. goods.
Given that Amazon has repeatedly been supplied evidence of fencing on its platform, it would be difficult to accept a defense from ignorance.
That is not the law, you’re just making up things out of whole cloth.
> Given that Amazon has repeatedly been supplied evidence of fencing on its platform, it would be difficult to accept a defense from ignorance
That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, Amazon being generally aware that there is fencing activity happening on their platform does not make Amazon liable.
> That is not the law, you’re just making up things out of whole cloth.
Every US state that I'm aware of makes it a crime to knowingly receive stolen property. Most additionally make it a crime to re-sell stolen property. On top of that, it's a Federal crime if the stolen property crosses state borders.
Here, for example, are NY's statutes on stolen property: Penal Law Ss. 165.40 through 165.65[1] (you'll need to navigate on that page to each section). In particular:
* It is not a sufficient defense to claim that the original thief has not been convicted or identified: § 165.50, bullet 1.
* Possession of stolen property encompasses the intent to sell that property: § 165.55, bullet 1.
> Amazon being generally aware that there is fencing activity happening on their platform does not make Amazon liable.
This implies passivity, when the relationship is an active one. If Amazon was an unstructured marketplace with individual business relationships between buyers and (potentially criminal) sellers, this argument might work. But that's not what FBA is, and it's not how these products are sold (you aren't buying Honest Abe's Big Brand Shampoo, you're buying Amazon-fulfilled Big Brand Shampoo).
> Every US state that I'm aware of makes it a crime to knowingly receive stolen property
For mens rea you’d need to know that the specific property you are receiving is stolen. Not that some of the amazon-scale quantities of property you’re receiving is inherently going to be stolen.
> This implies passivity, when the relationship is an active one
Mens rea is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one. You can also be found culpable under the standards of reckless action or criminal negligence. This is also true in every state that I'm aware of.
"We run such a large and haphazard business that we inevitably do a little crime" is textbook culpability via negligence.
Edit: And, to be absolutely clear, I do not believe for one moment that it isn't within Amazon's technical capabilities to detect at least some percentage of likely stolen goods on their site. This is merely the weakest possible argument for responsibility on their part.
That's why the standard is negligence and/or recklessness. Nobody expects Amazon to catch every single illegal use of their platform: the expectation is that they apply reasonable effort to doing so, including demonstrating a response to publicly known incidents of crime rings operating on their site.
I said exactly as much in my first comment.
Edit: This is at least the second time you've minimized an important piece of context: the problem is that they're accepting stolen goods, with multiple municipalities repeatedly warning them about it. Treating that as a "scale" issue doesn't wave the crime away, any more than throughput at a meatpacking factory would be a defense for the occasional employee being caught in the slaughter line.
> the expectation is that they apply reasonable effort to doing so, including demonstrating a response to publicly known incidents of crime rings operating on their site.
Again, rule of law. Reasonable effort is to do nothing unless they have information that would make a reasonable person believe that the specific goods were stolen.
There’s no expectation that Amazon would investigate the providence of the goods they receive.
> Edit: This is at least the second time you've minimized an important piece of context: the problem is that they're accepting stolen goods, with multiple municipalities repeatedly warning them about it.
No, I’m not. Amazon receives unimaginable amounts of goods, of which only a vanishingly small fraction is stolen goods.
> Treating that as a "scale" issue doesn't wave the crime away, any more than throughput at a meatpacking factory would be a defense for the occasional employee being caught in the slaughter line.
Are you serious? Surely the odds of an employee ever getting caught in the slaughter line must be greater than zero?
Surely you understand that if we were to infinitely scale the meatpacking factory, we’d be essentially guaranteed to see employees get chopped up.
> No, I’m not. Amazon receives unimaginable amounts of goods, of which only a vanishingly small fraction is stolen goods.
This simply does not matter in the eyes of the law. What matters is receiving stolen goods, period. The degree to which they do will solely determine the degree of the statute applied.
I think I'm just repeating myself at this point, so this will be the last time: there are different standards for culpability, and each exists for a reason. Accidents happen all the time, and we don't generally refer them for criminal prosecution unless they meet a standard of intentionality, knowledge, recklessness, or criminal negligence.
To use the slaughterhouse example again: nobody expects a slaughterhouse to be perfectly safe. However, we do expect a slaughterhouse to not recklessly or negligently expose its employees to danger. Nobody expects Amazon to perfectly avoid sales of stolen goods. However, we do expect them to pursue reports of stolen goods made by victims and investigating DAs.
I'm really interested why these "warnings" weren't subpoenas or warrants, especially if this is happening in multiple municipalities as you state. Is it some conspiracy across the US to not charge Amazon when probable cause is present, but instead send "warnings."
Not saying warnings don't happen when probable cause exists to prosecute a crime, but I think we're missing the content of these warnings before we get ahead of ourselves about what to think about them.
This is just baseless speculation on my part, but: municipalities don’t really want to take companies to court if they don’t have to. It’s expensive, politically risky, etc.
Besides, providing a warning actually helps the prosecution establish the crime: it’s much easier to argue negligence or recklessness if they can produce a history of repeatedly giving the company an opportunity to fix identified issues.
The government already has a mandate to prosecute crimes. It doesn't have a mandate to interfere with liberty. If they aren't going to do the job they already have why should they be allowed to find another excuse to avoid doing that job?
Regulating away legitimate secondary markets to sell on leaves us all paying higher prices. If brands and retailers believe it’s really retail theft causing all of this I invite them to track their goods better and run sting operations. I guarantee this type of money is going out the side door a truckload at a time, not the front door stuffed into someone’s shirt.
But the “progressive prosecutor problem” is a made up lie. Even in San Francisco where a DA recall vote actually succeeded it was obvious (and immediately proven[0]) that SFPD were actually just refusing to respond to calls:
Yes -- but we are not talking about that we are talking about selling goods for which you have no record of purchase and obtained through theft.
You are taking a pretty bit straw man here -- is your claim that there is no way to enforce procedures to curb stolen goods while selling other goods? I think every other seller that has been used as a fence in history would beg to differ -- just go to your local pawn shop.
This is one of those statements that feels good when no specifics are on the table, but if it was ever implemented we’d be seeing countless HN stories complaining about how Amazon is requiring sellers to provide too much documentation or closing their accounts for suspected dealing in stolen goods or something.
Heavy handed regulation always sounds better in hypothetical perfect knowledge scenarios, but kind of sucks for everyone in the real world.
Simply trying to rent a house here in Australia requires submitting a goldmine for identity theft. ID's, bank statements, workplace statements to prove you have a job and the list goes on.
And that simply gets you an application. No guarantee of being picked.
I have zero problems with a business having to prove - to whatever degree - they are legit.
Finance institutions have a KYC thing. Maybe Amazon needs a KYTrader.
AFAIK in the US you can buy/sell a house with an anonymous LLC. It's not clear to me you would even need an ID in the process, although that may vary by state. Definitely wouldn't need the rest of the stuff, except the money.
Buying a house doesn't require much ID. Borrowing money for it probably requires KYC, but maybe not exactly ID. Selling a house usually wants a notarized signature and notaries check ID (or are supposed to).
But also blame Amazon. If you ran a store that repeatedly sold stolen goods do you think local police and prosecutors would ignore you?
Trafficking in stolen property is a felony. That's true whether you definitely know it's stolen property or if you definitely should have known (recklessly trafficking). You, if you repeatedly did it out of your small business and ignored complaints, would face prison. Why does the law apply differently to Amazon?
My guess is, if you told Amazon's CEO that he had one month to substantially reduce trafficking or face felony prosecution and prison time - I bet you'd see severe reductions.
Really? I just googled my location plus "trafficked stolen property conviction" and found news stories regarding multiple convictions. It sure seems like the police investigate and arrest people knowingly selling stolen property. In what sense is Amazon not doing this, or recklessly disregarding whether or not they are doing this?
If I were a multi-hundred billion dollar business operating like Amazon, then of course cops and prosecutors would ignore me. Laws aren't for rich and powerful companies - they are for individuals and small business owners.
Stolen property convictions at least at the local level primarily come from stings where police come in with property that they describe as "boosted" or in similar terms and then once the sale is completed they arrest the store owner. Amazon being online is obviously immune to this kind of police work. As long as Amazon removes the seller once they become aware something is wrong they are probably not breaking any laws. Some states are trying to pass laws to make ecommerce platforms vet sellers more but I doubt this will make a difference because it is not hard to make fake invoices.
So, you think that if pawn shops and the like required thieves to fill out a webform and mail stolen property in to be resold, like on Amazon, then the shop owners would be immune from prosecution? That doesn't seem plausible to me.
The reality is that Amazon breaks the letter and spirit of the law. (Depending on jurisdiction) laws against trafficking stolen property do not require that the police catch you red handed in a sting, the law doesn't even require that you actually do know you are selling stolen property - you can be charged if you had a reckless disregard for selling stolen property. The spirit of the law is that selling stolen property makes theft more profitable and that will mean more theft which is bad so let's not sell stolen property. Amazon is obviously providing a way for thieves to profit.
Again, repeated violations of the letter and spirit of the law reported in major newspapers, and no criminal consequences for Amazon. Do you think if your local paper was repeatedly writing stories about how Pawn Shop X was helping thieves profit, that local police and prosecutors would just shrug and point to that webform + mail setup? I don't.
Even if you couldn't get a "slam dunk" case going after corporate leadership for this, you could try. Amazon has actually violated the letter and spirit of the law so it would be fair to bring a case against them. If the jury acquits, then wait until you find evidence of the next theft ring reselling on Amazon and bring new charges.
Even without a conviction I don't think corporate leadership would accept facing a jury trial once a month with the possibility of a conviction and prison time. Instead, Amazon would substantially improve protections on reselling stolen property - which is the desired outcome.
> So, you think that if pawn shops and the like required thieves to fill out a webform and mail stolen property in to be resold, like on Amazon, then the shop owners would be immune from prosecution? That doesn't seem plausible to me.
Not immune, just saying that the way police traditionally approach stolen property cases basically requires the suspect to be on tape acknowledging receiving stolen property. The reason they do that is because is the law requires them to show knowledge or that a reasonable person would know the property is stolen. Unless they find an email where someone in the company is notified that a seller is selling stolen property and doesn't do anything about they probably don't have a criminal case. What they could do is sue, get a "consent decree" and as part of the settlement force Amazon to implement more rigorous seller identification or something like that. But I doubt any Amazon employees are going to jail over this.
Yeah no they wouldn’t. How long did Amazon collect no sales tax before that loophole closed? How much did they have to pay back? If you tried that the state would stream roll you
Nope. In most states (CA for example) it is a felony to sell stolen goods when the amount exceeds a pretty modest threshold. If, as alleged in the parent comment, they are committing a crime on a large scale then the blame is very well placed.
*of course this does not exonerate the original thieves, but as a matter of practicality it is going to be easier to hit a single large offender than a myriad of small ones.
I am fairly sure that trafficking in stolen goods is only a crime if the person knew, or if a reasonable person should have known, that the goods were stolen.
And many people who buy from Amazon know Amazon must happen to sell some goods that are stolen, yet they still shop there. If everyone had to cease buying/selling because they know their counterparty must have some stolen goods then trade would literally ground to a halt.
I don't know if it's a crime if it's just "somewhere we must be buying stolen goods, but we don't know where." I'm not a lawyer but I think knowing that the specific item you bought/sold was stolen would look differently in court than just having some vague knowledge there must be stolen stuff somewhere in the supply chain.
This depends - if a person goes out of their way not to find out whether the goods are legitimate, it's equally bad.
Either way, if you possess stolen goods, they will usually be taken from you and returned to their owner. If that happened to a lot of Amazon customers, the refund volume would encourage Amazon to crack down on their supply chain.
You don't have to intend to commit a crime to have mens rea. You merely have to intentionally do all the steps involved in the crime. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, and neither is intentional ignorance of whether you are breaking it or not.
Pawn shops got the receiving end of this deal a while ago. Now it's Amazon's turn.
Intent does matter, however - plausible deniability would not be a thing otherwise.
Only in cases of strict liability are intentions not usually considered, which mostly include minor offenses (infractions) and a few major ones like statutory rape. Possession of items that are illegal to possess in any situation is another case where strict liability applies, but possession of legal goods that “a reasonable person” would not be aware was stolen does not fall into this case. Amazon sellers sign a contract saying the goods they offer for sell are their legal possessions to sell, giving Amazon plausible deniability as if anyone breaks the law, as the seller would then also be breaking their rules as well.
I think we need to ask ourselves the harder questions of why people are stealing and figure out how to address that issue. Just like how we here tend to condemn technological solutions for social problems, tons of legal regulations can be fairly criticized for a being a legal solution to a social problem.
I'm not sure why the fundamental problem here is that people are stealing, rather than that a known billionaire is willing to operate a business that is known to be an attractive way to profit from theft. You almost certainly can't eliminate theft without predictable laws; no one ever has, and to the extent that it's been reduced, the existence of a reliable legal process has been part of it.
And Amazon can't exactly plead "plausible deniability" in an absolute sense here, because they ought to be aware that they're acting as a fence, and they ought to be aware that their processes are insufficient for reducing the degree of theft that's going on. If they've deliberately chosen to be ignorant of those facts, it would actually raise their level of culpability.
Finally, your analogy of legal solutions to technical solutions fails. In a democracy, legal solutions exist to meet the burden of social expectations. They do not stand outside of society. Unlike democratic laws, technical solutions are usually imposed on a community by people with disproportionate power - laws are created on a one person - one vote basis, but technical solutions are usually created on a one dollar - one vote basis. Therefore, technical solutions are usually not responsive to the needs of a society, and are far more likely to represent someone's One Fantastic Idea to Solve All Problems, rather than a compromise of interests resulting in social norms that can be imposed on defectors.
This is exactly an occasion when existing laws should be used, rather than plea for the devaluation of trust and law by ignoring laws simply because they might be applied against a powerful person.
I do not think it is misplaced to look at a massive fence of stolen goods as a problem. Amazon takes a cut of every sale just like a fence. They have constructed their onboarding and process to "not know your customer" because they enjoy this revenue even though they must know their system is being heavily used for these illicit sales.
Perhaps thats why I've noticed a large number of complaints related to CVS-type items sold on Amazon: used items, counterfeit items, diluted items, etc..
> basically anyone with an Amazon account ... Amazon supposedly is cracking down on this but I have yet to see any meaningful evidence of any real enforcement.
Amazon has "Amazon Invoice Verification" for sellers selling large quantities of merchandise. But I personally do not want Amazon trying to check if Mr. Doe just wants to sell a couple extra tubes of deodorant he bought by mistake.
Can that be abused by thieves? Sure, but not everything is fixable.
Just like that without evidence you laid an allegation on Amazon even though all facts are that Amazon does KYC and doesn’t actually let anyone sell health products (among many others) without receipts.
This is text book rumor-mongering and spreading misinformation.
Most of the comments here are ignoring the difference between regular old shoplifting and the trend driving the increase discussed in the article, which they're referring to as "organized retail crime".
I think it's very fair to have differing attitudes/moral thresholds for an impoverished mother shoplifting a week's worth of baby formula versus "a couple in Alabama [which] pled guilty to shifting $300,000-worth of stolen baby formula on eBay".
My reading of the article suggests that the trend discussed is a result of the latter, which is more recent and problematic, and not the former. Comments here discussing the morality of crime or a desire for policy change are missing this distinction.
> I think it's very fair to have differing attitudes/moral thresholds for an impoverished mother shoplifting a week's worth of baby formula versus "a couple in Alabama [which] pled guilty to shifting $300,000-worth of stolen baby formula on eBay".
I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Knowing some people who work in retail, the impact of rampant theft (organized or random) is really quite unsettling on the people who have to be around it. Retail store policies are very much about not interfering with the thieves, but it’s quite upsetting when you realize you’re in an environment where the law doesn’t really mean anything and consequences basically don’t exist for breaking the law. The few people I know in retail (including retail management) are looking to get out ASAP because it just feels so vaguely unsafe and, worse yet, large swaths of the public seem to thing the thieves are the good guys and the retail employees are the bad ones because they’re associated with a corporation.
Few people live in what can reasonably called a "community" any more, so the link between anonymous theft and the erosion of social culture doesn't make sense to everyone.
The most remote, homestead-y places will have unattended "stores" where you leave out goods and people come by and leave money in the basket and take what you have. The least remote, most-managed places have security locks on items over $15. It is impossible to run a friendly, neighborhood-run store when any new customer is a potential thief. When theft goes uncontrolled, owners begin to look at their customers with suspicion. Those who don't like theft leave for more peaceful places and are replaced by owners who will tolerate theft with a big insurance policy and force.
It is continually astonishing to me that so many "community-focused" people don't realize that unilateral actions of harm inside the community (theft, assault, etc.) have ripple effects that harm the entire community. If you grow up in a region where store owners believe you might be a thief unless they personally know you and you have to constantly worry about protecting what's yours, and I grow up in an area where I'm trusted and respected by business owners and I leave my door unlocked when I go to town, how is equity meaningfully achievable between us?
>The least remote, most-managed places have security locks on items over $15. It is impossible to run a friendly, neighborhood-run store when any new customer is a potential thief. When theft goes uncontrolled, owners begin to look at their customers with suspicion. Those who don't like theft leave for more peaceful places and are replaced by owners who will tolerate theft with a big insurance policy and force.
There's a street in northern Baltimore where you don't actually go into any of the shops. Instead, you walk into a foyer-mantrap hybrid made of bulletproof glass. There, the retail employees ask you what you want, you tell them, pay, and then they go get it for you. Experiencing it for the first time was bizarre. Not an area I felt safe parking my car.
