17 ms·

> The target was no ordinary shoplifter. He was part of a network of organized professionals, known as boosters, whom CVS had been monitoring for weeks. The com

by bko 5y ago

> The target was no ordinary shoplifter. He was part of a network of organized professionals, known as boosters, whom CVS had been monitoring for weeks. The company believed the group responsible for stealing almost $50 million in products over five years from dozens of stores in Northern California. The story isn't about people selling stolen goods on Amazon. It's about organized theft operations. One way to stop theft is to reduce the ability to sell stolen goods, but that infringes on ownership rights of a large number of people that want to sell things online. I'm sure large corporations would love it if you can't buy their goods second hand. At the end of the day, protecting property rights is a job for the state. Since it sounds its being organized, the criminal organization might be exploiting recent changes in sentencing and prosecution: > Retail investigators blame changes in sentencing laws in some states for an uptick in thefts. In California, a 2014 law downgraded the theft of less than $950 worth of goods to a misdemeanor from a felony. Target recently reduced its operating hours in five San Francisco stores, citing rising thefts.

tyoma 5y ago
The felony theft limit for Texas is $2,500, but their retail establishments do not report massive shoplifting sprees. Clearly there is more than misdemeanor/felony classification at work here.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure in CA it's that police do not respond to calls for anything less than felony theft. So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you. Walmart and Target, among others, reportedly monitor small thefts and let you get up to the felony threshold over multiple incidents before swooping in.
    - everybodyknows 5y ago
      An option not available to small businesses, as the shoplifters have no doubt already learned. Another hidden tilting of the playing field against small business.
      - hpkuarg 5y ago
        Yes, exactly.
      - a9h74j 5y ago
        So will we see a startup: Uber for alternative policing to whom small retailers submit surveilance camera footage, and expect a series of crimes to be merged into a single case?
        BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
        That’s actually a pretty compelling idea. Not necessarily the alternative policing part (private police?), but compiling hard evidence against offenders and handing that to the authorities.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - sneak 5y ago
    "They were robbing the store, and I think one of them had a machine gun!"
    - keeganpoppen 5y ago
      "i think they had some counterfeit $100 bills as well"
      - dcolkitt 5y ago
        “Yes, that’s right. The shoplifted said he was going to use all the stolen merchandise as part of his unregistered securities exchange.”
- bko 5y ago
  That's a good point. I don't think the felony theft limit is the only consideration the deters organized theft. One obvious difference between Texas and Bay Area is Texas has a lot of guns. > In TX can You Legally Shoot & Kill a Shoplifter? The short answer is…not unless they somehow injure you in the process of committing the theft, making it a robbery. “During the process of committing the theft” would include while trying to escape with the property... One thing that is UNIQUE to Texas is the ability to use deadly force to protect property, even if you are not in fear for your life. Even though I doubt CVS security guards are trained the shoot shoplifters, the preception that this is a possibility would deter low level criminals tasked with shoplifting http://legas.legrandelaw.com/criminal-justice/in-tx-can-you-legally-shoot-kill-a-shoplifter/ http://legas.legrandelaw.com/criminal-justice/in-tx-can-you-...
  - pjc50 5y ago
    And what happens if you check the receipt on the body and find out that the item wasn't stolen? How many years do you face for murdering a customer?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      I can point to where firearms have stopped shoplifting crimes. Can you point to where your scenario has happened? Because I’m all for hypotheticals, so long as we admit the rarity and precedent before saying there is a problem.
      - Hizonner 5y ago
        Difficulty: It would take maybe, shall we say, ten thousand of your "firearms stopping shoplifting" cases to offset even ONE "innocent person getting shot" case.
        SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  My guess is it's the same situation as Seattle; Prosecutors in California refuse to prosecute these cases, meaning the cops refuse to waste time trying to apprehend them. Here's an excellent clip about a famous criminal living free in Seattle that happily expounds on his illegal activity: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868
  - crazy_horse 5y ago
    There are plenty of things about my state that get hated on all the time, and deservingly so, but I'll never get how the West Coast is happy driving productive people away and coddling those that have no intention other than to fuck over society.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > how the West Coast is happy driving productive people The evidence for this happening in economically-meaningful numbers is scarce. What we do see happening is those productive people disengaging from that broken society—civically, physically and emotionally.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        The evidence for this happening in economically-meaningful numbers is scarce. It doesn't take numbers meaningful to California to have a meaningful effect on other states, where housing costs are massively skyrocketing due to an influx of new residents.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        What does that have to do with crime? Could be people just getting priced out. Land in the western US is still more expensive and still getting more expensive than elsewhere, clearly it is in demand even more than it is not in demand.
        Cd00d 5y ago
- valdiorn 5y ago
  but in Texas, how likely is the staff or the store owner to be armed, and actually confront you? No way that would happen in California. I keep thinking of this event that happened to me in the UK, where laws are equally useless at preventing theft, and staff are just powerless to do anything about it. I chased down a shoplifter. I cornered him in an alley. He stopped, looked at me, and this brief conversation took place. (and nobody ever believes me, but I don't care; this really did happen) Him: What are you doing? Me: I'm chasing you Him: why? Me: Because you're a fucking thief! Him: (confused)...nobody's ever done that before. Me: (shocked) ... well, I AM, so fucking run! He dropped the bag (which contained mostly expensive meat and cheese and some other expensive-ish items - apparently really common theft targets) - and ran off. I took the bag back to the store. Now, I didn't give a shit about a 100 pound loss to Tesco, but if we've completely given up on the rule of law, I'm not sure that's a society I'm happy to live in.
  - nuclearnice1 5y ago
    I love a good foot chase! Given the sentiments of your last paragraph, why did you choose to send the criminal away and return Tesco’s stolen beef?
    - ryandrake 5y ago
      I don't understand putting your personal safety at risk (who knows if he had a knife or something) over £100 of goods belonging to a £20B company. It's not like he stole your meat and cheese as you were shopping. Nobody is going to miss that cheese. Nobody is going to get fired over it. It's really not that important.
      - nuclearnice1 5y ago
        You mention the meat and cheese, but the comment explicitly disavows that motive. P: I chased this guy for law and justice, not meat and cheese. Q: why did you chase for meat cheese?
        5y ago
- jcims 5y ago
  I think CA is an outlier. Super lax enforcement + huge population just puts up big numbers.
baybal2 5y ago
A simpler way — just put all merchandise behind the glass. Any touching only with supervision of a store manager.
- nradov 5y ago
  For many customers that eliminates the only advantage of shopping at a brick & mortar store. If you have to ask store staff for everything then it's easier to shop online. Cities are destroying their own business districts and losing sales tax revenue by refusing to enforce shoplifting laws.
- ganoushoreilly 5y ago
  Sadly a lot of the more risky chains do this pretty regularly. I was in a best buy a few years ago where almost everything was behind glass. I wonder what that does to the minds of locals shopping and feeling like they're always under lock and key. It can't be healthy.
  - incone123 5y ago
    Also requires more staff to get the goods to the customer. It used to be normal for everything in a store to be behind the counter, and you got served. But self service is cheaper for the store, unless/until we reach a tipping point regarding thefts.
