You know what? As a retail worker in one of these liberal west coast cities that the Fox News crowd are constantly scaremongering about, this is actually an area in which I’m qualified to offer my opinion for once!
I should state right off that I work at a grocery store, not a department store or a boutique, so flash mobs and smash-and-grabs aren’t the kind of theft we deal with. We mainly deal with a few distinct varieties of shoplifter; petty thieves trying to sneak a few things out in their pockets or in their backpack or what have you, “cart pushes” where someone loads up a cart with merchandise and then just walks out hoping nobody notices, people who underscan or price-switch at self-checkout, and check fraud being the biggies.
Yes, shoplifting is up the last few years, but it’s not up by a MASSIVE amount, and it has nothing to do with lefty liberal libtards “defunding the police” or anything like that. There are, in my experience, a couple of factors at work that have little or nothing to do with politics.
Firstly, it’s not always wise or prudent to try to stop every thief. Under state law, businesses have the right to detain suspected shoplifters for up to 4 hours before either releasing them or handing them over to law enforcement. It’s basically a form of citizen’s arrest. However, it’s also very easy for us to get sued for false imprisonment if we make a mistake, so corporate has some pretty strict rules about confronting shoplifters. Rank-and-file employees, including lower management types like myself, are NOT allowed to confront shoplifters; only trained Loss Prevention staff can do that. We can “help” someone ring up their stuff if they’re underscanning, or if we suspect a cart push, we can invent a reason to hang out by the door and watch them so that they get to scared to try it, or we can just follow them around semi-discreetly in a way that shows them that they know they’re being watched, but unless LP is on the case, if they try to leave with the merch, we let them. We’re open 24 hours, but we don’t have LP on duty for 24 hours - we’d like to, and we’ve been constantly hiring for LP for awhile now, but unemployment is at a record low, there are more job openings out there then there are people looking for work, and it’s a difficult job that not many people want to take even for the amount of money we pay. If someone decides to steal from us late at night when there’s no LP on hand, we just have to treat that as a cost of doing business, especially seeing as we’re now the only 24-hour grocery store in the county (all our formerly 24-hour competitors, including Walmart, started closing overnight during the pandemic and haven’t gone back) and we don’t want to give up that market.
Even when LP is watching a suspected thief (we’ve got cameras EVERYWHERE except in the bathrooms), there’s a series of criteria that have to be fulfilled before they’re allowed to stop them. They have to observe the suspect selecting product off the shelf, maintain unbroken surveillance on them from that point on, and watch them pass all payment points and attempt to leave the store without paying, at which point they’re allowed to make the stop. If the suspect takes the merch into the bathroom, we often can’t stop them, because for all we know they ditched the merch in the bathroom before leaving the building and there’s not always time to send someone in there to search for discarded packaging before they make their escape.
Then there’s safety - our LP carry handcuffs and wear Kevlar vests under their clothes, but they’re otherwise unarmed, and we’re not going to attempt to confront an armed person. If they’re visibly carrying a weapon, we don’t engage. If they brandish a weapon during the stop, we back off and let them go. (There’s only one case I know of where this rule was broken and the person responsible didn’t get fired; in 2021, a Proud Boy tried to cart-push about $800 worth of stuff, and when our LP guys confronted him, he pepper-sprayed two of them and then tried to draw a gun on our assistant manager who was with them. Said manager is a retired Army paratrooper and disarmed the Proud Boy, wrestled him to the ground, and held him there until the cops showed up. That guy’s now doing a 10 year prison sentence.) If there’s a group of people shoplifting together, we don’t engage unless the LP can round up enough other employees that we outnumber them. If the shoplifter is a woman and we only have male LPs working, we don’t engage unless LP can get a female employee as a witness to ensure that nothing untoward happens once the suspect is in the LP office. Ditto for having an employee witness if the suspect is a minor. We also aren’t allowed to pursue them if they make it off the sidewalk and into the parking lot - in my training I was shown the video of the incident that caused that policy to be adopted, and it wasn’t pretty.