A few blocks away from John Hopkins right? I find that city so bizarre, you have mansions, one of the top universities in the country, and a few blocks away it's pure ghetto. People go from being friendly to staring at you as if you are an alien.
Baltimore is so weird, sometimes feels like living in Rio de Janeiro but only the bad part of Rio. None of the music scene, night life or beaches of Rio, but all of the inequality and violence.
This (minus the bulletproof glass) is how most stores worked in Soviet union. Most of the wares were behind the counter and you asked for what you wanted and the counter person would give it to you. I guess robbery was not a big risk but theft was.
Or e.g. in Seattle in an otherwise-normal store they have alcohol under lock and key and you have to get an employer to give it to you - a hybrid model.
> Few people live in what can reasonably called a "community" any more, so the link between anonymous theft and the erosion of social culture doesn't make sense to everyone.
What do you think about how this relates to communities shifting almost entirely to the internet?
I thought about this for a while and I don't have a coherent answer.
I do think it's interesting that the Old Internet was more spontaneous, unorganized, and high-trust than the New Internet. It would be effortless to find counterexamples to this claim (back in the day I got death threats, now we have moderators for that!) but the fact remains that any new prosperous sector of the New Internet is immediately invaded by advertisers, authoritarian moderation teams, and the Eternal September effect, and the way that people present themselves on the New Internet is far more curated than in the past.
IMHO, technological advances begets social upheaval and accelerating inequity are the root causes for the popular usual suspects (broadcast media, cars and suburbia, social media).
Orthogonally, since Trumpism, I've been more open minded towards explanations rooted in reactionary populism (revanchism) and white racial animus.
> I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately.
Happened before in history. See the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union. Widespread moral justification for theft of private property on class-based "social justice" arguments. It's even happening right here in this HN thread, people justifying stealing.
This is one of those talking points I see progressives use that has just never made sense to me.
So we can agree people's time is stolen from them, this is wrong. The part that has never made sense to me is why this means stealing as a whole something that society should encourage?
If someone is abused by their parents we would agree they suffered injustice, like people who had their wages skimmed by their employer. We would never tell someone that was abused by their parents it's now okay to abuse their own children, so why would we tell someone who's been stolen from that it's now okay for them to loot bodegas?
I sometimes can't tell if I'm being gaslighted, or if people really do look at the world in such broad strokes. When I see my local owner, Sol, have his shop trashed and stuck up by a couple 19yos, I certainly wasn't thinking about how they're probably hardworking minimum wage workers and this is just an 'inefficient redistribution' of wealth which is rightfully theirs. Some people are just dishonorable thieves, there doesn't have to be more to it than that.
I think people are "bending the stick" a little as a response to traditional perspectives of crime. Ask a kid to draw or describe a crime/criminal and I'm sure it'll be a guy robbing someone either on the street or in their home. That's the dominant image of crime which people are pushing back against.
At some point after the 2008 financial crisis there were some protests in London (allegedly by black block type anarchists but they were only an element). Some vandalism occurred, bank windows got smashed, other shops were targeted and some stuff got looted. Fairly usual stuff. A meeting I was in the next day about something unrelated I listened to two people get into quite a rant about the "mindless destruction" and how much all that damage would cost. Not to mention the severe punishment that anyone involved should face (hard labour, flogging, etc). And yes, I did have to be "that guy" and point out that even if they had the same protest every week for a year it probably wouldn't compare to the cost of the crisis (a very large part of which seemed to be avoidable). That wasn't intended to justify or encourage smashing windows - it's just asking people to put things in perspective.
The problem is (as with many topics) if you only/mainly hang around progressive people (or read things from that perspective) things can seem unhinged because in that limited space the only crime they ever talk about is white collar crime or corporate crime (or white supremacist crime I guess). Those opinions are meant as a reply to mainstream society, not intended as a position statement on crime.
The same things happens with foreign policy. It's useful to be reminded of the crimes of "our side" when analysing the behaviour of Russia/China/whoever. But if you only ever talk about the crimes of the West without ever criticising Russia/China AND you communicate only with likeminded people you can end up sounding very strange to anyone listening to you who isn't in your weird bubble.
the point isn't that stealing is ok, it's that the people who claim to care about "stealing" care about one very specific type of stealing by one group of people and don't care about another more important and more extensive form of stealing by another group of people. It begins to look as though people maybe don't care about stealing as much as they claim to.
If people are just born criminals, then why is this a problem that is arising now? Is it actually a new problem or just media sensationalism? If it's real, then when did it start and can we surmise the reasons for the trend?
I don't think anyone's saying people are born criminals. People commit crime for a variety of reasons, but it's very obvious for anyone who lives in a big American city why this is specifically a problem now.
It's absolutely not media sensationalism, I've seen people walk into CVS, Target, bodegas, etc. with a bag and clear entire shelves in full sight of other shoppers. They know nobody wants to end up on TikTok accused of committing a hate crime, so they let them leave.
The cops outside, understanding the motivations of our DA Alvin Bragg, generally don't chase as they similarly realize even if they catch them, they'll be out the next day.
It's frustrating to me when people who don't live in NYC act as if they understand the problem or worse, gaslight civilians and tell them it's just "media sensationalism".
If I had to give one reason for the trend, it is that it has come become apparent that the risk:reward for stealing:persecution has tipped in the favor of stealing, and every day more people in the city decide to take part. Blaming Amazon or 'the media' is almost insulting to the shopkeepers who've had their livelihoods ruined from this selfishness.
You seem to be implying that this is both an NYC problem due to the DA, but also a national problem, so it probably isn't just because of a DA in one city. And that's my question - do we even actually have a national problem and if so, what are the causes on a national scale? I don't know if there actually are answers; though it's obvious everyone has their pet theories.
National problem caused by extreme virtue signaling, which in turn makes these thugs feel like they can get away with anything, while the only risk is to the careers of those doing their job who will be branded "racists"?
Honestly, it seems like that moment in the Batman movies after the Batman goes into exile and Gotham goes down the toilet. And for some reason, these don't seem to be as prevalent in Boston either, so it's definitely not a "those damned liberals" issue.
I wonder if there's data regarding national crime and/or national virtue signaling. But I will say that in the last few years, I've lost the sense that there is such a thing as law - merely what you can get away with or not. I wouldn't attribute it to virtue signaling or fears of racism though.
> I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Let me try to convince you without defending the morality of the shoplifter or declaring corporations evil.
1. On the totem pole of crimes, petty shoplifting (without violence) is pretty close to the bottom when it comes to harm done the public. Jaywalking and smoking weed are lower.
2. These corporations that are being robbed already build shrinkage into their budgets. $300k of baby food is nothing to Walmart, a rounding error, and I doubt you can even see it in their bottom line. Even a smaller shop is not going to go out of business if someone walks out with all their toothpaste. It’s not analogous to stealing from an individual.
3. There are a limited number of police and I’d rather them be out there deterring violent and serious crime than protecting the inventory of companies. When every rapist, murderer, white collar fraudster, and drunk driver is behind bars, and the police have nothing left to do, then sure, go bust those dastardly deodorant thieves.
"Rite Aid, a pharmacy, closed a branch in Hell’s Kitchen in February after losing $200,000 worth of stuff last winter. And last week Target, a big retailer, reported that a rise in “shrink” (to use the industry jargon) had reduced its gross profit margin by $400m so far this year. The National Retail Federation says inventory loss, largely driven by theft, cost retailers a record $95bn last year."
It seems that $300k is several orders of magnitude off.
The harm to the public is when the stores find it unprofitable to exist in certain neighborhoods, which makes the neighborhoods even worse off. If the stores don't close, then prices have to rise to pay for the shrinkage, which the public has to pay for.
Would you invest in something that returns 1% when there are 2% returns elsewhere? That is called the "opportunity cost", and a business is misallocating capital if the expected return is less than the opportunity cost.
> The cause in the increase is possibly an increase in poverty, or increase in wealth disparity?
I don't understand your question. Businesses have to have a return on their investment, or they go out of business. Shrinkage is a cost, so the price on the goods has to be raised to compensate.
The price will be increased until people stop buying (either because they do without, go elsewhere, or shoplift)
The cost of shrinkage doesn’t factor into the price a business can charge. You don’t decide “I will buy X for $1 and sell it for $3”, you go “I can sell X for $3, where’s the cheapest I can buy it and does it make sense”
Now if you have a competitor next door selling X for $2.50 you will struggle to sell for $3, even if your rent or your supplier is higher
If you can't raise prices, you go out of business.
> if you have a competitor next door selling X for $2.50 you will struggle to sell for $3
Right, but your competitor next door is also suffering from shrinkage.
There's no way that shrinkage does not impact prices. Having the government run it won't help, either, as even if the government doesn't raise prices, the money will come out of your pocket anyway as taxes or inflation.
Just as an addition, it’s worth noting most store theft comes from employees not the public.
It’s expensive to minimize opportunities for the public to steal. Basic speed bumps preventing employees (who can steal more extensively) are less expensive and tend to be the focus.
> it’s worth noting most store theft comes from employees not the public
Employee theft is always a problem, too, but whether it is worse than shrinkage or not is kind of irrelevant - it's still going to cost the business money which will mean that they'll raise prices or go under.
Employee theft can and does cause businesses to fail.
Shoplifting results in shops closing down in poorer areas or raising prices. This is quite bad for the poor.
People getting away with shoplifting and seeing others get away with it makes them feel they are not in a law abiding environment and makes them far more willing to break other laws and do things like deal drugs, beat up/kill their enemies and take the law into their own hands. A look at the murder rate in poor areas is suggestive.
It’s morally wrong to steal, and has been since the beginning of civilization.
“Though shalt not steal” - Ten Commandments
“If a man has stolen goods from a temple, or house, he shall be put to death; and he that has received the stolen property from him shall be put to death.” - Code of Hammurabi
Private property is the foundation of civilization and pretending theft doesn’t matter undermines the basis of our world. All theft is wrong.
And yet, even the Bible has provisions for poor people [1]:
> “If you go into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes, as many as you wish, but you shall not put any in your bag. 25 If you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain.
While I agree that it's morally wrong to steal, you lost me at "All theft is wrong". I think there's a deep reason why stories about moral (or at least mostly ambiguous) thieves are so prevalent. Two major examples are Robin Hood and more recently Andor, both about stealing as a way to rebel against an overwhelmingly powerful and negative authority.
People love retribution, especially when group of people they identify with benefit. It does not matter whether the cause for said retribution is real or not.
You sleep easier when you don't know what happens to the people who won't receive the shipment a robbed grain merchant cannot pay for.
Bible laws are imposed rules of violent hostile overlords, not the foundation of civilization. Although you could argue that the way civilization has evolved, those kinds of rules _are_ its foundation :-(
I might agree that all theft is wrong, but - as Proudhon aptly put it: La propriété, c'est le vol !
Disagree a bit here. The Bible and other religious texts were not necessarily decrees by "hostile overlords", they were the back-then equivalent of what we would call a Constitution these days - the foundational rules of society. Particularly what Christians call the "Old Testament", the Jews the Torah and whatever Muslims call the foundations prior to Quran today... it's essentially the same text, the same rules.
It's micro-managing every aspect of their lives to the same degree modern laws do - everything from a basic criminal code (Ten Commandments) over food safety laws (e.g. the ban for Jews and Muslims to eat pork) and employment regulation (work-free Sabbath) to providing answers to specific legal questions (inheritance, paying damages for livestock or raped women) and prescribing religious rituals. Even how to properly wage war was written down there... all of that was stuff the old tribes learned the hard way or decided upon and documented. For the Quran, a good example for that is the love of Prophet Muhammad on cats - the tribes learned that cats keep grain storages free from pests!
The problem is that over the millennia, the original context of these rules being tribally discussed and agreed-upon laws or some of these being the documentation of dispute resolutions got lost, and dogmatic / religious interpretations took favor, leading to entrenchment of rules that no longer made any sense (e.g. the mentioned pork ban or ridiculous interpretations of the work-free Sabbath). Additionally, some of the contents got lost or modified in translation - the best example is the "72 virgins" that await a Muslim martyr in heaven, which may very well have rather meant "vine grapes" [1]. FWIW, the Christian "New Testament" can also be seen as a reform-oriented amendment of the Torah.
Religious texts make way more sense when viewing them as "this is the collection of hundreds or thousands of years of tribal knowledge, order and jurisprudence", which is (IMO as an atheist) the only way these texts should be interpreted as. And yet, it still makes sense to also see the part of the rules and regulations that haven't gotten outdated as a foundation of how even our modern societies should look like (e.g. parts of the Ten Commandments, Jesus' teachings on how to view and help the poor and discriminated).
> a Constitution these days - the foundational rules of society.
A constitution is what a ruling class formalizes as foundational rules of the state. Society is mostly made up of the subjects of states.
This is perhaps more of a gray area these days - as most states are official democracies and have elections and such - but I would argue it is still essentially the case. But regardless of the present - this was certainly the case in more ancient times, where some well-armed and well-connected person or family declared itself to be the rulers. The majority of the population were simply conquered, lorded over, by such kingdoms; and whatever codex of rules was put down in writing (if at all) was not even known to them, let alone constrained to agree with their mores and customs.
About the (Jewish) bible specifically - the legislative part of it is a collection of different, and partly contradictory texts from different periods in the history of ancient Judea and the holy land, that was put in writing only much later. Most subjects of the Judean kings were not even that committed to Yahweh as a god. Naturally, such decrees and commandments were not written to be entirely divorced and contradictory to surrounding society, but they were first and foremost impositions in the interest of the rulers, not representation of the views of the ruled.
PS - From my (admittedly partial) familiarity with devout muslims, I very much doubt people going on a martyrdom (istish'haad) missions here in Palestine expect to get virgins after they die, nothing of the sort. There isn't a "piety and modesty now, promiscuity and debauchery after death" kind of a perception. Again, AFAIK. I can't access the NYT link, there's a paywall.
This is a shortsighted take. This is as stupid as the corporations buying "cyber insurance" not realizing the cases are going up and that prevention and processes are needed. Then comes next year their premiums shoot up. Who would have thought it?!
Yes they "build shrinkage" for a forecasted number. If that number goes up and you get people swiping large amounts of products that number becomes meaningless. Then people wonder why did the store close or why a deodorant there costs $10 and is locked behind the counter
Im sure that Walmart is the gold standard of cost optimization, but it's not universal. Many stores operate on very low margins, so it's easy to imagine that just a few missing cans of baby formula actually brings down the profitability of the entire shelf down to zero.
> I’ve also noticed a weird tendency to downplay theft lately, either through projecting a theoretical moral justification on to the shoplifter or by insinuating that retail stores are evil corporations and therefore deserve no sympathy.
Well... it's not that weird. The big chain stores like Walmart ruthlessly exploit their workers to the point of them being forced to apply for food stamps [1], while the owner class makes literally a dozen billions of dollars a year in net profits [2]. Additionally, Walmart is infamous for killing off small businesses around them [3]. So, I don't have much sympathy at all for these corporations and Walmart in particular.
With ever more and more people being unable to make a honest living - over half the US has less than 1000$ in savings [4] - it's no surprise that shoplifting for survival is on the rise and at least somewhat accepted in society.
Unfortunately, small stores get caught up in the crossfire as they can't afford to bear the rising cost of shoplifting.
We need better wages for the 99% and higher taxes for the 1% so that we can get away from forcing people to steal to survive.
With children, it's worse. Three million children in the US are "food insecure" and 30 million (!!!) qualify for free school lunches [1], often their only source for a warm and healthy meal, and in some places where school meals aren't free parents have to go into debt with the threat of losing custody looming over them [2].
Whenever I witness people clearing shelves in NYC, it's never been by someone who appeared homeless. Usually they're wearing clothes as nice as I am, sometimes they've got Airpods in. Let's not make up excuses for criminals, yeah?
> Most of the comments here are ignoring the difference between regular old shoplifting and the trend driving the increase discussed in the article, which they're referring to as "organized retail crime".
I guess, but conversely I'd argue that organized retail theft has been around pretty much as long as supply chains have existed. That's the mob's bread and butter. The phrase "riding shotgun" is in common use. Perhaps mass shoplifting from the store is a new tactic, but personally I look at this situation and ask, "what has changed"?
For one, we've sort of collectively realized how terrible modern jails are (Rikers anyone?). And that's good.
A second conclusion I draw is that retail stores have been gutted... walmart-ized... every ounce of efficiency wrung out of them. Have you ever been to one of these massive retail outlets and had trouble finding anyone that works there? A few months ago everyone was clutching pearls about some 150 yd stretch of train track in LA that was continually being robbed... and I can make a wild guess that this was the result of 1) skeleton crews, 2) minimal security on the ground and 3) shipping containers that are running with sub-standard defense mechanisms because they're simply too much work (slows down loading, probably break a lot, etc.).
Yes organized crime should be punished, but these companies seem to throw up they're hands and say "Gee golly, we have no idea why $20 million dollars of merchandise watched by 5 overworked, low wage employees and 1 loss prevention officer is such a target! It's a mystery!"
I don't hate mega corporations (ok maybe a little), but they definitely have a hand in creating this situation. And it's rarely commented upon when discussing the recent rise in shoplifting.
(Edit: I forgot my favorite shoplifting fact... up until recently, reports showed that both shoplifting and wage theft "cost the economy" around $40 billion per year. Comparing prosecution rates of the two crimes is left as an exercise for the reader.)
You have it backwards. Saying it's the store's fault is like blaming a victim of rape.
Once I chased a thief out to the waiting car, and blocked the door from closing, leaned into the car, and came to my senses...
I let them go. It was only worth $750. And I wasn't about to brawl inside a car with two thugs.