- Animats 5y ago
  Then you need more staff. I was trying to buy some allergy spray at CVS, and couldn't get anyone to unlock the case. So I left and ordered it online from Costco, at 1/3 the price.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Stores can become large vending machines with minimal staff
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
floren 5y ago
The SF city government seems to have realized that there's another way to make crime "go down": refuse to prosecute for anything, ideally make it pointless for the cops to even show up, until people stop bothering to report crime. Wow, shoplifting is at record lows!
- nikanj 5y ago
  Same with bike theft in Vancouver. Nobody bothers reporting it, so the statistics aren’t too bad
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Isn't there any incentive for your claim on your theft insurance?
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      It's fairly uncommon to have insurance specifically for your bicycle, so most people would be filing claims against their renters' (if they have it) or homeowners' insurance. Given the size of those deductibles ($500 is the US average for homeowners', I would think Canada is similar [1]) lots of people would just buy another bike that costs less. 1: https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-insurance-basics/homeowners-insurance-deductibles-choose-right-one.html https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-in...
      - desmosxxx 5y ago
        even for claims above deductible but still relatively minor (2-3x maybe?) it might not be worth it financially (in the long run) depending on your provider and any previous claims of course
      - the-dude 5y ago
        In NL you can insure your bike for theft upon purchase ( or later ).
- 5y ago
Gunax 5y ago
I think it's okay to mention the effect Amazon is having without blaming them. Ultimately online person-to-person trading is making fencing items easier and the people buying probably don't know they are purchasing stolen items. Amazon isn't the thesis, but it is disrupting the stolen goods market in the same way automoboles and highways lead to a spike in bank robbery. I grew up in a poor area and we had a neighborhood fence. Let's call him 'Casey' since that was his name. Everyone knew Casey was selling stolen items and there was sort of a joke in the town about getting a 'Casey discount'. It sounds like Casey is probably operating an Amazon store now.
- hattmall 5y ago
  This has been flea markets and yard sales for decades though.
bushbaba 5y ago
If each item had a unique id. And the stores could indicate unique ids that are stolen. The. Amazon & eBay could monitor and prevent stolen merchandise
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Everything is easy if you assume a panopticon.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sneak 5y ago
    We already have the panopticon, we might as well get some fucking benefits from it. As it is I'm paying both for hard drives in Utah for the NSA to store my contacts and photos and track logs, then again (formerly) for iCloud to do it a second time. It's inefficient.
- literallyaduck 5y ago
  You could probably get some milage with just a local store id and date on the box. If you want to get cute you could change the pill stamp.
nonameiguess 5y ago
If it's actually organized crime, then they can be prosecuted under RICO statutes, which allows for much stronger sentencing than shoplifting ever would have. Robbery is one of the 35 crimes included under the "racketeering" umbrella.
- hattmall 5y ago
  Gotta be felonies though right?
kevinpet 5y ago
I'm concerned about lawlessness, but if the only alternative is that $950 theft is a _felony_ that's messed up. This seems more like a case of not being able to deal with crime than lax sentencing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 5y ago
  Nobody will risk prison for $950 of stuff. If you make it basically a ticket, then you can easily get dozens of people to be able to steal a meaningful amount of stuff.
  - coderintherye 5y ago
    This is patently false, do you think people didn't go to prison prior to the law change? In fact, so many people were risking prison time for petty theft that is what led to enacting the law in first place to deal with the overcrowding in the state prison system, as summed up in this layman article: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299 https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299
