New York City has a shoplifting problem, but kiosks aren’t going to stop it, by Andrea Widburg

Maybe New York mayor Eric Adams should call ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani and ask him how he cut crime. From Andrea Widburg at americanthinker.com:

Like all Democrat-run cities that turned against police in 2020, New York City has a crime problem, including an explosive uptick in shoplifting. Fortunately for New York City store owners, Mayor Eric Adams has a plan. The problem is that, as with all lefty plans, it will cost money and almost certainly be completely useless.

Ever since the George Floyd riots caused leftist-managed cities to defund their police, all sorts of crimes have increased. In New York City, the crime that’s really taken off is shoplifting.

In the first eight months of 2021, shoplifting in New York increased by 30% over rates in 2020. Of course, one could argue that slowly ending the lockdown was what made the difference. However, that wouldn’t explain what happened in 2022. In that year, shoplifting went up by another 45% over rates in 2021, with an even better marker being the fact that it was 275% higher than a decade or so earlier.

Shoplifting may be a non-violent crime, but it has a disastrous effect on people in the community because stores, including big box stores, respond to theft in two different ways: First, they raise their prices; then when that proves ineffective, they pick up their marbles and go home by shutting down stores. In San Francisco, for example, Walgreens closed five stores due to shoplifting. Target, meanwhile, predicts that retail crime will cost it as much as $1.3 billion:

Crime-battered retail giant Target said it expects to suffer as much as a $1.3 billion hit to its bottom line because of “theft and organized crime,” according to the company’s first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday.

The Minneapolis-based chain said its profit will be squeezed by “$500 million more than what we saw last year” – when the company lost as much as $800 million from “inventory shrink.”

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