I could have been stabbed or shot. It's not worth the risk. And I was the store owner. Let me tell you straight up: it's not understaffing.
I would expressly tell my staff to not risk their safety for merch.
A couple years after I sold the store, they had an armed robbery at closing and lost about a hundred thousand. Also, break-ins went up: they tried cutting the safe out but couldn't reach the rear bolts to cut them. They even stole the security cameras.
I only reported once because I knew the guy and I felt betrayed. I don't know for certain, but I think the vast majority of retail theft goes unreported.
And your favorite shoplifting fact is down-right offensive. If you were more balanced in your counterargument you'd also ask the reader: What is the cost to the public for added security, staff, deterrence tech, and lost merch? And lost sense of safety and security? Those are priceless in the eyes of most reasonable people.
It's sad to think we may have lived through the golden era of retail where stores were relatively safe and pallets of merch could be left out unguarded.
These gangs are ruining it for everyone. We shouldn't even have this discussion. We should all unify with retailers of all sizes. Theft is straight up wrong, and the thieves should be punished.
> And your favorite shoplifting fact is down-right offensive. If you were more balanced in your counterargument you'd also ask the reader: What is the cost to the public for added security, staff, deterrence tech, and lost merch? And lost sense of safety and security? Those are priceless in the eyes of most reasonable people.
Sure, and the counterpoint is how much does it cost to provide those services publicly? The cost of catching, prosecuting and jailing the person is almost certainly more than the cost of the goods.
E.g. you chased off someone that stole $750 worth of goods. The average cost to incarcerate someone for a year is $31k. They will have cost the public more than $750 if they spend just 10 days in jail (which they definitely will if they don't post bail). If they spend 30 days in jail, which they could easily do just waiting for trial, it will have cost taxpayers ~$2,550 just to jail them. Add on the costs of hiring prosecutors, judges, public defenders, and more cops to do all the work here, and the public will have spent something like an order of magnitude more than the actual theft.
Theft is wrong, the thieves should be punished, but I don't know that the public spending huge sums to prevent low levels of theft is even worthwhile. The court system is about the most expensive deterrent I can think of.
If I were asked to vote on it, I'm sure not going to opt to spend an order of magnitude more trying to punish thieves. It sucks, but it would cost me less to just pay whatever markup the stores have to charge to cover the loss.
>The average cost to incarcerate someone for a year is $31k.
In the Baltimore-Washington stretch of Maryland, it's hard to find a retail store with an ATM in the front, because it's common for thieves to crash a vehicle through the glass into the ATM, load it into their vehicle, and drive away. I've talked with a couple store owners where it has happened, and apparently, nobody was ever caught in their cases.
Baltimore has some parts where you can't even enter stores. Instead, you have to wait in enclosed bulletproof glass areas while the clerks gather items for you.
The restaurant where I work at on the weekends once got a GrubHub driver open carrying with a bulletproof vest. One of our regular GrubHub drivers got carjacked by a man who shot a police officer right out front of the restaurant.
Everyone I've mentioned so far is black, in case it matters.
If we do not swallow the costs of jailing lawbreakers, then the rest of America will be like this.
>I'm sure not going to opt to spend an order of magnitude more trying to punish thieves.
Judges typically balance 3 primary factors in sentencing criminals:
- Punishment of the criminal.
- Protecting the community from the criminal.
- Provide justice and closure to victims of the criminal.
Punishing the thief is just one aspect of this. It's an important one, because it serves as a deterrent for future would-be thieves. Crime is going unpunished in Baltimore. As a result, the community is not protected and victims have no justice. People have been leaving for years now.
Understaffing doesn't justify crime. You probably understaff your home security, leaving it empty all day while you're at work. Do you deserve to be robbed?
Noting the existence of theft throughout the ages is not an endorsement.
My point is that we should be careful who we ask to pay for enforcement. It's expensive to maintain a system of courts and jails for petty crimes. Rikers is a rather egregious example, but almost $1 billion per year where 85% of detainees are pretrial!
I think it's legitimate to ask to what exent the community should cover the enforcement cost.
The community pays either way - they are the source of the revenue that has to cover any private enforcement! Law enforcement is a public good and will be under supplied by private parties that cannot internalise all the gain!
When you spread the risk out among thousands of homes near you, a door with a lock may well be a “sufficiently staffed” home. Meanwhile stores may be the only game for several blocks, miles even depending on which part of the country.
Understaffing and such things are like having locks on your house, yet only locking the windows while leaving the house, garage, and shed doors open. You may not deserve to have your stuff taken, but everyone can understand why they chose your house instead of the one next door. If you aren't willing to do the bare minimum - shutting doors and locking them - you were minimally more OK with the risk.
And to be fair, retail places usually aren't "robbed". They have their stuff shoplifted and stolen: Robbing a store generally creates images of armed intruders, and most of it isn't like that.
This is such a big nationwide problem that Target actually mentioned it during their earnings report (this is stated in the article.) Some states/cities have made it near impossible to prosecute these people, so the risk/reward is very favorable to stealing and reselling. Some stores have even closed down in certain areas because of it. When we talk about "food deserts" in some cities, it could one day be we have massive deserts of no retailers at all, and it will largely be a government policy failure.
The videos of organized ransacking of stores are honestly insane. The stores are somewhat powerless because of liability, and the new laws that have raised the level in which the law even cares. I don't think the "broken window" policy is the end-all, it has some problems but allowing "small" theft rings does not generally put areas on a good trajectory. These goods are almost always getting 3rd party listed, be it Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc.
This is mostly a function of policies that explicitly allow and tolerate this sort of behavior as a sort of “pay back” and “release valve” for the poor, addicts or generally speaking under represented social classes.
As the wage gap and opportunity gap widens in the US, allowing shoplifting is actually an intentional release valve that is being tolerated and even outright legally permitted (California Prop 47), because - without it - we would see more home break-ins, kidnappings of wealthy people and more severe offenses. Instead, shoplifting is relatively harmless and prevents this type of escalation of crime.
“Panem et circenses” said the Romans, shoplifting is a form of “panem”. I think many don’t understand the incredible pressure pot that is the US at the moment with vast negative social pressures and inequality. If it explodes, all bets are off: the US could look a lot like South Africa and Brazil than what it is now.
This plus some political survivorship too: votes are all equal, and when most people are disadvantaged or about to become disadvantaged, politicians cater more and more to them (populism) in order to survive and dominate in the political arena.
This is an idiotic rationalization even if it is true that this is the motivation behind allowing ransacking to go unchecked. You're essentially funding the creation and expansion of criminal gangs. Training up a whole generation of people to become looters with little fear of the law. Take this a few steps further, the article mentions that retailers have begun keeping product off the shelves or even completely shutting down outlets in problem areas. What happens when this becomes general policy and there are no more easy targets to loot? Do you think that every person who has grown accustom to this lifestyle and has forgone legal work in favor of this more profitable option is just going to look around and say "oh well, it was good while it lasted. Guess I'll go get a job at McDonald's and be a law abiding citizen", fuck no, they're going to look for other targets but now they have possibly years of experience and contacts with other criminals allowing them to go after other options that they wouldn't have considered before.
This isn't hyperbole, just look at what happens in other countries that lack the ability to enforce their laws.
> As the wage gap and opportunity gap widens in the US, allowing shoplifting is actually an intentional release valve that is being tolerated and even outright legally permitted (California Prop 47), because - without it - we would see more home break-ins, kidnappings of wealthy people and more severe offenses. Instead, shoplifting is relatively harmless and prevents this type of escalation of crime.
What a wild theory. I've seen no evidence of this mechanism existing.
I lived in slums and he's not wrong. You have no idea how some people have been left behind by society. And you expect them to care about the community?
I have no idea how a prosecutor can take down these organized rings. The entire method prosecutors use for say exotic drugs, guns, etc: "Ok we have you for 5 years here, who do you work for, make these phone calls, we can get your sentence down to parole". This allows prosecutors to work their way up. But if a prosecutor is sitting in front of a low level shop lifter - who gets out that day - i don't see any prosecutor leverage.
And? US policy on handling shoplifters has not undergone any meaningful change in just the last couple years; I assume Europe has also largely maintained the status quo.
Mostly, except pretrial detention for minor crimes is unfortunately still not that uncommon in Europe.
The lack of bail often makes this worse, a weird obsession with “fairness” forces us to continue locking up people with sufficient assets to insure against absconding. Poor people can’t afford bail? Better make everyone else suffer too.
>and it will largely be a government policy failure.
You mean feature.
If you tell voters in no uncertain terms what will happen if they piss on the electric fence and they piss on it then it's safe to assume they wanted the results. Make no mistake, people were told certain policy would lead to businesses leaving these areas resulting in <thing> deserts. Voters voted for it anyway.
If this only harmed the people who voted for it, then I'd have no problem with it. The problem is that it's also harming all of the people who voted for the opposite but lost.
Having the penalty be a slap on the wrist and having the person is released same day, it’s essentially the same as not prosecuting them. NY state bail reforms, and in San Fran;
“ In 2014, a ballot referendum passed that downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanor.”
That’s not the same claim at all - those people can and are being prosecuted: bail wouldn’t matter if they weren’t! Similarly, changing the threshold for a felony theft charge doesn’t prevent anyone from being prosecuted.
That’s the claim made by someone running for office on a tough on crime platform, so I’d want a more objective source and especially comparisons to other cities.
For example, one other explanation is that police have gone on a soft-strike trying to reduce popular support for anti-police brutality laws. If that were the case, the focus should instead be on disciplinary measures for the officers who aren’t answering calls.
The big thing we’d really want would be comparisons with other cities. We hear a lot about NYC and LA both because they’re large but also because they are synonymous with liberal in right-wing media, where billions of dollars annually are spent promoting that narrative. One of the first questions should be comparing rates to less popularly-mentioned cities, especially in states where sentencing thresholds haven’t changed.
You delegate and subdivide. I get a gang together and each person steals $50 at a time, no more; if they get caught they get let go or it’s very minor.
You collect the materials and farm them off to Amazon.
I was talking to a NYC colleague the other day about how there are trends in favor of not punishing people for certain criminal activity in the city. We were talking about driving with a suspended license, but I asked about shoplifting. She said, "Oh, no. That's on the opposite trend. Not only are they prosecuting it to the maximum, but they just changed the law to make it easier to hold people on bail for shoplifting." She made it clear that shoplifting was never a low priority for prosecution, but now it's a higher one.
I understand that the claim in this article is that aggregators/sellers/fences whatever should be surveilled and prosecuted (more), but just wanted to add this tale from the courthouse and emphasize that the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.
> Manhattan D.A. Acts on Vow to Seek Incarceration Only for Worst Crimes
> The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told prosecutors in his office in a memo that they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for the most serious offenses — including murder, sexual assault and economic crimes involving vast sums of money — unless the law requires them to do otherwise.
It clearly is true. I can actually watch it happen. You can too, if you go to arraignments in NYC. The line ADAs have no discretion to dismiss petit larceny (shoplifting) at arraignment. They need supervisor approval. There are other cases like driving under suspension (VTL 511 -- mentioned in GP) where they do have this discretion. There is a reason for the difference, which is that petit larceny is a priority.
Also, the DAs supported the "harm over harm" amendment to bail reform (CPL 510.10(4)t) for the explicit purpose of seeking bail in repeat shoplifting cases. And can you guess how they're using it?
You are conflating DA public statements with actual operational policy. It is nothing new that DAs claim to prioritize things that are not on their roadmaps.
So on the one side I see news reports of dozens of cases of serial shoplifting offenders out on the streets, and the NYC DA informing his staff and letting the public know that if you steal less than $500 you will not go to jail.
But you're claiming that the DA actually intended to send them to jail. So he was baiting them to commit the crime? I don't buy it.
And you're claiming that his prosecutors have no discretion in prosecuting these cases? I don't buy it, but if you have some references to support that claim, other than word of mouth, I'm all ears.
I can't find precisely what the amendment was and when it took effect, but the subject of the article was a surge in retail theft over several years, so if you're talking about some changes in the past year, then maybe we will be able to see some effects in the next year.
I am speaking of the perspective of having seen about 200 cases of this type in the last few years (this is a moderately low sample size among practitioners) in the place in question and from having discussed the issue with colleagues who have more experience than that over longer time periods in the same place.
You are free to disregard my "word of mouth" claim in favor of an elected prosecutor's press releases and true crime sensational stories in one of the country's most infamous tabloids. I just wanted to put some ink on the statement that what I described is "clearly not true."
You are only seeing the cases that make it to the courthouse, right? How many shoplifting events are ignored, missed, or otherwise let off before things make it that far? OK, there is no discretion on the cases they allow into court but there is a hell of a lot of discretion before things get to that point.
This is correct in the sense that the police have the ability to "let someone off with a warning," or loss prevention/the cashier can look the other way, but my statement applies to any case where someone gets a ticket or is arrested. That's where the ratchet starts to tighten.
In the case of habitual, high-volume retail theft like in the article, people seem to be eventually arrested at a pretty fast clip, though it's obviously impossible to know the rate.
I regret the "clearly not true" wording. I wasn't reading your original comment as closely as I should have.
But now I'm not clear exactly what you are claiming. Of the 200 cases you've seen, how many were petit larceny cases that resulted in jail time? How much jail time?
Every source I can find indicates that the government can reduce charges or dismiss, and that in any event, jail time is unlikely.
"A petit larceny charge “would get a desk appearance ticket and fall under Bragg’s ‘no prosecution memo,’” said Joseph Giacalone, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and ex-NYPD sergeant..."
https://nypost.com/2022/01/08/alvin-bragg-underplayed-shopli...
> how many were petit larceny cases that resulted in jail time? How much jail time?
I don't think I've seen anyone get a jail sentence for a shoplifting petit larceny in New York. However, people commonly serve jail time before sentencing in these cases. There are two major causes: arrests and bail.
The DA statement in the article you cite says that people should be issued a summons for shoplifting rather than be arrested. It is true that this should happen, but a lot of police don't seem to agree with it and they have the power to arrest. I have seen more petit larcenies in DATs than under arrest at arraignment, but it's actually a pretty close call. People who are arrested can spend a few days in jail until they are arraigned.
At arraignment, the person will be released unless bail is set. Bail cannot be set in most misdemeanors in NY after bail reform. However regarding shoplifting, the legislature has passed the "harm over harm" carve out (referenced earlier) to allow a prosecutor to ask for bail if someone is, among other things, repeatedly accused of shoplifting. Having bail set in a misdemeanor like this is a big deal because a lot of people will serve more jail time waiting for a plea offer than would have been the sentence.
Regarding discretion to dismiss, this is a nuanced issue. Line prosecutors, unlike police, have astonishingly little autonomy. More specifically there is usually freedom to be more punitive but not less punitive. There are instances where discretion is pre-delegated and the prosecutor in arraignments can dismiss a case if they see a reason this would be a good idea, but this is extremely rare. What I was saying above is that petit larceny is not such a crime. Of course there are other ways to dismiss cases later in the process, but those require more work and are available to fewer people.
Anyway my original point, which I will stick to, was that shoplifting is not deprioritized or unprosecuted by the NYC DAs. They treat it as seriously as anything, and to my mind more seriously than they should.
Aren't most shoplifters not even caught? Police don't investigate because the city won't prosecute. And shops won't report because police won't investigate.
Maybe what you say is true about arraignments. But that assumes that someone has been reported, investigated, and caught.
Maybe? I would tend to believe that but it seems impossible to know. I think companies tend to argue something like shrinkage == theft and theft > arrests, but that's pretty suspect since there are many other ways that inventory goes missing.
As to your other point, I think it's a myth that people lose faith in governmental administration and fail to report crime in this context. Maybe that happens with things like sexual violence, but not here where property owners have every economic reason to report theft without considering police availability or effectiveness.
I agree that police don't investigate crime like this (in cities), but in the corporate context they don't need to. This field is dominated by private investigation and security. People are detained with dubious legality by the "loss prevention" employee until police show up, then the store hands over 4k video of the person stuffing baby formula in their pants and walking out of the store.
It can both true that those shoplifters getting caught are punished to the full extent of the law and that it is hard to catch 50/50 people who were in a shop for 30 seconds and arrest them for shoplifting. So hard in fact that if the police are not physically there before it is happening there is likely zero chance to catch anyone in these groups.
The other thing that's interesting from their state graph is that it disagrees with the "people fleeing anarchist California to orderly Texas to escape rampant crime" meme.
Not only does Texas have higher rates of larceny theft[1], it is the biggest outlier on the graph in terms of lack of prosecution for it - no other state is further below the trend line.
Also should be taken into account, it's about _reported_ larceny theft. Allegedly, they say that in "anarchist California" people don't even bother reporting anymore.
> the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.
Getting a low-level criminal or junkie off the street, alive, is worth a lot. You can then offer them a chance to turn their sentence into rehab or something if they don't need jail.
And there's no reason we can't go for the higher ups too, there's (jail)time for everyone!
> Getting a low-level criminal or junkie off the street, alive, is worth a lot.
Off the street and on to Riker's Island. A jail so dangerous that it has a high likelihood of being put into federal receivership in the next year. People are safer on the street. Full stop.
Probably mostly positive actually. Removing people who either have poor self control or little ability to find productive work means they don't teach those habits to their children and those around them.
This does not mean the answer is executions though, as people's lives and happiness have value even if they're scumbags.
> What are the aggregate consequences of such policies to society?
Might ask yourself the same question about shoplifting gangs being let loose
And if Riker's is a problem, then deal with that specific problem. Not prosecuting people seems to be one level removed from it. (yes, they are connected, but for example, not sending pre-trial people there could be a start)
That sounds insightful but it is wrong - Vancouver BC lost 3500 people on its streets last year.