    - desmosxxx 5y ago
      > overcrowding in the state prison system and so our solution is to change the law, instead of dealing with whatever is causing people to steal in the first place. Theft is a grey area between non-violence and violence, I'd rather we deal with the root causes rather than just making it less of a crime. If murders were overcrowding prisons, i doubt many people would be calling for reduced murder sentencing (although im sure some would)
      - rayiner 5y ago
        The “root causes” of theft (and most crime) is social breakdown. It’s not poverty or need—or you’d expect far more crime in say India than in the US and you don’t actually see that.
bsanr2 5y ago
Not to downplay the seriousness of theft, but there's something to be said about the scale. A few people working in an uncoordinated fashion is a crime problem; a structured group essentially working in symbiosis with a retailer's systems (and its blindspots) sounds more like a system design issue on the community and company level. Why do these people need or even want to steal so much? How can a company sustain these kinds of losses? It seems like there are inefficiencies to consider from several vantage points.
tzs 5y ago
A misdemeanor can still get up to 6 to 12 months in jail depending on if it is a gross misdemeanor or an aggravated misdemeanor, so I’m not sure I buy the theory that the downgrade from felony in 2014 is why these shoplifters are not prosecuted.
rayiner 5y ago
One of my observations coming from Bangladesh, where policing is pretty inadequate, is that criminal law is really there to prevent the growth of organized crime. So you have to think about crime as a system not in terms of individuals. Harsh punishment may not deter a given criminal. But it may well make it hard to recruit dozens of low level people to engage in low value illegal activity that adds up to something significant.
- jzb 5y ago
  That doesn't seem to be working so well with drugs. We've filled prisons with people engaged in low level illegal activity but we don't seem to have made any dent in illegal drugs. In fact, probably the opposite.
  - google234123 5y ago
    Well, looks at Japan and Korea for a counter example. There is much less prosecution of low level drug crimes now and an increase in the amount of fatal overdoes from illegal drugs
  - rayiner 5y ago
    That just means that it’s hard to regulate criminal activity where the “victim” (buyer) is a voluntary participant. But laws like RICO—which allows low level goons to be held liable for the whole enterprise’s crimes—absolutely decimated the Mafia.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    The difference is that drugs are a victimless crime. Vast networks can operate outside the law, because no one has any incentive to defect. Outside extensive and ubiquitous surveillance, it’s virtually impossible to disrupt a disciplined drug distribution network. Maybe you get a few lucky hits here or there from random traffic stops or the like, but it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. In contrast victim crimes like theft create a huge surface area of vulnerability. Every time the crime is committed, by definition the criminals are interacting with an adversary who’s extremely motivated to collaborate with law enforcement. Victim based criminal networks are basically unscalable and extremely short-lived for this reason. Unless the political classes are complicit and refuse to let law enforcement do their job of protecting victims.
fragmede 5y ago
The fact that Amazon will fence stolen goods for a thief is absolutely part of the story. Used to be a whole criminal enterprise to be able to make money off of stolen goods. Now, anyone can start shoplifting and turn that into cash through FBA. If you can find someone selling something for cheaper, you can turn around and sell it online via Amazon FBA. Turns out, stealing is a great way to drive down costs (assuming no morals). There's absolutely a wider societal discussion to be had, but lowering the bar on how to make cash via shoplifting deserves some recognition as well.
- hattmall 5y ago
  That's nothing new, flea markets and yard sales have been and still are wide open to fence goods. I would say Amazon FBA is actually upping the bar on selling stolen goods its kind of a lot of work. Plus you have to pay FBA fees and the Amazon commissions.