Next, the George Floyd killing changed some things. Our LP used to have pretty much free reign in how they went about detaining someone. In the past I’ve seen them smash people against vending machines, lock MMA holds on them, or straight up ground-and-pound them until they stop resisting. (I’ve had the opportunity to read a few of the written reports our LP have to fill out to document stops, and the phrase “I escorted the suspect to the ground” covers a lot of territory.) We don’t do that these days, because it looks bad and draws negative attention to the business. Our LP used to be plainclothes - now they wear uniforms that identify them as store security, they aren’t allowed to use physical force unless the suspects attack them first, and they’re no longer allowed to use chokeholds or any amount of force beyond what’s necessary to handcuff them and get them into the office. (I did once see one of our LP guys fireman-carry a suspect into the office, which was most comical.)
Next, there’s the fact that our LP’s attention is divided these days. Homelessness has been an increasingly big problem here recently, just as it has been in every major city in the US, and with that comes unhoused people and junkies (of which there is unfortunately a lot of overlap) looking for a place to sleep or get their fix. The former is potentially a major can of worms, because recent court rulings have made it very difficult to evict homeless campers from their squat, even on private property, and it takes no time at all for a massive homeless encampment to crop up anywhere property owners aren’t being vigilant and months to clear it out once one forms - basically, the police can’t clear an encampment unless they have somewhere else for the people living there to go. The Hobby Lobby down the road from us had an encampment on the edge of their property for the better part of a year until recently when the county moved all the people living there into a motel that the county bought and turned into a shelter. We haven’t had to deal with that, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying on their part. I’d estimate that our LP spend about as much time kicking campers and tweakers out of our parking lot as they do watching actual shoplifters these days, and we even had to bring in a uniformed security guard in a liveried car to patrol the lot at night and watch for people trying to set up.
The last reason does have to do with law enforcement policy - but it’s got nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with covid. When the pandemic hit, maintaining social distancing was as important in the justice system as it was everywhere else, which meant that police simply stopped arresting most nonviolent offenders, regardless of whether the amount of stuff they tried to steal was enough to bump the offense from “petty larceny” to “burglary”. We don’t always call the cops on shoplifters - usually, if they’re cooperative, we get to assess them a civil penalty of $250 + the value of the stuff they tried to steal, trespass them, and send them on their way. However, it’s become a fact of life that the cops often wouldn’t respond to shoplifting calls unless the suspect tries to fight us (which elevates it to “robbery” in this state), and the courts have been so backlogged because of the shutdown in 2020 that there can be a period of years between when a shoplifting occurs and it goes to trial if it ever does. It was only within the last month that our newly elected county sheriff (who, despite being one of those loony leftist radical reformers who ran our former corrupt-as-hell drunk-driving MAGA sheriff out of office last year, has been featured on Fox News because of his “tough” stance on crime) announced that the covid emergency in our county jail was over and they could resume those kind of arrests, but the criminal element has definitely been emboldened by the belief that the cops don’t care about minor thefts anymore.
There’s a limit on what we can realistically do to prevent theft. Liquor and baby formula are kept at customer service where they’re under supervision and are locked up when it’s not staffed. Laundry detergent is at the back of the store where it isn’t practical for someone to run in, grab it, and run out. Sometimes, when we “let” a thief get away and they drive off in their car parked in the lot, we’re able to get their plate on camera, we call it in, and the cops stop them at home and recover the merch, but that’s not the part of the story that thieves hear about, and it doesn’t always work out that way. If a smash-and-grab or flash mob type robbery did happen, we’d be completely unequipped to deal with it, and even with all the security footage we’d have on hand the cops would probably be hard-pressed to identify most of the perpetrators.
What it really all boils down to is that the factors going into the problem of retail theft are practical, not political. You could replace all our elected officials overnight and it wouldn’t change the factors at play. Wherever large groups of people live in a concentrated area there will be poverty, and where there is poverty there will be theft, the circumstances of the times we live in make it difficult to make a meaningful dent in it, and the media loves “crime out of control!” stories because scaring people makes for good ratings.