But there's no reason to put people in expensive and dangerous prisons when minimum security facilities will do. When you're drying people out and have the only supply around for 50km they aren't going to leave.
It could be wrong, I have no idea from a statistical prospective. You would have to analyze the people who are arrested and figure out what are the mortality rates in those narrow demographics, which is not my field. We can assume maybe 20 people will die on Riker's this year[0] our of ~5865[1], so it's not a low rate. I am mostly motivated to counter the "people better off in jail" narrative, which is horrible and pernicious.
Another thing is that your hypothetical minimum security facility does not exist in NYC and is not going to be built, so we are dealing with Riker's for all pretrial confinement unless you are a child or very mentally ill.
Prison is not permanent housing. Moving someone from the street, to prison, then back to the street, takes away a lot of the resources that they may have been using to keep themselves alive. Temporary shelter may be gone. Connections to people who can help them may be gone.
If someone dies on the street as a result of imprisonment, they're counted as a street death, but they're really a prison death.
The goalposts were fine where they were, that prison can be and in these cases is a better alternative to leaving people on the street.
> a lot of the resources that they may have been using to keep themselves alive
They are dying in an open air drug encampment. Any resources they had were sold for drugs in the first few days.
> Temporary shelter may be gone.
They're probably under a tarp, but maybe they had a place at one of the indoor drug encampments. None of these are the slightest help, and to go back to any previous shelter is death.
> Connections to people who can help them may be gone.
Any people you knew while living in a drug encampment are toxic or worthless at best. Any "help" you were getting at the time is the type that kept you there.
> If someone dies on the street as a result of imprisonment, they're counted as a street death, but they're really a prison death.
Your analysis ignores the people who get better as a result of a criminal-sanction enforced dry-out and that a significant number (25% maybe) of street users who don't make it into prison (it's a good thing in this context) will die on the street each year.
Yes, minimum security is better than maximum and non-criminal rehab better again, but you said it won't be built so it's good for you to know that even Riker's Island is better than leaving junkies on the street - for the junkie!
Only if you narrowly define 'people' to mean the tiny minority of people who are thieves, and exclude the overwhelming majority of people who aren't thieves. Thieves are safer on the street but everybody else is safer with thieves off the street. You've got your priorities skewed.
This is a reasonable comment if you're talking about stabbings or murders but not shoplifting. Allowing people to steal from retail stores with impunity doesn't make anyone unsafe.
Realize that I'm not arguing for impunity, just that incarceration should be off the table.
Allowing people to commit any forceful or violent crime makes everyone feel less safe but also encourages the crime to escalate.
> just that incarceration should be off the table.
Nope. Nobody takes options off the table or the opposition adjusts. If we say we won't imprison people for X then X becomes a freebie. You see it in SF where shoplifting under $1k isn't pursued, in Vancouver where vandalism isn't pursued and you can pitch a tent up against someone's building, etc. Without involuntary incarceration you can't even force someone into detox or rehab.
We should try to have better options but we've got to stop the sabotage of our system. If you can't present a better alternative to incarceration (for everyone holistically) then you can't complain.
California is starting to clean up its DAs, a bit, British Columbia is cracking down. Eventually we'll have the use of our legal system again.
This is about organized retail bulk theft. Punishing the individual shoplifters is useful. But it's also useful to crack down on secondary markets through which (mostly) stolen goods are shifted.
We haven't banned pawn shops, either. But we do understand that they are a conduit for theft and can induce other crime, and so we tend to impose a certain amount of regulation upon them to reduce the scope of the harm.
What exact form that would take is up for discussion.
And, of course, there's other secondary markets-- sketchy people with tables illegally selling gray market consumer goods.
> So you want that the government do something, but don’t know what?
Actually, I pretty well know what, and I'll explain despite your bad faith.
* We have a century-old toolkit of ways to deal with legitimate businesses that often end up as fences. Mostly record-keeping requirements and a degree of secondary liability to encourage vetting of where they buy merchandise from. You see this toolkit applied to pawn shops, scrap metal dealers, etc...
* We also have pretty good ways, in major municipalities, of shutting down sellers of goods who open impromptu businesses on street corners with dubious goods. Increased amount of retail theft may be a signal to redouble these efforts.
* And, of course, enforcement against the actual frontline shoplifters is important, too.
Of course, all of these things are tradeoffs that impede some legitimate businesses to some extent to protect other businesses from illegal activity. The exact amount and form is open to discussion.
The reason why all your comments are getting flagged is because you're engaging in mockery instead of trying to advance the conversation and talk about specifics.
Ideally they would get the street-level shoplifter to inform on the shoplifter's boss in order to get a low sentence or immunity, so that the real kingpin can be caught.
Some speculated that prosecutors had gone soft on looting after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But it is hard to see any such trend in the data: generally states with more shoplifting prosecute more shoplifters
The claim is about the time-series comparison, and the rebuttal is about the cross section comparison. Is the journalist in question stupid, gaslighting, or both?
It's funny they say it's "hard to see any such trend in the data" of arrests in a post-Ferguson America when the data is so apparent and its meaning so contested that it has its own Wikipedia article.
It would be totally illogical to pretend that such massive sweeping change in public perception of policing would have no effect on the activity of the police themselves.
What's amazing is how no one is honing in on the real reason this is happening, the DA's office combined with state laws make it hard to bail people and send people to prison. That's the decision made, and it's referred to as the carceral system. It's something viewed as urgently needing reform, and that's how the progressive DA's operate. Look at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA's program (https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Day-O...)
If cops are standing around doing nothing, it's because it's pointless to engage with a suspect physically, risking yourself while by the way people around whip out their phones to video you, if the suspect will be released on their own recognizance on some lowered charge, if the charge isn't dropped anyway.
You can also add, if you want to criticize cops, that they're civil workers at the end of the day, and most are in for the benefits, such as pension and healthcare, rather than pretending to be superheroes or vigilantes.
I wish that DA had added some references to the studies that support less incarceration. It just doesn't make sense to me, he admits that Manhattan is the worst burrough for crime, then states that it is over incarcerating. How does one determine that?
Also he mentions social programs as an alternative to incarceration, but are these programs actually available? The crime rate suggests they are not, so reducing incarceration may be counterproductive until they are better established.
>It just doesn't make sense to me, he admits that Manhattan is the worst burrough for crime, then states that it is over incarcerating. How does one determine that?
It's tied in this foundational belief (and it's mentioned as one of the points) that incarceration leads to more recidivism. How one can reach this conclusion by taking overall violent crime stats into account (also all but one out of seven felony types are up in NYC) requires some logical legwork.
The fact that increases of petty crime and increases of serious crime are both happening yearly should be a red flag that makes us question the policy decisions, which again are based on not 'over policing' or 'over incarcerating'. It could be the two are connected, but you'd be accused of Broken Windows Theory.
It's hard not to see a general chaos as being contributing. The plexiglass seems like a symbol of that to many people.
It's amazing how popular this beleif is, and how confident adherents are that it is true. It's epistemological arrogance, people simply have an unjustified confidence in social science studies.
>What do you mean by general chaos and plexiglass?
The plastic casing around goods in all the chain pharmacies now, requiring staff to unlock. There's also hired private security now on top of it. It might not be Plexiglass, to be fair.
seems like the problem is not too much incarceration, but the wrong type of incarceration (i.e. not having prison be a dangerous and dehumanizing experience). if you didn't have a broken prison system that leads to recidivism, then you could safely use incarceration as a deterrent to crime
I think you're spot on. Well designed prisons should not institutionalize people. In my mind the ideal situation would be prisons that act like adult schools that teach how to best live on the straight and narrow.
Though based on the public curriculum of my state, I'm not confident that current governments have enough talented people to make this a reality. Maybe somewhere someday.
The real reason is mentioned I the article: it’s absurdly easy to sell bulk stolen goods online. As long as that’s possible, there will always be someone stealing it, no matter how many people you lock up.
Why is it specifically a problem here in New York then, but wherever else I go in the country I don't see things nearly as locked up? Geography presumably shouldn't be a factor if shoplifters are only selling their loot online.
Population density makes it easier to hide in a crowd and also easier to recruit teams of shoplifters. The estensive subway system in Manhattan makes it easy to escape underground. Due to traffic, police response times may be longer. Manhattan has dozens of pharmacies in the business areas, which makes it easier to hit several stores in succession and get a substantial haul.
That sounds like we're pointing to an external force (the ease of selling stolen goods online), as if it were some sort of magnetic draw, an irresistible temptation.
What's tempting is that there's a lack of punishment. Do you propose we lecture to thieves to dissuade them?
It's like arguing people run red lights because they get distracted due to phone notifications and so maybe we shouldn't punish them with points that could lead to a license suspension.
> Do you propose we lecture to thieves to dissuade them?
No.
> as if it were some sort of magnetic draw, an irresistible temptation.
The shoplifting itself is committed by individuals and individual cases of shoplifting should be a reasonably light punishment. It’s not murder.
But a single person is not shoplifting $300,000 worth of merchandise. There’s two culprits: the ease of selling vast quantities of stolen items and from which follows the organized crime rings that facilitate it.
If you want to stop it, you need to crack down on both the fences (eBay, Amazon, etc.) and the organizers of these shoplifting sprees. Sure, punish the shoplifters too, but going after them won’t end it - there will always be someone in need of easy cash who can be recruited in their place.
> It's like arguing people run red lights because they get distracted due to phone notifications and so maybe we shouldn't punish them with points that could lead to a license suspension.
If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to.
Even if you are super cynical, throwing a shoplifter in jail accomplishes what? If they have a job, they'll lose their job. If they have a home, they'll probably get evicted. They'll have to go through a court system that has to deal with this. People will have to do a bunch of work to move this person through the system.
And at the end of the day someone goes to jail a bit and leaves, and there's no safety net, so they're just permanently worse off. Congrats, you not only wasted an outsized amount of resources for petty theft, but now the person is back in society with less means of getting anything done in a legal way.
If you consider people to actually be people who you want to see improve, there's a hell of a lot better things to be done than putting people in jail for petty theft. At least in the US system.
>If bankers can get away with treble damages, then maybe shoplifters should to
What other crimes do you hold this standard with? Should rapists and murders not go to jail since bankers get away with crimes?
>Even if you are super cynical, throwing a shoplifter in jail accomplishes what?
It removes a person willing to shoplift from society.
>If they have a job, they'll lose their job. If they have a home, they'll probably get evicted. They'll have to go through a court system that has to deal with this. People will have to do a bunch of work to move this person through the system.
Same thing happens with any criminal. Why not avoid the paper work and avoid arresting murderers.
>And at the end of the day someone goes to jail a bit and leaves, and there's no safety net, so they're just permanently worse off. Congrats, you not only wasted an outsized amount of resources for petty theft, but now the person is back in society with less means of getting anything done in a legal way.
>If you consider people to actually be people who you want to see improve, there's a hell of a lot better things to be done than putting people in jail for petty theft. At least in the US system.
Perhaps this is true, but you are putting the cart before the horse. We need to fix the things you mentioned before we avoid jail time.
The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period. And unreasonable punishments, like locking a human in a cage without rehabilitation for years of their life, only make the problem worse and cost us a ridiculous amount of money (and humanity).
So maybe take a step back, or five, and think about the causes of petty crimes and why they happen here more than other nations.
>The fact that the only solution you see is "punishment" is exactly the problem. No reasonable punishment will stop these crimes. Period.
Reasonableness can be debated. That these crimes are unstoppable less so; not only is any crime stoppable, if stoppable means reducing the yearly instances of it. It's disproven because the crime numbers have gone up since these policies have been implemented and we've reduced incarceration rates. It's a correlation that you can't ignore.
Your humanitarian argument is absolutely legitimate, how we deal with people who steal, often out of necessity due to addiction, mental illness, or other desperation. It's hard to say that punishment is always an inhumane option though. We can't run a society and dense cities without an enforcement of some order, since that concerns the other 99% who aren't committing these crimes. If pharmacies close and parks are unusable, everyone suffers.
A big cause of petty crimes (and more serious ones) is people growing up among criminals and seeing them not face harsh consequences. The reality experienced by a group of people shapes their mores over time.
Nah, locking them up is cheaper than leaving them out. Yes, it may cost a lot but what do you think the societal cost is of beating up CVS employees until they close another store? What do you think the neighbors would want?
> locking a human in a cage without rehabilitation for years of their life
A human who isn't worth letting out even if it were safe to do so. Net positive to society. I'd rather imprison one person than sentence another to a mugging or rape. The CVS employees have rights too.
> make the problem worse and cost us a ridiculous amount of money (and humanity)
Explain the humanity loss to someone mugged or raped by a repeat offender.
> why they happen here more than other nations
Why are more rapes reported in Sweden than India? Because more rapes happen, or more rapes are reported? In many countries if you tried to shoplift you'd simply be beaten and thrown out. In the USA police are called and a report is written.
As for which nation is safer, it depends if you're a criminal or not.
Punishment is about desert, rooted in morality. A sin/crime/misdeed just definitionally deserves punishment.
Read The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment by CS Lewis [1].
The other position is that humans need to be cured of their problems. At which point the "humanitarians" who arbitrarily decide these things, basically will endlessly torture people into conformance. They medicalize justice. With the permission of their own conscience, they will cure people of things they may not even regard as a state of disease. Of course these "diseases" are a subjective matter. What some people regard as unpleasant ways to live, others don't.
Can't even argue with someone who thinks like this. But in an ideal situation, you would get to live in a city with no prosecution for theft and I get to live somewhere with harsh punishment for theft.
The problem is I have to live under the mayors you vote for because there's a few more of you than me.
max shoplifting penalty in nyc is a year and thats for repeat offenders. its mostly fines. you are right putting people in prison for years for shoplifting is bad. it doesnt really happen
Certainly not for one offense, or even two. Someone who behaves outside the law consistently needs to be dissuaded though. What suggestions do you have?
Ideally they'd be given corporal punishment by perfectly morally upstanding cops. This is cheap, fast, doesn't stop them working and doesn't put them in an environment where they're around lots of hardened convicts.
I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
Oh, I got this one! Just replace the cops with objective, completely fair AI! That will surely solve all of the problems and definitely hasn't been extensively worried about in science fiction for decades.
The danger is sliding the Overton window so that society becomes accepting of theft, which makes life objectively worse for everyone including the thieves.
Look at things like food deserts for an example of why allowing high theft is bad. Crime is so normal in these areas that its not even viable to bring in food in exchange for money.
You're laughably sheltered. The same person would set a baby afire to get drugs. By refusing to get them off the street at the first intervention you're setting some poor schmo up to take the fall, robbery, beating, or death.
This isn't some poor single mom who can't afford an extra $20 a month to feed her baby, stealing formula. Watch the videos - crews of five to ten are walking into a store and looting it systematically - expensive cosmetics and other non-essentials - and beating anyone who interferes. Regardless of the violence it just gets called "shoplifting" in the news.
You're minimizing organized crime that results in attempted murderer simply because the predicate crime sounds small.
Because the news doesn't report the truth. You have to watch youtube videos of the thefts to see the violence. Even then, the most egregious videos seem to be vanishing as if they're being reported. Most of these people have no idea because the news tells them it's a made-up MAGA issue or something.
And the violence is never punishable if you're a "victim". A guard who trips a thief will be charged, no question, but a thief who beats that guard on camera isn't even going to be investigated. No budget for "shoplifting" after all.
It's not like someone is stealing food. These thugs are systematically ripping off just less than $1000 of expensive cosmetics, medicine, etc, that they can sell. Some of the videos show the thieves with calculators, tabulating their take and leaving just before they cross the line.
This comes out of the pockets of the honest customers, if they weren't beaten in the robbery itself. The cost of these robberies is society itself.
Sure, negative societal costs are true of embezzlement, stock fraud, and wage theft as well. I wouldn't describe those crimes as violent either, unless by chance a separate act of violence was perpetrated in their commission. And, even though they are generally on an orders-of-magnitude higher cost scale than garden variety shoplifting, we don't normally describe embezzlers and other white collar criminals using dog whistle words like "thugs" either.
> I wouldn't describe those crimes as violent either, unless by chance a separate act of violence was perpetrated in their commission.
Or if they plan to use violence if needed. Watch the videos of them beating guards and other shoppers. It doesn't matter that they don't use violence every time because they're ready whenever they want.
If that white-collar criminal had a gun, "just in case", then we would call them a violent criminal.
> dog whistle words like "thugs" either.
Does that "I'm taking offense over here" strategy do anything for you? It just tells me you try to see everything through a race-based lens.
We have been, obviously. That's why we have the largest prison population in the world (and we have to pay for it). It just doesn't work. So if you actually care about reducing crime, and not just getting petty revenge, shouldn't we try something different finally?
Raises hand: uh, I think harshly punishing crimes works just fine. Things were pretty safe while I was growing up, in fact it was even getting safer every year. It really wasn't until we actually did "try something different" with these DAs who don't believe in prosecution and the defund movements that crime actually started to go up again.
Things are safe now, from my perspective. And from a statistical perspective, crime today is dramatically lower than the 70s and 80s. When did you grow up?
And yet the bump in property crime is coincident with noticeable recent slackening off, especially on property crime. I'm all for exploring what works, but not prosecuting shoplifters goes in the failed experiment bucket at this point IMO.
Why not both instead of relying on one? Fix the broken economy, and punish people. That should reduce crime, lower the prison population, while still punishing those who actually deserve it.
Unfortunately economy is boring and the media/congress would rather talk about stupid side issues that effect no one.
443 comments as I write this. I searched for the word "boost" and "Fentanyl" and was surprised that neither word had been mentioned.