by bko 5y ago

tyoma 5y ago

The felony theft limit for Texas is $2,500, but their retail establishments do not report massive shoplifting sprees. Clearly there is more than misdemeanor/felony classification at work here.

Workaccount2 5y ago
I'm pretty sure in CA it's that police do not respond to calls for anything less than felony theft. So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you. Walmart and Target, among others, reportedly monitor small thefts and let you get up to the felony threshold over multiple incidents before swooping in.
  - everybodyknows 5y ago
    An option not available to small businesses, as the shoplifters have no doubt already learned. Another hidden tilting of the playing field against small business.
    - hpkuarg 5y ago
      Yes, exactly.
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      So will we see a startup: Uber for alternative policing to whom small retailers submit surveilance camera footage, and expect a series of crimes to be merged into a single case?
      - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
        That’s actually a pretty compelling idea. Not necessarily the alternative policing part (private police?), but compiling hard evidence against offenders and handing that to the authorities.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- sneak 5y ago
  "They were robbing the store, and I think one of them had a machine gun!"
  - keeganpoppen 5y ago
    "i think they had some counterfeit $100 bills as well"
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      “Yes, that’s right. The shoplifted said he was going to use all the stolen merchandise as part of his unregistered securities exchange.”
bko 5y ago
That's a good point. I don't think the felony theft limit is the only consideration the deters organized theft. One obvious difference between Texas and Bay Area is Texas has a lot of guns. > In TX can You Legally Shoot & Kill a Shoplifter? The short answer is…not unless they somehow injure you in the process of committing the theft, making it a robbery. “During the process of committing the theft” would include while trying to escape with the property... One thing that is UNIQUE to Texas is the ability to use deadly force to protect property, even if you are not in fear for your life. Even though I doubt CVS security guards are trained the shoot shoplifters, the preception that this is a possibility would deter low level criminals tasked with shoplifting http://legas.legrandelaw.com/criminal-justice/in-tx-can-you-legally-shoot-kill-a-shoplifter/ http://legas.legrandelaw.com/criminal-justice/in-tx-can-you-...
- pjc50 5y ago
  And what happens if you check the receipt on the body and find out that the item wasn't stolen? How many years do you face for murdering a customer?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    I can point to where firearms have stopped shoplifting crimes. Can you point to where your scenario has happened? Because I’m all for hypotheticals, so long as we admit the rarity and precedent before saying there is a problem.
    - Hizonner 5y ago
      Difficulty: It would take maybe, shall we say, ten thousand of your "firearms stopping shoplifting" cases to offset even ONE "innocent person getting shot" case.
      - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
My guess is it's the same situation as Seattle; Prosecutors in California refuse to prosecute these cases, meaning the cops refuse to waste time trying to apprehend them. Here's an excellent clip about a famous criminal living free in Seattle that happily expounds on his illegal activity: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868 https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  There are plenty of things about my state that get hated on all the time, and deservingly so, but I'll never get how the West Coast is happy driving productive people away and coddling those that have no intention other than to fuck over society.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > how the West Coast is happy driving productive people The evidence for this happening in economically-meaningful numbers is scarce. What we do see happening is those productive people disengaging from that broken society—civically, physically and emotionally.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      The evidence for this happening in economically-meaningful numbers is scarce. It doesn't take numbers meaningful to California to have a meaningful effect on other states, where housing costs are massively skyrocketing due to an influx of new residents.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        What does that have to do with crime? Could be people just getting priced out. Land in the western US is still more expensive and still getting more expensive than elsewhere, clearly it is in demand even more than it is not in demand.
      - Cd00d 5y ago
valdiorn 5y ago
but in Texas, how likely is the staff or the store owner to be armed, and actually confront you? No way that would happen in California. I keep thinking of this event that happened to me in the UK, where laws are equally useless at preventing theft, and staff are just powerless to do anything about it. I chased down a shoplifter. I cornered him in an alley. He stopped, looked at me, and this brief conversation took place. (and nobody ever believes me, but I don't care; this really did happen) Him: What are you doing? Me: I'm chasing you Him: why? Me: Because you're a fucking thief! Him: (confused)...nobody's ever done that before. Me: (shocked) ... well, I AM, so fucking run! He dropped the bag (which contained mostly expensive meat and cheese and some other expensive-ish items - apparently really common theft targets) - and ran off. I took the bag back to the store. Now, I didn't give a shit about a 100 pound loss to Tesco, but if we've completely given up on the rule of law, I'm not sure that's a society I'm happy to live in.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  I love a good foot chase! Given the sentiments of your last paragraph, why did you choose to send the criminal away and return Tesco’s stolen beef?
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    I don't understand putting your personal safety at risk (who knows if he had a knife or something) over £100 of goods belonging to a £20B company. It's not like he stole your meat and cheese as you were shopping. Nobody is going to miss that cheese. Nobody is going to get fired over it. It's really not that important.
    - nuclearnice1 5y ago
      You mention the meat and cheese, but the comment explicitly disavows that motive. P: I chased this guy for law and justice, not meat and cheese. Q: why did you chase for meat cheese?
      - 5y ago
jcims 5y ago
I think CA is an outlier. Super lax enforcement + huge population just puts up big numbers.