There is another engine driving this phenomenon: addicts "boosting" to feed their addiction. Drug use is another crime that society seems uninterested in prosecuting or punishing as of late. Add illicitly manufactured Fentanyl (1) to that recipe and you have an absolute onslaught of retail theft.
In interview after interview with addicts, it's clear that boosting is one of the primary methods of funding drug use. (2) If we are not interested in curbing drug trafficking, sales, and abuse, we will continue to have a huge problem with retail theft. (And also an unconscionable death toll that is growing rapidly.)
We already tried this. It was called The War on Drugs and it failed totally, completely and unambiguously. If there's one thing to understand about the last 60 years of United States drug criminalization and enforcement, it's that those policies have utterly failed to curb drug abuse and addiction. There are a mind-boggling number of studies which show that criminalizing drug use doesn't create fewer drug addicts.
Decriminalizing drugs doesn't mean that addicts would suddenly be able to afford them. How would drug decriminalization mitigate retail theft? Who is going to purchase their Fentanyl for them?
You're arguing against a claim which I never made. I didn't say that decriminalizing drugs would "mitigate retail theft", just that criminalizing drugs doesn't do anything to prevent drug abuse and addiction.
Portugal decriminalised drugs in 2000 and this is regarded as a better solution. Drug use is treated as a health issue rather than a crime issue, and the results are better.
See here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
I'm Portuguese and can confirm this works pretty well overall.
It's still too strict though - I got convicted of essentially "possession with intent to distribute" just for having ~15g of hashish when I was young and a regular smoker some 15 years ago (the legal limit is 5g). I only got a bit over a year probation and it never showed up on my record, but it was extremely unfair IMO and a traumatic experience - to this day I still have nightmares of being arrested and my home being searched every once in a while, and a big distrust for police and the justice system which will probably never go away.
Decriminalizing drugs wasn't the only thing Portugal did. They virtually force people into rehab. They don't just go around distributing crack pipes like the US.
Decriminalize drug use, thorough social services support, start treating drug-users as patients with an illness rather than criminals with a moral-failing.
This will probably require some decriminalization of drug sales. Just to get the drug-users out of constant contact with crime.
And also - it's not like Americans are uniquely prone to opioid addiction, why isn't the rest of the world seeing this problem on anything approaching similar scale? What are they doing differently?
I get the impression America is uniquely vulnerable among the wealthiest nations. Private healthcare providers, a defanged health regulator, and rampant corporate bribery/advertising.
Purdue salespeople lobbied doctors directly to prescribe their opioids to patients, while Purdue suppressed knowledge their incredibly addictive nature, and later offloaded blame to the addicts they largely created.
The article says prosecutors don't go after these thefts but I'd think the issue is with the cops and the number of arrests. After the BLM protests of 2020 (George Floyd) cops basically went hands off on these so called minor crimes, and so I'd imagine many of them don't even make it to prosecutors. We'd need a graph of incidents and arrests for years prior to 2020 (or months in early vs late 2020) to see the change.
The article claims that the BLM protests made little difference, and include a graph of various states comparing the amount of shoplifting with the amount of prosecution. Generally there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between states with large BLM protests and reduced prosecution.
For example, Oregon had huge protests and weak government responses, and yet prosecutes large amounts of shoplifting.
Blaming this on the response to BLM seems intuitive, but I have yet to see data that supports it.
There were not protests state wide, they were in a single county, the one in which shoplifting isn't prosecuted as much. A couple miles away, with different DAs, you will get arrested and prosecuted for even very minor theft.
> Unseating [Washington Co DA] Barton has been a priority for national progressive groups funding criminal justice reform in Oregon.
> “Washington County is the most extreme county I’ve ever worked in, and that’s because of the tough on crime, war on drugs, lock 'em up and throw away the key fanaticism coming from the DA’s office,” Decker said.
This is the person responsible for a 93% prosecution rate, being re-elected on the basis of "law and order" and relatively conservative viewpoints, backlash against the BLM protest responses that you talk about.
As others have said, aggregating at the state level makes no sense.
For example, in Austin, TX, I can't speak for retail crimes in particular but there has most definitely been a change in prosecuting other crimes. Hit-and-runs are an epidemic now in the city, primarily because the police won't even respond unless there is a major injury. I was in a hit and run, I got a detailed description of the car and license plate, and yet there were 0 consequences to the person that hit me. It actually makes more sense to run if you hit someone because there are literally no downsides (except for people with a conscience, of course).
But if you looked across TX as a whole, this data would definitely not show up.
My point is that you can have a democrat city abdicating law enforcement in a republican state. What matters for local crime is the city, not the wider state.
False. Law enforcement has many layers with concurrent jurisdiction. It’s not just city. How each jurisdiction polices can vary widely depending on where you are.
That depends on how rigorous their work was. If they did a good job, that would be a major career boost and would likely get them tenure. If they did a flawed but plausible sounding job, they’d likely get a book deal and could become a fixture on conservative media which would pay more but would limit the places they get tenure.
People love simple explanations. BLM obviously wasn't a causal factor, but general mayhem/disorder certainly facilitated things like shoplifting. There were a lot of people doing what sublime did back in '92 [1].
In Chicago there has been a dramatic drop off: the arrest rate for retail theft went from 43%-54% in 2016-2019 to 18% in 2021 and the number of cases brought to Chicago police has dropped from 8986-10792/year to 6166.
As a Chicago resident I’d say it’s mostly “quite quitting” by cops. You never see them working anymore, and the people I’ve talked to about their experience with police basically all say that they never even showed up, and if they did they refused to even fill out a report.
The union even officially called for work stoppages due to vaccine mandates.
> The article says prosecutors don't go after these thefts
the article says that was speculated but not borne out by the data.
> What is behind this unwelcome rise? Some speculated that prosecutors had gone soft on looting after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But it is hard to see any such trend in the data: generally states with more shoplifting prosecute more shoplifters (see chart).
As stated in another comment, the articles claim makes no sense. More shoplifting = more prosecuting has nothing to do with there having been a change after some event. There could still be a linear relationship between incidents and prosecutions, but a lower line after George Floyd. Specifically, a single cross sectional data point cannot prove anything about a time series or a claim about it.
Has the number of cops shooting people actually decreased?
Considering that they've never even looked for a bicycle, which is many times more expensive than a stick of deodorant, I'm seriously doubtful that they've ever have been hands on for these thefts.
There's a simple solution to this: just leave, and take your taxable income with you. If a jurisdiction can't do a basic function of government, why the fuck would you want to perpetuate the administrative disease any further? Paying taxes to these jurisdictions is like enabling an abusive relationship
> New York is where the jobs are. Just leave and get another 200k job as a banker where?
What percentage of New York makes over 200k? They can stay, the rest can leave.
IOW, it takes all sorts to make a city work, and if you have labor (those people who work, at whatever wage) move away because the policies favour non-labour (those people whose income is from theft) it doesn't really matter how many 200k stockbrokers want to stay - they'll have to move eventually too.
This economics point is often misunderstood, because at the high-end of the earnings spectrum, a large portion of income can go to savings, and cost-of-living differences make no impact on that.
That is, if you're making a $200k salary in NYC, let's say you spend 50k a year on housing and 50k a year on other expenses, but the rest you can put towards savings.
Then you move somewhere that is 50% cheaper, but you make 50% less. So now you can get the same quality apartment for $25k and your other expenses are only $25k, but you're only saving $50k a year instead of $100.
Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but the vast majority of time if you move to a place with a much lower cost of living, your reduction in salary, if looking at local jobs, is unlikely to make up for it. Never mind the fact that for many industries there are only a few places where you can live if you really want a career: if you work in high finance or fashion in the US, you probably want to live in NYC. Film or TV, you'll be in LA, etc.
It just so happened my wife and I were in a CVS (a US pharmacy chain) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (think pooches inside Gucci bags), and I wanted to get a Deodorant.
We had to call the staff to unlock small pigeon hole after another just to see what was written on the labels.
As always it is not just one thing - the lady that came to help us was in a Hijab and was studying medicine and was helping her parents who immigrated from Turkey and own the operation rights of that store, on thanksgiving eve.
May be I am Old, but I did not mind the locked shelves after meeting her.
Maybe I'm not putting all the pieces together correctly.
What is the significance of her wearing a hijab? Why is that worthy of mention, or the fact that the owner family was from Turkey? And also the Thanksgiving eve bit?
They are just details. Let them echo around in your head as you like.
Maybe she's from a conservative part of the world that doesn't have too many woman turning out as doctors. Maybe supporting her family of immigrants, who might not have a ton of money and are dealing with some of the hard things that being new in a strange country brings. Maybe in the deep background you can sense an unhappy reason they left Turkey in the first place. And all this taking place on a holiday eve when she and your narrator would rather be home with a hot tea and a book. She's a fighter, up against long odds, having overcome some adversity to get here. I don't mind a short wait.
It seems you're a big fan of judging people on superficial details of their internet comments.
The point was pretty clear to me...that there's a person and a family on the losing end of all this. Giving the owners of a store a backstory is humanizing, OP gave as much detail as he knew which wasn't much and that's fine. It's a shame we're all so tense about cultural details that people get attacked for trying to say something nice.
Not op. I frequently do, all the time. You seem to indicate this is a bad thing. Maybe I misunderstood but its just data. As long as you don't draw huge conclusions with no room to adjust, then in my book its basically par for the course. We reason from heuristics, its difficult to analyze every possible person from first principles, especially in a casual interaction...
This has nothing to do with the hijab. This is a matter of mixing perspectives.
All of the descriptions of the situation are rather mundane and bland. Only two extra details stand out: "Upper East Side of Manhattan (think pooches inside Gucci bags)" and "in a Hijab and was studying medicine and was helping her parents who immigrated from Turkey".
A significant percentage of "regular" stores in big cities are owned or at least managed and operated by immigrants from very different backgrounds.
These details being present in the brief story seem to have some significance, so my question was, "Why is this significant?"
This is not a judgement on the people running the store or of people in hijabs. It's a question for the poster about why those details were significant.
Maybe it was just the ramblings of an old person (which I can say as I'm an old person). But it is still fair to ask for clarification.
In a brief recall such as the parent post, certain details would seem either superfluous or meaningful if they don't appear to relate to the topic.
If you mentioned that the guy at the counter of the CVS was wearing a baseball cap, we would wonder why that was a significant detail, or maybe "what team was on the cap".
Saying someone had a hijab is clearly leading with some meaning, but the post didn't go into that detail. I can only guess that it implied something related to Muslims; but I don't even know. They didn't expand on that. So we are left to wonder WHY they mentioned it.
My interpretation was simply painting the picture of who helped him, and not commentary about muslim beliefs.
As another commenter said—humanizing the part of the locked deodorant, and that they did not mind because at the end of the day “we’re all in this together.”
It sounds like somberi is bringing home the point that they went really far out of their way to a very different culture to work hard and make a way for themselves and try to beat the odds? Isn't that the very idea of America?
You are filling in so many details that are not there. But whether that is correct or not is not the point.
The point is, why mention it? Should we be surprised, or should we be impressed that an immigrant Muslim family was involved? I just don't know what the OP wants me to feel. It's touchy, but it is ambiguous.
Is that good? Is that bad? Is it stereotypical? Is it challenging expectations?
I think the point is that there’s a human on the other side too, not faceless corporation.
Rhetorically, the story works just as well if it’s a scary-looking guy in a biker jacket, helping his sister open a ballet studio, or someone clad head-to-toe in Rangers’ gear.
> scary-looking guy in a biker jacket, helping his sister open a ballet studio
I think this illustrates the possible unspoken angle of the post. Is the post trying to show a surprising contrast? And if so, should I be surprised to see anyone, hijab or not, working in a family pharmacy store while also working on their MD?
With your example, a scary-looking guy in a biker jacket evokes a certain feeling (fear, worry, etc.), but then we find out that he's just a good guy helping his sister do something that's very unlike his nature - or the nature we would assume a "scary-looking" guy in a biker jacket would be about.
By this example, I would take it to mean that your interpretation is that a girl in a hijab is a scary person to worry about, but in reality she's just a good, smart, hard-working girl helping her family.
This is why I raised the initial question. These couple of extra specific details lead somewhere. I wanted to know where, because the perspective was not provided. The reader was left to make their own assumptions or draw conclusions. Based on your example, we see one conclusion: fear of people in hijabs, but that such fear is not appropriate.
I take the perspective that the hijab doesn't represent a special person nor a person to fear any more than a guy with a baseball cap on his head sideways means something other than "he likes to wear a cap in a way that doesn't block the light from his eyes".
Nope. At least for me, the details are meant to sketch striking human characters that you want to support, whether they are plucky (children of) immigrants, surprising family men, or hometown characters [0]. The rhetorical contrast is not a hijab-less woman, jacket-less man, or Dallas Cowboys fan.
Instead, consider this over-the-top example: "Augustus P. Moneybags, who owns 51% of the parent company Amalgamated Holdings, said deodorant theft reduced earnings per share from $1.20 to $1.19 this year. Although the company still turned record profits, he vowed to crack down on it. Specific plans were not available at press time, as Mr. Moneybags had left on his yacht." Here, I can imagine thinking "Meh, who cares? Maybe people need deodorant more tan this guy needs money."
[0] You didn't mention Rangers guy, but if it wasn't clear from context, the NY Rangers are a local hockey team. Nothing scary about them, except perhaps their recent mediocrity.
Well, she was unlocking small pigeon holes so that they could read the labels (reveal the mystery inside), clearly she will do gastroenterology or gynecology.
Do we really have to explain? She is patient because she is willing to unlock multiple deodorants for a customer until they find one they are satisfied with, she’s a hard worker who puts others needs above her own. Her family relies on the store for income and she is working there even when she should just be focusing on school. Because of rampant theft, the family cannot afford to lose inventory the way other stores can.
Finally, the adherence to the hijab shows that she knows her place in the world. She is here to serve, not chase her own self interests and hedonism. Hence why she will be a good doctor in the service of others.
Where did you develop your reading comprehension skills?
> she knows her place in the world. She is here to serve,
I know it's sort of an unspoken NoNo on HN, but given your bold comment I had to look (I thought maybe you were using confrontational comedy). But your bio: "Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company you know. Used to have close to 1000 karma, got destroyed over time by hackernews cancel culture and a change in downvote algorithms. But now that the algorithm has been changed back to classic style, I'm rising up again."
There's no point arguing with you. I want so much to tear apart your lunacy, but it would do nothing here (and worse, it wouldn't change what you apparently have going on in your mind).
I will admit though, I never realized that a woman without a hijab would "chase her own self interests and hedonism".
But out of curiosity, assuming women with hijabs don't have self interests or hedonistic tendencies, what sort of clothing would a man wear if he wanted to demonstrate that he also was not self focused or hedonistic? (I ask because I want to be sure I'm never caught wearing such garb.)
CVS doesn't lease out or franchise operating rights to their stores in the US. They own and operate all of them exclusively. They operate similarly to Walgreens in that respect.
I'd assume there was a miscommunication with the person that was working at the CVS store. She may have been talking about another store that her parents have the operating rights to or such.
Not sure what you're trying to get across. Am I supposed to think that locked shelves is normal or ok, should we minimize yet another needlessly bizarre and inconvenient impediment in ordinary life? Because of some romantic anecdote about a second-generation model minority?
I'd wondered if someone figured out how to turn deodorant into meth, since they started protecting it like Sudafed even after Sudafed was removed from the Sudafed boxes sold as Sudafed (phenylphrine is not pseudoephedrine and is not effective).
Sudafed, baby formula, deodorant, and razor blades, together could sound like a Jesse Pinkman shopping list before he found a high school chemistry teacher to help him.
At the same time, since nobody is making retail chains put lock boxes on the deodorant aisle, shrinkage best meets Occam's razor. Or would if it hadn't been shoplifted.
The article says it's organized. Meaning you hire a dozen thieves and send them after the same few items. Go grab as much Old Spice Sport and Burt's Bees lip balm and whatever else and then you setup as an Amazon reseller with what looks like a real inventory. Then you can fence nationwide with almost no overhead.
It's true they removed Sudafed from most (by and large all, except by request) boxes labeled Sudafed (sub-labeling them Sudafed PE), and PE is not effective. Many consumers never realized, and even if they do, they generally do not realize the substitute doesn't really work.
Thanks to https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/pseudo-brief112013.pdf in most states you cannot buy it off the shelf yourself (only behind the counter and often with ID), some locales it's prescription only, and it's only this year that Oregon started letting you get it without a prescription again:
“People shouldn’t be asked to visit a doctor to obtain a prescription for common cold medicine, especially when Oregon is the only state requiring a prescription," Post said in a statement when the bill passed. "We can trust Oregonians more than that.”
As someone not from the US can anyone shed some light why deodorant and other personal care goods are so expensive in the US? The prices are so ludicrous compared to the UK that on my trip I had to take a photo as friends would have thought I was exaggerating when telling them!
Take for example Dove Men+Care antiperspirant. In the US what is a rather compact can 3.8oz/107g was on the shelf at $9.55 (plus sales tax). I've just checked a well known UK chemist (boots) and 150ml of the same brand is £1.70 and 250ml is £2.00 (both including sales tax). Not really sure why the US measure aerosols in g and the UK measures them in ml but the price difference alone is jaw dropping.
The prices here vary wildly depending on where you're shopping. In a Manhattan CVS I wouldn't be surprised to see prices three or four times what you would see in a Nebraska Walmart. I live in the Seattle suburbs and $9.55 for deodorant makes my eyes bug out. I don't think that's normal.
In seattle Greenlake and Safeway had deodorant at $9+ around me. Pretty annoying. I guess i need to buy it stolen on Amazon for a decent price?
And if all this thieving is going on why aren’t grocery stores just doing what Costco does and have membership cards and employees checking entrance and then receipt checkers as well?
The target at northgate has laundry soap locked up. I get Seattle has a terrible fentanyl addiction, weak politicians and poor policing but why can’t the corps make some changes? I guess they’re still making money and I’m still spending
I'm in the midwest and that doesn't sound too far off. I think the fancy Dove deodorant my wife buys is around $8 at Kroger or Target. We only buy it at a Sam's club.
You paid the "convenience tax". Big expensive city, prices to offset shoplifting, and you didn't know where to go for cheaper product. Otherwise, prices are about the same. I've seen the same expensive deodorant in Europe too.
I think aerosol deodorants are less popular in the US. Are they popular in the UK? This may factor into the pricing. Marmite costs a fortune in the US!
In 2004 I spent part of my honeymoon in London. At a pub, I paid £10.95 for a burger. At the time it was ~$2 to £1, so it was effectively a $20 burger. My friends thought I was full of it when I said I paid $20 for a burger.
Paid $20 for a burrito and a coke in a dive taqueria in the SF mission. Just a few years ago that would have been under $10. Curious if they give a discount to the local Latino population who's average income is fairly low.
> Take for example Dove Men+Care antiperspirant. In the US what is a rather compact can 3.8oz/107g was on the shelf at $9.55 (plus sales tax). I've just checked a well known UK chemist (boots) and 150ml of the same brand is £1.70 and 250ml is £2.00 (both including sales tax). Not really sure why the US measure aerosols in g and the UK measures them in ml but the price difference alone is jaw dropping.
First for the price info. I live in [state capital city] but we're not a big tourist destination and that can ranges between $4.09 and $10 locally. Prices can vary drastically based on the retailer and location in even a city.
For the actual difference in product, I'm fairly sure this is just a misunderstanding (and a reasonable one at that due to our crappy weight system).
The US version is listed at 3.8OZ "NET WT." not "FL. OZ", so the 3.8oz should be the weight of the actual deodorant inside, not the volume of it. Whereas the UK version being listed at 250ml I assume it is the volume.
I don't have a good estimate on the actual volume/weight difference of the two products though.
Maybe someone could grab a can from a US store and do the math on the actual volume of the container?
You are probably getting them from touristy places or convenience stores. You should instead buy packs of 4+ from like Walmart or online if you want a good price
The US is a much richer country than the UK. Wages are higher and thus the market can bear higher prices. For example experienced nurses in the US can make six figures whereas in the UK nurses start on a poverty salary and through experience can upgrade that to mid five figures.
Moreover the UK has undergone dollar deflation in recent years that we are only just catching up to. The pound dropped from $1.70 to $1.20 in the last decade. But £ inflation over that period was low. So prices were in fact falling in dollar terms until the recent inflationary period.
Where is "the US"? You realize that's an entire fucking continent with vastly different economic situations? Just looked it up on instacart, it's $4.29 here.
This comment is not only rude but also inaccurate regarding basic geography.
On the topic of price the item in question shows as been between $8.50 - $11.50 depending on store in the first zip that instacart loaded (94105). Checking another zip (07081) it's between $7.50 - $11.50. As a result $9.95 does not seem outside normal parameters for this item.
The US item is also materially smaller than the UK version. Even if they was the same volume, at $4.29 this is still a considerable increase in cost compared to the UK price.
> The US item is also materially smaller than the UK version.
I'm fairly sure the US version is weight of the product (not including the can), and the UK version is volume.
US version is listed at "NET WT 3.8OZ/107g", where if it was volume (like the UK) it would be listed as "3.8 FL. OZ". [0]
UK version is listed at 250ML (can't find a good image of the listing on the label), so I suspect is volume rather than weight.
[0]:
> Fluid ounces measures the volume of a liquid and net weight measures the mass of a solid. You may have heard of ‘gross weight’ but it shouldn’t be listed on product labels because it can be confusing and misleading to consumers. Gross weight combines the weight of the contents and container, whereas the net weight only measures the contents.
> Since fluid ounces and net weight measure different things, they don’t equal each other. For example, 8 fl. oz. of juice doesn’t equal 8 net wt. oz. of chips.
Piggybacking on this thread, is stealing a common thing across the whole of the US or is it restricted to some areas? I keep getting asked how people in n San Francisco are living with crime so rampant and they send a video of gangs stealing from a store/mall.
Right, so this is a hugely political issue right now. Don't be surprised to get wildly differing answers. Republicans are pointing at public disorder and screaming about crime, and Democrats are accusing them of being fragile suburbanites who can't handle normal urban life. I'm a left-leaning independent, and I tend to agree with Democrats on a lot of their talking points, but I will say that everywhere I go I see more public disorder than I did a few years ago. There are more locked shelves everywhere, and I think people's perceptions of crime and disorder are also affected by the fact that there are way more encampments of people living in tents and RVs (which leads to more litter on the streets etc.). I live southeast of Seattle, in a straight-up middle-class area, and our local Target now has OTC pain relief behind locked glass doors. I stopped dead and stared. I'd never seen that except in a big city.
As for the issue of unhoused people, which I don't think is related to the actual crime rate but is very much related to perceptions of crime, we also have some tent encampments down in my area. In Seattle (I visit the International District weekly) a year ago there were huge tent cities under freeway overpasses, actual structures hacked together on sidewalks, people living in deplorable conditions. There have always been unhoused people in Seattle but it was an order of magnitude worse than normal. In the last several months Washington state and Seattle have made a huge effort to clear the tent cities and get people into transitional housing, and from what I can tell it's working: the sidewalk shacks are gone, the tents are gone, the areas are fenced off, and by all accounts they've gotten almost all the people living there into shelter of some kind. I'm paying attention to whether I hear less squawking about crime now that there's less visible disorder.
How's the housing work? Victoria and Vancouver tried this by buying old hotels and turning them into apartments but they filled them with junkies and were surprised that they soon became worse than the outdoor camps.
Any solution that doesn't segregate the sick can't work.
Depends how you define "work." It would have to be pretty damn bad to be worse than what we had. I think King County is doing the "buy hotels and turn them into housing-first apartments" thing, so I do expect those to turn into really bad places. I would also rather have the really bad places behind walls and a roof.
They burn down as Vancouver found out. Not only does it get worse inside than out but then they're back on the street.
It's not a bad solution, sorta. They should just send one to each cheap hotel in the country though. Split the problem up and spread it out so it isn't being reinforced.
By 'work' I mean, for the junkies or the residents. Junkies living together escalate and it spills out. Those walls won't contain them.
Ultimately nothing other than forcing them through rehab will turn them into anything other than drug zombies.
I'd like the organized retail theft (gangs of people robbing a store) cracked down on, but in general I'd prefer a softer touch on general petty shop lifting.
These are different things, with different motivations, and cracking down on someone stealing because they have nothing doesn't actually prevent that from happening more (you need to address the underlying issue).
The organized crime, however, should be harshly treated, because these folks are doing this to enrich themselves, and it's organized. The biggest problem here is that stopping this requires more than just police arresting people. It requires actual investigation work, and it seems that police funding tends to go to patrols and not investigation. Close rates for investigations are at all time lows. I really wish this was the focus of law & order republicans, rather than "we need to arrest people", because that only catches the easy, petty criminals.
Although I generally agree there's little positive effect from harshly punishing very petty thieves, saying "address the underlying issue" is a major cop-out basically indicating you have no interest in fixing anything.
What do you think the "underlying issue" is? Drug abuse? Lack of education? Paucity of low-skill jobs? Not enough affordable housing? Discrimination? Lack of opportunities for ex-prisoners? Inflation? Point is, there are plenty of reasons, not just one, that could lead a person to steal a few items from CVS, and they are far too numerous and widespread to believe you'll be able to do anything meaningful to "address" them.
"The causes of the disease is so complicated, that anyone looking to do anything other than treat the symptoms must be disingenuous" ? :/
It is a long list of problems that most other advanced countries seem to have mitigated. Why must we throw our hands up like, "ugh, Its too hard, I need something simpler"?
I take issue with your statement that theft is a "disease." I do agree that for a small segment of the population, economic conditions are extremely difficult... but I don't think these are the people committing the majority of thefts. As long as you start with the assumption that theft is a disease, i.e. something that happens TO an individual, rather than a choice, we're going to have greatly-differing opinions on how to remediate.
It's not a cop-out, it's exactly how other countries have eliminated this problem.
The US is the largest incarcerator in the world, yet it still has these problems. Your suggestion is that we can imprison our way out of this, but prison makes people poorer, in some cases permanently, which ultimately makes the problem worse.
And yet not imprisoning people isn't a solution either. Weird.
Portugal and the NL other countries who are supposedly soft on druggies are actually far stricter with them than Canada or the USA - but by imprisoning the drug user on first use they provide a better outcome than going easy on them until they manage to commit serious crime and have to do hard time.
You seem to think that prison time somehow rehabilitates people, but data simply doesn't back you up on that. People are categorically worse off and more likely to commit more serious crimes after being imprisoned.
If we want to lower crime, we need to address the source of the crime, and that's primarily poverty. There's plenty of research that shows strong correlation. Law & order approaches have historically been quite ineffective, and are very likely to help increase, rather than decrease crime.
This isn't to say there should be no crime enforcement, but concentrating on violent crime, and less on petty crime would be a step in the right direction. Hell, one of the most effective places we could set our sights is wage theft.
> You seem to think that prison time somehow rehabilitates people, but data simply doesn't back you up on that.
That's a cop out even if it was true. "We can't put them in jail [so you have to suffer the break-ins and violence]". If you can't help then step back and let people who either can or are at least still willing to try.
Portugal imprisons, and has great results, but it imprisons you in a rehab program and doesn't give criminal records from the drug-use portion of your charges. (If you stole to buy drugs then you get a record for the theft.)
> People are categorically worse off and more likely to commit more serious crimes after being imprisoned.
People are categorically worse off after being preyed on by a criminal. Please consider the actual victims here.
If your prisons are that bad then you should pay to ship them off the countries that run humane prisons, but you still need to do something.
> If we want to lower crime, we need to address the source of the crime, and that's primarily poverty.
Once citizens are safe on the streets and can work on community wealth-building programs then sure. Many people are poor because of crime and need help too.
> one of the most effective places we could set our sights is wage theft
Now you're in the spirit of the thing. Recognize more crime and punish more criminals to make things better for everyone.
> "We can't put them in jail [so you have to suffer the break-ins and violence]"
Break-ins and violence aren't petty theft. Break-ins are a form a violence, as well. Prison is a reasonable thing to use to isolate violent people. It would be ideal if rehabilitation was what was happening during that isolation, of course.
> it imprisons you in a rehab program and doesn't give criminal records from the drug-use portion of your charges
This doesn't happen in the US. In the US, if you're imprisoned, your life will be worse afterwards, not better. You will be poorer, you won't be able to get most jobs, and you won't be able to rent most apartments. You'll also be released on parole, and will have a constantly disrupted schedule that further limits you.
I'd love to also see prison reform in the US, but it's a separate topic. Even with prison reform, it's better if people don't go to prison to begin with. In the best case, if you go to prison, you're going to lose your job, and you're very likely going to lose your home.
> Please consider the actual victims here.
For petty theft, the victim is the business, which in the vast majority of cases is a large corporation, who has leakage built into their numbers.
Stop conflating petty theft with violent crime.
> Once citizens are safe on the streets
They are. Cities in the US are the safest they've ever been. These reports about massive crime waves are simply lies supported by idiotic statistics. Yes, crime is some categories is up 100-200%, but that's because the actual crime numbers are so low now that minor changes in the numbers looks like huge percentage shifts.
If the stock market dropped 90%, then went up 200%, would you be celebrating the 200%?
> Recognize more crime and punish more criminals to make things better for everyone
The point isn't to punish more crime, it's to punish the right crimes to move the needle. Poor people having their wages stolen makes them poorer. Poverty is strongly associated with crime (especially violent crime).
Same reason to encourage unions, increase minimum wage, have better social programs, provide free childcare, provide free education, provide public health insurance. When people have their needs covered, they're less likely to commit crimes for money.
Stop condoning violent crime just because it starts as something petty.
It's not just that these people are stealing in "shoplifting gangs" it's that they easily resort to violence when blocked.
> It would be ideal if rehabilitation was what was happening during that isolation, of course. [...] I'd love to also see prison reform in the US, but it's a separate topic.
If you say so. This seems like a perfect time to fix prisons so that you could better use them.
> For petty theft, the victim is the business, which in the vast majority of cases is a large corporation, who has leakage built into their numbers.
That's a commie answer. Corporations are made of people, and owned by people.
If I robbed your house enough you'd eventually budget for it, at which point I could defend myself by saying "See, it's built into his monthly expenses!"
> If the stock market dropped 90%, then went up 200%, would you be celebrating the 200%?
Yes.
> Cities in the US are the safest they've ever been
Less safe than last year, for a few years now. Yes, it's smaller than all past gains but why are we slipping backward at all?
> The point isn't to punish more crime, it's to punish the right crimes to move the needle.
I'm not about the absolute numbers but the percentages. I wish there was less crime to punish, but of the more damaging types the problem is definitely that we aren't punishing enough. And yes, that totally includes economic crimes that make the everyday people poorer.
> Same reason to encourage unions, increase minimum wage, have better social programs, provide free childcare, provide free education, provide public health insurance. When people have their needs covered, they're less likely to commit crimes for money.
What a depressingly bad set of social policies but what a great demonstration of why we're in trouble.
Unions were a good idea when workers were dying, a little light crying isn't an issue. Minimum wage increases produce inflation not real wealth. Social programs are what's destroying many cities - specifically Vancouver, Seattle, SF. Free childcare is backwards compared to helping mothers work less in the first place and hurts the quality providers in the market. Insurance that everyone has isn't insurance, it's a poorly run buying program - mandate open drug pricing and help small providers buy at scale to achieve savings.
> When people have their needs covered, they're less likely to commit crimes for money.
Help make the economy better so they can afford to. Safety for people and property is essential.
This isn't petty theft. Petty theft is an individual shoplifting, for instance.
> That's a commie answer.
No, that's a capitalist answer. You're comically giving the communist answer, that a business is a collection of people, and that hurting it hurts them all.
Shoplifting is bad for society as a whole, but (usually) doesn't directly hurt individuals.
>> If the stock market dropped 90%, then went up 200%, would you be celebrating the 200%?
> Yes.
So you don't understand math...
> Less safe than last year, for a few years now. Yes, it's smaller than all past gains but why are we slipping backward at all?
Because that's normal. The decrease in crime over the past 50 years hasn't been continuous. It's been a more natural ebb and flow. I don't see a year or two of very slightly higher crime as a trend up.
> Unions were a good idea when workers were dying, a little light crying isn't an issue. Minimum wage increases produce inflation not real wealth. Social programs are what's destroying many cities - specifically Vancouver, Seattle, SF.
All of these cities have lower crime rates than republican lead cities. All of them have drastically lower violent crime rates.
> Free childcare is backwards compared to helping mothers work less in the first place and hurts the quality providers in the market.
What about single mothers? What about mothers in 2 income families, where they can't afford losing an income? What do you actually propose to make it easier for mothers to work less? Apparently higher wages aren't appropriate, and free school to help them get higher paying jobs isn't appropriate.
> Insurance that everyone has isn't insurance, it's a poorly run buying program - mandate open drug pricing and help small providers buy at scale to achieve savings.
Essentially every other country on earth proves this to be wrong. The US has the highest medical costs, and plenty of other countries have a life expectancy that keeps rising, while ours is falling.
> Help make the economy better so they can afford to. Safety for people and property is essential.
The US economy has been stronger than most countries for effectively my entire life, and that hasn't eliminated poverty or crime. Other countries have enacted good social programs and have virtually eliminated crime.
> This isn't petty theft. Petty theft is an individual shoplifting, for instance.
If any are ever caught they get treated as individual shoplifters. Magically the crime statistics never show gang shoplifting.
> You're comically giving the communist answer, that a business is a collection of people, and that hurting it hurts them all.
The communist answer is that it isn't theft because of how you categorize those you inflict it on.
> Shoplifting is bad for society as a whole, but (usually) doesn't directly hurt individuals.
Of course not, you said the word 'directly'. All crimes against public companies are guilt free by definition comrade.
> Because that's normal. The decrease in crime over the past 50 years hasn't been continuous. It's been a more natural ebb and flow. I don't see a year or two of very slightly higher crime as a trend up.
You're missing the difference between reading history and experiencing the events in real time. Yes, we can probably count on things getting better in generational time, but now as things are getting worse we should look at our policies and try to figure it out rather than just waiting decades for things to clear up on their own.
> All of these cities have lower crime rates than republican lead cities. All of them have drastically lower violent crime rates.
Only if you ignore the crime of open drug use, and that it kills thousands per year. The only thing you can trust from these cities is that they're dishonest about their stats. If police don't answer a call did a crime really happen?
> What do you actually propose to make it easier for mothers to work less? Apparently higher wages aren't appropriate, and free school to help them get higher paying jobs isn't appropriate.
Higher wages are because of promotions are good, higher wages for the same job simply by government mandate doesn't provide higher purchasing power after inflation. And free school leads to the nonsense we have now with subsidized loans where a critical-studies degree costs $250k.
> Essentially every other country on earth proves this to be wrong. The US has the highest medical costs, and plenty of other countries have a life expectancy that keeps rising, while ours is falling.
Of course the costs are higher in the USA because it's the only country where you pay the actual cost. In every other country it's hidden in taxes to some degree, usually a lot, if it's available at all.