baybal2 5y ago

A simpler way — just put all merchandise behind the glass. Any touching only with supervision of a store manager.

nradov 5y ago
For many customers that eliminates the only advantage of shopping at a brick & mortar store. If you have to ask store staff for everything then it's easier to shop online. Cities are destroying their own business districts and losing sales tax revenue by refusing to enforce shoplifting laws.
ganoushoreilly 5y ago
Sadly a lot of the more risky chains do this pretty regularly. I was in a best buy a few years ago where almost everything was behind glass. I wonder what that does to the minds of locals shopping and feeling like they're always under lock and key. It can't be healthy.
- incone123 5y ago
  Also requires more staff to get the goods to the customer. It used to be normal for everything in a store to be behind the counter, and you got served. But self service is cheaper for the store, unless/until we reach a tipping point regarding thefts.
Animats 5y ago
Then you need more staff. I was trying to buy some allergy spray at CVS, and couldn't get anyone to unlock the case. So I left and ordered it online from Costco, at 1/3 the price.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Stores can become large vending machines with minimal staff
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

floren 5y ago

The SF city government seems to have realized that there's another way to make crime "go down": refuse to prosecute for anything, ideally make it pointless for the cops to even show up, until people stop bothering to report crime. Wow, shoplifting is at record lows!

nikanj 5y ago
Same with bike theft in Vancouver. Nobody bothers reporting it, so the statistics aren’t too bad
- the-dude 5y ago
  Isn't there any incentive for your claim on your theft insurance?
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    It's fairly uncommon to have insurance specifically for your bicycle, so most people would be filing claims against their renters' (if they have it) or homeowners' insurance. Given the size of those deductibles ($500 is the US average for homeowners', I would think Canada is similar [1]) lots of people would just buy another bike that costs less. 1: https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-insurance-basics/homeowners-insurance-deductibles-choose-right-one.html https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-in...
    - desmosxxx 5y ago
      even for claims above deductible but still relatively minor (2-3x maybe?) it might not be worth it financially (in the long run) depending on your provider and any previous claims of course
    - the-dude 5y ago
      In NL you can insure your bike for theft upon purchase ( or later ).
5y ago

Gunax 5y ago

I think it's okay to mention the effect Amazon is having without blaming them. Ultimately online person-to-person trading is making fencing items easier and the people buying probably don't know they are purchasing stolen items. Amazon isn't the thesis, but it is disrupting the stolen goods market in the same way automoboles and highways lead to a spike in bank robbery. I grew up in a poor area and we had a neighborhood fence. Let's call him 'Casey' since that was his name. Everyone knew Casey was selling stolen items and there was sort of a joke in the town about getting a 'Casey discount'. It sounds like Casey is probably operating an Amazon store now.

hattmall 5y ago
This has been flea markets and yard sales for decades though.

bushbaba 5y ago

If each item had a unique id. And the stores could indicate unique ids that are stolen. The. Amazon & eBay could monitor and prevent stolen merchandise

nitrogen 5y ago
Everything is easy if you assume a panopticon.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sneak 5y ago
  We already have the panopticon, we might as well get some fucking benefits from it. As it is I'm paying both for hard drives in Utah for the NSA to store my contacts and photos and track logs, then again (formerly) for iCloud to do it a second time. It's inefficient.
literallyaduck 5y ago
You could probably get some milage with just a local store id and date on the box. If you want to get cute you could change the pill stamp.

nonameiguess 5y ago

If it's actually organized crime, then they can be prosecuted under RICO statutes, which allows for much stronger sentencing than shoplifting ever would have. Robbery is one of the 35 crimes included under the "racketeering" umbrella.

hattmall 5y ago
Gotta be felonies though right?