> The US economy has been stronger than most countries for effectively my entire life, and that hasn't eliminated poverty or crime.
It kinda has though. Our poorest are richer than the median in many countries. In cash dollars and in purchasing power. There are structural problems keeping many people in poverty and not purely distribution problems.
Crime on the other hand is more of a social thing than a poverty thing.
> Other countries have enacted good social programs and have virtually eliminated crime.
You know what's a good social program? Building a place to put druggies before thousands of them die on the street in the middle of a city.
> Only if you ignore the crime of open drug use, and that it kills thousands per year.
Thousands of users are killing themselves with the drugs. This is a self-harm issue, not a violent crime issue. It's only crime because we're criminalized possession, and that hasn't curbed use. It's still illegal to possess the drugs these folks are using, and they have roughly the same level of access to these illegal drugs inside of prison.
Prison simply isn't the answer to solving drug use. Drug use is also highly correlated with poverty. Some of the addicts on the street became homeless because of their addiction, but some of the addicts on the streets became addicts after becoming homeless.
The biggest driver of the heroin epidemic was perdue. The people responsible got off without punishment. You're proposing punishing their victims.
> The only thing you can trust from these cities is that they're dishonest about their stats. If police don't answer a call did a crime really happen?
This is a conspiracy theory.
> And free school leads to the nonsense we have now with subsidized loans where a critical-studies degree costs $250k.
No, you get that nonsense when the government subsidized a loan program.
> In every other country it's hidden in taxes to some degree, usually a lot, if it's available at all.
This argument isn't supported by the data. The data shows that total spending on healthcare in the US is considerably higher.
In the US the cost is also hidden by your employer, who's paying thousands of dollars a month for your insurance, which you also need to pay for, where you also need to cover a deductible, co-pays, out-of-network costs, ambulance costs, etc.
These things are all covered directly by your taxes in other countries. I'm currently living in Japan, and the cost of healthcare here is considerably cheaper, and my overall tax rate isn't much higher than it was when I was living in the US.
> Our poorest are richer than the median in many countries.
We're the richest country in the world. We need to compare ourselves to similar countries, not to third world countries. Folks in impoverished areas in the US can live in third-world conditions. This is extremely out of the norm when compared against our peers.
> Crime on the other hand is more of a social thing than a poverty thing.
Again, the data doesn't support this. There's a very strong correlation between poverty and crime.
> You know what's a good social program? Building a place to put druggies before thousands of them die on the street in the middle of a city.
Yeah, this is the point of safe-use sites, which have counselors to perform outreach, doctors to ensure they don't die, and facilities to ensure they have somewhere to throw away needles and use the bathroom. They're extremely effective at combating overdose deaths and at reducing needles on the street.
As mentioned before, it's just as easy to get these drugs in prison as it is to get them on the street, so unless you're proposing detox and treatment centers, I don't see what your good social program suggestion is.
> this is the point of safe-use sites, which have counselors to perform outreach, doctors to ensure they don't die, and facilities to ensure they have somewhere to throw away needles and use the bathroom.
These already exist in all the cities I'm discussing, but that's not at all what those sites are like. There are no doctors, no talking, no help, just a chair in a little nook and one nurse watching a room of people through a camera. The current message to the addicted is that they will die addicted and there's essentially no hope of "being cured" so there isn't much use in having a doctor on staff to deliver it.
> They're extremely effective at combating overdose deaths and at reducing needles on the street.
That's what they claim in their funding requests. And who knows, years ago with a different drug problem they may have had some positive effect. (fwiw clean needles appear to be the only useful piece of this intervention and they are widely available elsewhere.)
> Thousands of users are killing themselves with the drugs. This is a self-harm issue, not a violent crime issue.
It's a criminal issue because there are armed dealers and fortified camps and dead bodies in our cities.
> It's only crime because we're criminalized possession, and that hasn't curbed use.
It's crime, and not one we can look away from, because they're incapable of doing it quietly and without secondary violence and crime. The point isn't to give them a criminal record, it's that once we judge someone's actions to be criminal it gives us a lot more power to compel them off the streets and into treatment.
Once we put them in a detox program we can waive the criminal record for all their non-violent crimes. Portugal does this - the criminal sanctions are secondary and only used if you don't cooperate.
>> If police don't answer a call did a crime really happen?
> This is a conspiracy theory.
This doesn't require any conspiring, it's just the natural consequence of the police being too busy. They don't even record the things that they're too busy to respond to so it's invisible to the criminal justice system.
> Again, the data doesn't support this. There's a very strong correlation between poverty and crime.
For which city, and when? Is the city also undergoing a fentanyl crisis during the study? The people in the drug camps are not the same people who would have been smoking crack by the side of the road twenty years ago, many of them are well to do people who've fallen - quickly - into ruin.
> Some of the addicts on the street became homeless because of their addiction, but some of the addicts on the streets became addicts after becoming homeless.
Ultimately it doesn't matter how they got there, they all need to detox before they can move on.
> so unless you're proposing detox and treatment centers
I am.
> Prison simply isn't the answer to solving drug use.
Nothing is the answer, but it's an important part of the solution. When you imprison the drug user they don't live in a drug camp on the street and they don't overdose. Everyone is safer and happier. But no, detox is the answer and you use prison to make the junkie do that if they won't take another option.
> it's just as easy to get these drugs in prison as it is to get them on the street,
Not in the slightest. You can openly buy and use injection drugs in front of a police officer in these cities.
> I don't see what your good social program suggestion is.
I don't think you really understand the scope of the problem or the solutions that have been tried. Especially when you're telling the most "progressive" cities to be more progressive.
> cracking down on someone stealing because they have nothing doesn't actually prevent that from happening more (you need to address the underlying issue).
The petty shoplifters steal mostly because they can. They're not stealing a bag of rice because they're starving, they're stealing a new pair of jeans because there's no need to pay.
There being unpleasant consequences for stealing actually would deter them.
"I'd like the organized retail theft (gangs of people robbing a store) cracked down on, but in general I'd prefer a softer touch on general petty shop lifting.
"
What about door frames that launch an array of taser lines when someone hits a panic button?
It’s very much specific to particular areas. In Los Angeles, a CVS or RiteAid in a less well-off area will have things behind plexiglass. The same store just outside Pepperdine (a very expensive university in the very wealthy Malibu area) has the same things and more expensive stuff just available on the shelves without restriction.
Organized retail theft is common in big cities. Most Americans do not live in big cities. This is not an issue for most Americans, and the stores they shop at do not have restrictive shelving nor go out of business do to "shrinking."
Assuming 331M people in the USA, 164M (50%) live in a metropolitan area of at least 1.6M people. 189M people (57%) live in an area with at least 1M people. 230M (70%) live in an area with at least 500K people.
My conclusion is that most Americans do live in big cities. However, even if all big cities have restrictive shelving practices, there are still 3 out of 10 Americans (outside of the 500K cities) that do no experience these practices.
I'm in an area with 4M people and have seen the shelving practices. So I can concluded that at least 34% of Americans (who are in larger areas) have also experienced these restrictions.
I'm not sure how to consider the stats you're using here. Metropolitan areas aren't cities, the whole reason for the term is to include not just adjacent suburbs, but whole adjacent cities to major urban cities. Do we really consider an hour away and for cities over living in San Francisco?
I mean, from a European perspective who has been to the bay area semi-often, SF - San Mateo - Redwood City - Palo Alto - Mountain View - Santa Clara - San Jose is pretty clearly a continuous urban area and the fact that the subdivisions are considered separate towns and cities more an anomaly of historical origins and local government setup rather than something you would decide working from the definition of town or city.
In Europe, places that have been swallowed up by urban sprawl like that usually stop being called as such given time - no one persists in calling Chelsea, Charlton or Westminster cities now they're well inside the London urban area, and I suspect the same will happen to bay area towns and cities over the next 200 years unless it undergoes a significant population decline.
Hm. Maybe it's just from having grown up here but to me those cities are very different places — each with a dozen neighborhoods of their own. And they range from "urban" through suburban, to isolated neighborhoods. Especially when you want to consider them in terms of stores, crime rates, foot traffic etc.
Sure, but to stick with the London example, Canary Wharf, Chelsea, Westminster, Ealing and Croydon are all very different places with differing densities, land uses, socioeconomic makeup, etc.
The definition of an MSA is basically the "economic gravity well" of an urban areas. This is casually obvious just by looking at the nice green map they give you on that page.
If you think some guy 2hr northwest of Bangor or 3hr out of Vegas into the Nevada desert is in an urban area I'll sell you some beach front property in Arizona.
Meanwhile in Tokyo you have self serve 24/7 convenience stores. And I’m not talking about vending machines. This is where you grab the item, enter on a screen what you got, pay for it, and walk out. No staff needed.
Though I know these exist somewhere, I haven't personally seen one in the 3 years I've been here.
Petty theft does occur in Tokyo, and there's organized crime as well. You don't see this kind of organized retail theft because the police would actually investigate it, rather than do nothing and cry about "the crackdown on police rights".
More extreme instances likely restricted to particular areas but much more widespread is locking up seemingly cheap stuff behind cage/plastic.
In Australia, spraypaint in a hardware store is locked up but often not much else that I can recall. In Home Depot in the US, power tools even in the $30-80 range can be, amongst other things. In supermarkets in most states/cities I've been to, cheap toiletries can require help from staff with a key, plus some electronics in the automotive section. Seems to be a reaction to targeted theft rather than just value of items.
A cheap deodorant (Dove/whatever) is like $2-3 in expensive parts of Europe. That's not worth stealing. What makes them $8 or $10 in manhattan? It's an expensive area and I guess there aren't many large stores to buy from but more smaller pharmacies, but that still doesn't explain why there is a 2-3x price difference for deodorants in particular.
Commercial real-estate. When your store cost at least 10k or even more in rent. You have to sell awfully many deodorants to cover it. And labour isn't exactly cheap either if you want to get some.
That's a good explanation of general price differences between an expensive and a cheaper area, e.g. that Manhattan prices would be 50% higher than more rural New York prices. But I was under the impression here that deodorants in particular were 2-3x more expensive on manhattan, but that the difference was smaller for other goods.
Usually the US (Even the most expensive parts) would be a lot cheaper than e.g. Oslo or Zurich. That's not the case unless there is something else going on here , e.g. that they aren't the same product due to different size and so on.
In Sweden, deodorant sticks are smaller than what I’d get in Canada. There’s also an appalling lack of variety. In particular, you never see Old Spice. I think there is a lucrative business opportunity in bringing American deodorant maximalism to the nordics.
A lot of American products have strong scents that are not really liked in Europe. Old spice started really aggressive advertising campaign a few years ago here. They had frequent and obviously high-budget commercials in TV and stocked middle shelves in popular stores, but no one wanted to buy it. People say it simply stinks. It's another Hershey chocolate.
Thieves are the problem, not Amazon FBA. Yes, there are stolen goods there, but the vast majority of sellers are legitimate businesses who buy wholesale and sell things like deodorant/graphics cards/phone cases/canned soup.
The article suggests "organized crime". Basically it's gone beyond petty theft to organized rings who have efficient fencing organizations. In the old days it would be hard to get much money for the stick of deodorant you just stole, but apparently criminals have figured out how to use online market places to make it profitable and have started organizing large numbers of street level thieves to get their supply.
Well, the only company mentioned by name is eBay, which was used as a fence for 300k in stolen goods by a single couple.
So you could maybe make a case that Amazon makes it easier for retail theft, but you also have to seemingly ban all online retailing, which seems rather anticompetitive.
The answer is that the stores claim shoplifting is way up and costing them immense amounts of money. As always, the only citations are the corporations and their lobbying group. It's standard tough-on-crime sophistry.
Not really. Walk around the city and you see more cops than ever. The issue is that police don’t actually prevent crime. Putting more cops on the street is like trying to use water to extinguish a grease fire.
The cops are generally part of the crime problem in NYC. They also don't go after people for anything short of attempted murder (even when it's done in front of their faces), so lots of crime goes unreported.
Yes, that’s a big part of the problem. By far the most common lawbreakers I see in my day-to-day are cops committing traffic infractions. You can tell you’re by a police station solely by how impassable the sidewalk becomes for pedestrians.
There was an incident recently in which someone removed an obstruction from a license plate. The police ignored the illegally obscured plate but arrested the person clearing it for “criminal mischief”. The lawlessness and selective enforcement is astonishing.
You should never base opinions off single instances you see a news story of. Both because of the misleading nature of such stories in terms of the information they include or miss out and because single cherry picked instances are not representative.
I agree with the general principle of that, but in this case I do think it represents a broader trend. Walking around NYC, if I see an intentionally obfuscated plate, nine times out of ten it has a police placard in the dashboard.
It’s such a familiar problem to locals that the TV show Billions had an arc where Chuck illicitly obtained a placard and was trying to trade favors for it, but couldn’t because everyone he needed favors from already had one.
I have a scar on my hip because I had to bike on a slippery surface to avoid an NYPD car obstructing a bike lane and had my rear tire slip out in the rain. So this isn’t just aesthetic for me.
I see it constantly, both in person and on social media. I've personally reported many cases to 311 and to officers in person, and every single time they either ignore me or lie about handling the complaint. It's so endemic that a City Council member has introduced a bill that would allow civilians themselves to ticket illegally parked vehicles [1].
So no, it's not a single news story. This one just happened to be a particularly egregious display of NYPD lawlessness.
> Research on the police–crime relationship generally shows police levels have little impact on crime rates.
> Two recent studies presented evidence that prior police–crime studies were methodologically flawed and found that increased police levels reduced crime.
Well, if law enforcement proves useless, give shopowners protection for handling it themselves. Our current attitude of just deal with it/ignore it is not only insanity, it's infuriating.
Assuming you mean allowing them to use violence against shoplifters, I’m curious how far you think we should take this. Should we allow employees to use violent force to recover stolen wages from their employers? After all, orders of magnitude more is stolen via wage theft than shoplifting.
Whataboutism aside, in a more just world, law enforcement and the judicial system handle things so townspeople don't have to. And that's a great thing. But what do you do when those systems stop doing anything?
So again, if let’s say a waiter assaults their manager who isn’t covering the difference between their tips and minimum wage, that would be allowed? What if I slash the tires of an illegally parked car with an expired police placard?
The bizarre examples you keep bringing up are retaliatory actions, not preventative ones.
These are punishments after the fact. Nobody is suggesting to allow people to go around exacting punishment. We are suggesting to allow people to defend self, family, and property.
Assaulting the manager would not be allowed because it has nothing to do with physically preventing the crime from being carried out. Same with slashing tires.
Allowing people to defend themselves and their property has been done many times in history. It is, in fact, the historical standard, including in the history of your own community. If you want a practical example of how this could look, simply look into that history, just decades ago. Please dispense with these unproductive gotcha attempts.
> These are punishments after the fact. Nobody is suggesting to allow people to go around exacting punishment. We are suggesting to allow people to defend self, family, and property.
No, I’m describing crimes in progress. If a waiter confronts their manager while they’re they’re paycheck, that isn’t a “punishment after the fact”. They are defending their property by using violence to prevent wage theft from being carried out, in exactly the same way you’re suggesting shopowners be allowed to.
When the GP says “reasonable force,” that “reasonable” is doing all the heavy lifting. It’s whatever he considers reasonable. Let’s also ignore that “provable” is decided by the courts which these vigilantes are meant to bypass.
Doesn't everyone use words to mean what they want to mean by the words?? I seriously though your post was a defense at first. Why would their rule not protect you from liability also?
If it's legal it isn't vigilantism. Isn't it the law in some states that you are allowed to use force to prevent theft? I assume that's what they meant. Yes it has its drawbacks but I think the current pacifist course has us headed for 24/7 surveillance.
OK so we have something like this: Stand Your Ground laws. A bunch of states passed then recently and saw a large increase in shooting deaths that legally weren't proven to be either self-defense or murder, becuause the witness is dead. Now what?
In a sense they are. The article talks about putting deodorant behind a locked panel. I'm hoping you're not talking about something like an physical confrontation, since that would strike me as dangerous and unmanageable. That's the last thing I'd want to expose employees and customers to.
This is possibly the most ridiculous argument being used today. Anyone who has looked at their speed and slowed down while driving past a cop can confirm that you’re full of it.
Yeah, and then they speed right back up after once out of view. The best you can say is that cops prevent crimes when they make their presence known and have the would-be crime doer in their sight.
So sure, if you post an officer every 50 feet you might actually start deterring crime. But when we’re talking about increasing police density from basically zero to basically zero it’s not gonna do much.
One method of deterring crime is the “fuck you in particular” method of ramping up the punishment crazy disproportionately to the crime but how this really works in practice is the “two americas” problem where if you’re not a group cops are targeting you’re probably not gonna get caught and made an example of. Also despite it working I think this is crazy unethical to the people caught.
One prevalent narrative in NYC is that there’s an epidemic of people being pushed onto the tracks. We need more police in the subway to prevent this from happening.
I was in Singapore recently. Most people there take the subway. Yet no one gets pushed onto the tracks. Why is that?
It has nothing to do with cops — you rarely see them on the subway there. Instead, they have a wall between the platform and the tracks.
So many problems like this have non-carceral solutions. The reactionary reach for police to solve ever problem we see is inhumane. It makes society worse.
The idea that lawlessness or criminal behavior is inhibited by a short wall in the subway between the platform and the tracks is absurd. There are broader cultural forces at play, in particular the "non-carcerial" alternatives that Singapore employs- harsh punishments for small crimes. Giuliani's "broken windows" policies on steroids.
If we wanted to emulate Singapore to make our subways safer, we would have to do much, much more than put up a little wall on the subway platform.
Why stores simply don't improve physical security? As in, doors that automatically shut when abrupt movement is detected OR panic button is pressed, and a security that shoots to kill (to avoid legal trouble with the wounded thief claiming racism etc)?
Given the amount of theft in America, and size of Amazon's American revenue and sales, can we figure out what percentage of Amazon's revenue is generated from fencing stolen goods?
on edit: IIRC AWS is 70%, Ad revenue is half of retail (30%), that means criminal revenue has to be less than 15% and I would think probably significantly less than half of that even. Maybe 2% at most?
on second edit: I wonder if every corporation has a percentage of its revenue that is criminal, like how processed food has a percentage of bug parts. You would think not, initially, but just voicing the idea makes it strangely attractive as a concept.
How bizarre. In my country supermarkets have self checkouts. You'd think they'd lose a ton of money on shoplifting. Maybe it is because society hasn't broken down thanks to a social welfare safety net?
You guys somehow manage to foster so many bored criminals so as to resort to messing with deodorant in pharmacies. Are they out of banks to rob? Illegal drugs to sell? Come on!
Target’s cameras have facial recognition. They can even identity people by gait. When these people return to the store, they can probably tell with some level of confidence they previously robbed a target. Why not stop them from entering? Or try to inconvenience them significantly?
Drop a bag of slime on them as they exit? Make the floor slippery as they try to run out? There are smart people working at target; they need to be less shy about protecting their store, which is an American treasure
> When these people return to the store, they can probably tell with some level of confidence they previously robbed a target.
They still need a cop to show up and actually trespass the individual. Cops refuse to show up, take hours if they do and perhaps even then still not be convinced to spend their time doing to report. The cops know the person will be back, the company knows the person will be back, and even the person knows they'll be back. Unfortunately there's nothing the owner of the store can do except attempt to reduce all liability of said person being on property.
Don't stores in Manhattan employ security guards? Most busy central London shops certainly do, at least at busy times of day. That seems to sufficiently deter shrinkage, without having to resort to lock boxes on the shelves.
Sometimes you'll see high-value items (like expensive bottles of alcohol) with security tags that need to be removed at checkout, but I don't recall seeing locked down shelves.
The homeless population (including those in shelters and cars) is < 1% of SF's population. Even if they used products at the same rate as the rest of the population and stole 100% of what they used, they would be responsible for less than half of retail shrinkage.
Of course they are stealing things for their own consumption. They are merely choosing to steal a particular thing that is easy to steal and easy to convert to cash, which they can then use to purchase the diverse things they need to survive.
Is there anywhere this is not the case now? At many drug stores here a lot of stuff is locked up. A lot of drug stores are woefully understaffed because they all want to rely on automated checkout and not have anyone in the store.
I just visited Texas and they didn't have this problem, but it was hella boring there. A lot of places outside the USA also don't have this problem even in the big cities.
It always amazes me that people somehow attribute solid executive criminal function to a bunch of people who can't actually keep a roof over their heads.
The shoplifting "epidemic" has been due to organized gangs for quite a while as the increasing legality of marijuana is impacting their revenue streams.
Both can be true. Being the street-level operator for a crime gang isn't exactly a union job. The people doing the actual shoplifting are variously unhoused, mentally ill, substance dependent, and desperate. It kind of depresses me how people think it's Kurt Russell with an eye patch stealing Ensure from Walgreens.
It makes the emotional aspect of the public defender more palatable in certain cases if he imagines his clients might depend on shoplifting out of absolute necessity a bit more than may actually be the case.
I read this as a joke. Touché, you've scored a point on the public defender meme account.
In case someone reads this as sincere:
This type of cognitive dissonance is neither necessary nor allowed for a public defender. In the first instance the day-to-day reality of unjust governmental administration is so insane that, not only would nobody from outside believe it, but it becomes counterproductive to engage in rationalization fantasies like the parent describes. I don't need to concoct a reason to feel sorry for my client--there are too many obvious real ones. I also don't need to feel sorry for every client to do my job well.
In the second instance, I am actually confronted by evidence all the time in a high-stakes adversarial environment. My client is going to jail for stealing diapers. If he makes up a story that he's not reselling them on ebay and I believe that story, I'd better be sure that I'm not going to get some PayPal statements in discovery the night before trial.
I love how the article explains to me, a non-native English speaker, not from the US, what the very popular "Rite Aid" and "Target" are, but lets me understand the industry jargon "shrink" from the context by myself.
It's not just Manhattan. At certain CVS stores in Washington, DC, one must find a clerk to open the door in front of the deodorant. At most of the ones I know, one must find a clerk to get access to razor blades.
What is behind this unwelcome article on HN? Some speculated that HN is increasingly filled with the type of right wing extremists who lose their minds at the mere thought of BLM. But it's hard to see any such trend in the comments...
As it happens, you don't need much content to convince people that petty criminals are scum and the only solution is more and meaner cops and prisons. After all, the retail lobby says so!
I chose paps over enscript or groff because it handles utf8. With groff you get garbage like âshrinkâ, and enscript generates "Buttons marked â\200\234call for assistanceâ\200\235".
I'll remember this if I ever recreate my RSS to five-column-PDF-emailed-to-myself-every-morning setup. I had to do some ungood things to make BBC articles safe for LaTeX back then.
That sounds a little like you think criminals aren't a necessary symptom of "living in a scarcity society" itself...? As long as it's easier to take something than it is to pay for something, there will be people who take, and there will be groups that organize around taking.
Pretending that crime is some kind of quirk that you can get rid of if only [fill in reasons here], and that the grey and black markets wouldn't exist if only we didn't have crime, implies a lack of understanding when it comes to socioeconomics.
Unless you know how to get us to a post-scarcity world of course, in which case: please make that happen. We're all tired.
I used to be able to go buy a stick of deodorant without waiting five minutes for somebody to come over with a key and get it for me.
That economics has a just-so story to explain why this is exactly what I should expect doesn't change the fact that I didn't used to have to do this, and now I do have to do this.
> As long as it's easier to take something than it is to pay for something, there will be people who take, and there will be groups that organize around taking.
One of the basic functions of the state is to make it difficult for people to steal things.
No isn't. It's to impose sanctions on those who steal things. They have zero involvement in making in harder to do so. Neither laws nor police make it more difficult to steal things, they merely raise the cost of doing so, and as long as that cost is less than the benefit derived from stealing things, thievery will be there to do its thing.
Arguably still no, that's the responsibility of the owners to help facilitate (through video surveilance, etc), mostly required by insurance. Government's role really is just the part that formalizes what the punishment is, should you get caught. Society is who decides how hard, or easy, it is to steal things.
Up to a point, if the money spend into making it difficult is clearly lacking in root problems that are causing people to become criminals in the first place then other forms of governments will quickly become attractive and the likelihood to create civil unrest.
Scarcity is not that much of an incentive to steal when all basic needs are fulfilled without much hassle, that's why many countries with their shit together don't have this problem; the US is not one of them.
Okay, yeah no. If you think everyone is so well off they don't benefit from stealing something as stupid as deodorant, you've been living an incredibly sheltered life and it's time to actually look into how much poverty there really is.
There are maybe a handful of countries with their shit together enough for this kind of thing to not happen anymore. The overwhelmingly vast majority of countries on the planet are not those.
So what? The mere existence of a few tell us that is really possible, and its not like the US or other countries go into great lengths to remedy such situation, instead they pretty much seem to be trying the opposite, just ask any elementary school teacher about how competitive their salary is or how much of their own personal money goes to buy school supplies, or how many criminals are under "medical bankruptcy" or drowning in banks overdraft fees or any other form of bankruptcy, or perhaps you can ask what are "private prisons" and what are their incentives.
That’s one perspective. Another is that the truly greedy thing is to construct a society such that some people can’t afford basic necessities, and that inflicts far more suffering than people stealing what they need to live.
You're constructing a strawman fantasy word where by people only do anti-social things because they need to live, thereby painting them as heoric, Robin Hood type figures.
Here on planet earth however, some people are just anti-social and understand nothing except force. No amount of education or counselling or whatever else will change that.
I actually believe they choose the easiest path. Stealing is sometimes that. Now if they could get reasonably paid work or other sources of income they probably would not do that much of it.
Yes, people steal shit from stores and do a bunch of work shipping stuff through FBA because they are anti-social \s
You think fencing happens because of anti-social behavior? Fencing _is_ work!
The simplest explanation for why people steal and resell stuff is money. You do a thing, and at the end you have money in your pocket that you didn't do before. Not complicated!
Take the act of stealing and project it onto the {anti, neutral, pro}-social dimension. It’s clearly not pro-social; I think it’s easy to argue that it’s not neutral either.
Maybe I misread the original point of the post, but I read it as "the anti-social component is the motivator".
Of course it's ... not good! Stealing is generally pretty bad, all things considered! But this idea that there are some deep psychological flaws that cause this behavior does not, I believe, represent a primary motivator for a significant portion of these acts.
The struggle to survive is the starting condition in nature. That society doesn’t completely eradicate it (but only makes great strides in that direction) is not an indictment of society.
I did not consider it like this before but it is so true. Society is not a given, and it is not a perfect fabric in which evil people tore holes. Instead it is woven by everyone that acts in it.
I actually wrote another comment in this thread about Singapore [1]. The subway there was particularly interesting to me. While the New York media has used subway deaths to drum up support for police, Singapore has entirely solved the root problem in a non-carceral way by investing in infrastructure.
Plenty of other countries have done the same, actually. The knee-jerk response of adding more cops actually makes society worse for all of us.
I would have thought Singapore had more policing in all respects versus US cities.
Also the subway stories are probably more about general fear of whatever criminals are apparently lurking down there. It can get kind of scary in the subway when it's deserted. especially Upper Manhattan where it's so deep down. Meanwhile when I travel in developed Asian cities, it's not scary at all. Just really really crowded.
> I would have thought Singapore had more policing in all respects versus US cities.
You only see police occasionally doing their patrols, so it can be argued there is less of a police presence than say NY. There is no need, there are cameras everywhere and its a small Island, you can't run anywhere.
With respect to the parent's comment on subway deaths:
> Singapore has entirely solved the root problem in a non-carceral way by investing in infrastructure.
There are barriers that only open when the train has arrived, so there quite literally cannot be deaths from people pushing others onto the tracks. I presume that is what he means by infrastructure.
I wouldn't call infrastructure the root problem when people are murdering others. My point was the murders are evidence that there's psychos down there. Hence people want more cops.
> You know Singapore unabashedly beats the shit out of thieves, right?
They don't...first offense you basically get off with a warning. Recent headlines was a case of Australian school girls shoplifting [1]. Although they're foreigners, same goes for locals.
This is simply not true. Solving hunger and poverty is EXTREMELY difficult. The US could use more social programs to help resolve it, but solving it outright is basically impossible.
Oh knock it off with this crap. The article is about organized retail theft. If you work for a criminal enterprise you should work a legal job and pay for things like everyone else.
"like everyone else". This would be a small fraction of people though. The whole of human enterprise is built on stolen loot: the forests razed without permissions and the lands dus and animals chased without anyone's consent. We are conditioned to behave as we own this planet, why is it unfair to consider that between people too this behavior wouldn't show?
What are these "basic necessities"? To me it seems like it's an ever-increasing list of things that were largely created in the modern era. A person from a few hundred years would hardly consider deodorant a basic necessity.
We consider them basic necessities, because we're used to them, but all these new inventions had to be made by somebody. The profit motive seems to be quite good at incentivizing people to do just that. If we discourage that then the basic necessities of tomorrow might not get invented.
Society doesn't conspire to cause poverty, nature already inflicted that upon us.
> Another is that the truly greedy thing is to construct a society such that some people can’t afford basic necessities, and that inflicts far more suffering than people stealing what they need to live.
Your argument would be more sound if the people stealing were stealing for themselves instead of selling them on a marketplace at slightly below retail with a 100% margin. Their theft hurts the jobs and customers (some shops have outright closed) and it also still has the end customer paying basically the same amount.
What makes you think people are stealing what they need to live? That can sometimes be true, but is often not true at all. Either way there's no way in which theft, often from people or companies that have no hand in inequality, does not make things worse for everyone else. It screws over other poor people who don't steal because everyone else will be paying for the insurance and restocking of stolen property...
If that were actually true someone could hold up a sign in front of CVS or whatever saying "please buy me a stick of deodorant", and I can guarantee you someone will.
They can go to a soup kitchen, or a church, or a food panty and ask for basic necessities.
Americans are very generous, especially conservative ones, who lead the world in charity and generosity. There is no excuse to steal when you can just ask.
Shoplifting is actually one of the least harmful forms of theft, in terms of dollars stolen. Wage theft costs orders of magnitude more. A few years ago, money stolen by police via civil forfeiture surpassed the amount stolen by burglars.
Yet the form of theft I hear the most about, by far, is shoplifting. Why do you think that is?
Why don't we use the terms "rent theft" or "loan theft" when people don't pay their rent or loan payments, since we use the term "wage theft" when companies don't pay their wages? In all of those cases, isn't it just not giving someone what you owe, rather than taking something away from someone?
Isn’t there a difference between “I think your conclusion is wrong, here’s another possible scenario where this could happen,” and “I think your conclusion is wrong, and here’s a legitimate scenario that I totally agree with that could explain why this happens”? They didn’t say it was right, just that there are other motivations for why people do these things.
But society first needs to be in a degraded state for most criminals to exist, as most only meet their basic needs through criminal means, such as food, shelter, health and education.
"Most" in the absolute terms, not in the relative (e.g. percentual) way you may be interpreting my comment. And anyway there is always going to be criminals, but its not remotely the same thing when your national average thief steals one thing per year vs one thing per day.
Society has been persistently degraded since time immemorial, because of the presence of organized crime. The only thing that's changed since Prohibition is the genetic makeup of the gangstas who are in charge.
#BlackLivesMatter came about because the police have been--somewhat unwillingly--waging open warfare against gangbangers for decades in the inner city. The gangbangers all have guns and the cops have heavy weaponry that sometimes protects them and oftentimes blows away a few low-ranked gangbangers who might've just completed initiation, or weren't even affiliated but just hanging out at a party.
So what #BLM and #DefundthePolice people are saying is, enough is enough with this open warfare, you're killing children and innocent people, the cops are too powerful.
But gangs offer societal structure: they offer belonging, they offer community, they offer encouragement and brotherhood. They offer economic opportunity. They offer lifelong careerism. That flavor of opportunity can't be had in a public school or a legitimate job.
So gangs aren't going away; gangs are part of the fabric of society because they're providing tangible benefits for many members and non-members alike.
But how will they disarm themselves? How will they offer truces to the cops and reconcile, swords into plowshares? If gangs don't go away then they need to be pacified or the open gang warfare will continue to get cops involved, and the gangs will continue to shoplift and fence and operate all sorts of low-level criminal enterprise with impunity. So what to fix?
If you want law enforcement to deal with petty crimes, you're going to have to contend with the externalities of cops operating anywhere. How many bystanders and innocent people reported by paranoid suburbanites are you willing to see injured or killed to protect that deodorant shelf?
And dozens of people have been spared serious injuries or mysterious "deaths in custody" as a result. Maybe you'd prefer some deodorant to that, but I don't.
Car culture has done this. The destruction of regular meeting places that get you to know and trust your neighbours. Now everyone you see is an untrusted stranger.
I think cars are only a symptom of the real issue, which is that the scale of modern society is just too big for our brains to comprehend or handle. I don't think getting rid of cars would necessarily help one cope with the fact that 99.9999% of people you see are untrusted strangers.
It's not the whole issue, but it's the biggest contributor imo. Even in small American suburbs people still don't know anyone because they never walk anywhere and have no local businesses / recreation spots. They all immediately get in the car and drive somewhere else, cut off from the rest of the world.
What part of "organized retail crime" is not a "complicated conspiracy theory"? What makes "organized retail crime" a "transparently obvious" explanation?
So if we attribute the rise in petty property theft to organized crime gangs that still doesn't get to the issue of why. we know why and we've known for thousands of years [1]:
"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime"
-- Aristotle
No one grows up wanting to steal deoderant from Walgreens. A lot of crime can simply be explained by material conditions. Over the last 40 years in particular, we've seen real income be eroded. Ultimately continued profit growht comes at the expense of labor and labor has enjoyed none of the benefits of decades on increased productivity.
We have a very peculiar "recession" that ultimately seems aimed at breaking labor when, for the first time in decades, people started to see a real increase in wages. That is unacceptable as it reduces profits. The Fed Chair is on the record as wanting to increase the unemployment level.
> for the first time in decades, people started to see a real increase in wages
Who are you talking about? Other than the techbros who switched jobs for a $100k raise, which is a tiny fraction of the population, basically everyone else's real wages have plummeted the last two years.
"No one grows up wanting to steal deoderant from Walgreens"
You should mix with different people. When you mix poverty and a lack of education with genetic stupidity you get some pretty obnoxious personal motivations over the population, and those motivations aren't fixed by lifting people out of poverty or trying to educate them. Some people are simply lost causes that society would be better off without, period. Pretending otherwise is naive.
Anyway, to get to my point; turns out I do know fences - basically anyone with an Amazon account, and I know a lot of fuckers with Prime. For the low investment of polyfill bags and other shipping materials, and this one weird trick called stealing, you too can make money online! Just take your stolen goods, send them to Amazon, and they'll take care of selling them for you. All you gotta do is some computer shit, and some packaging, and then send it off to Amazon. Because your supply costs are cheap, you can undercut your competitors (but not by too much) and rake in the profit. Amazon supposedly is cracking down on this but I have yet to see any meaningful evidence of any real enforcement.
The economist article avoids naming names, but what you're looking for to get started is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).