kevinpet 5y ago

I'm concerned about lawlessness, but if the only alternative is that $950 theft is a _felony_ that's messed up. This seems more like a case of not being able to deal with crime than lax sentencing.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 5y ago
Nobody will risk prison for $950 of stuff. If you make it basically a ticket, then you can easily get dozens of people to be able to steal a meaningful amount of stuff.
- coderintherye 5y ago
  This is patently false, do you think people didn't go to prison prior to the law change? In fact, so many people were risking prison time for petty theft that is what led to enacting the law in first place to deal with the overcrowding in the state prison system, as summed up in this layman article: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299 https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299
  - desmosxxx 5y ago
    > overcrowding in the state prison system and so our solution is to change the law, instead of dealing with whatever is causing people to steal in the first place. Theft is a grey area between non-violence and violence, I'd rather we deal with the root causes rather than just making it less of a crime. If murders were overcrowding prisons, i doubt many people would be calling for reduced murder sentencing (although im sure some would)
    - rayiner 5y ago
      The “root causes” of theft (and most crime) is social breakdown. It’s not poverty or need—or you’d expect far more crime in say India than in the US and you don’t actually see that.

bsanr2 5y ago

Not to downplay the seriousness of theft, but there's something to be said about the scale. A few people working in an uncoordinated fashion is a crime problem; a structured group essentially working in symbiosis with a retailer's systems (and its blindspots) sounds more like a system design issue on the community and company level. Why do these people need or even want to steal so much? How can a company sustain these kinds of losses? It seems like there are inefficiencies to consider from several vantage points.

tzs 5y ago

A misdemeanor can still get up to 6 to 12 months in jail depending on if it is a gross misdemeanor or an aggravated misdemeanor, so I’m not sure I buy the theory that the downgrade from felony in 2014 is why these shoplifters are not prosecuted.

rayiner 5y ago

One of my observations coming from Bangladesh, where policing is pretty inadequate, is that criminal law is really there to prevent the growth of organized crime. So you have to think about crime as a system not in terms of individuals. Harsh punishment may not deter a given criminal. But it may well make it hard to recruit dozens of low level people to engage in low value illegal activity that adds up to something significant.

jzb 5y ago
That doesn't seem to be working so well with drugs. We've filled prisons with people engaged in low level illegal activity but we don't seem to have made any dent in illegal drugs. In fact, probably the opposite.
- google234123 5y ago
  Well, looks at Japan and Korea for a counter example. There is much less prosecution of low level drug crimes now and an increase in the amount of fatal overdoes from illegal drugs
- rayiner 5y ago
  That just means that it’s hard to regulate criminal activity where the “victim” (buyer) is a voluntary participant. But laws like RICO—which allows low level goons to be held liable for the whole enterprise’s crimes—absolutely decimated the Mafia.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  The difference is that drugs are a victimless crime. Vast networks can operate outside the law, because no one has any incentive to defect. Outside extensive and ubiquitous surveillance, it’s virtually impossible to disrupt a disciplined drug distribution network. Maybe you get a few lucky hits here or there from random traffic stops or the like, but it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. In contrast victim crimes like theft create a huge surface area of vulnerability. Every time the crime is committed, by definition the criminals are interacting with an adversary who’s extremely motivated to collaborate with law enforcement. Victim based criminal networks are basically unscalable and extremely short-lived for this reason. Unless the political classes are complicit and refuse to let law enforcement do their job of protecting victims.

fragmede 5y ago

The fact that Amazon will fence stolen goods for a thief is absolutely part of the story. Used to be a whole criminal enterprise to be able to make money off of stolen goods. Now, anyone can start shoplifting and turn that into cash through FBA. If you can find someone selling something for cheaper, you can turn around and sell it online via Amazon FBA. Turns out, stealing is a great way to drive down costs (assuming no morals). There's absolutely a wider societal discussion to be had, but lowering the bar on how to make cash via shoplifting deserves some recognition as well.

hattmall 5y ago
That's nothing new, flea markets and yard sales have been and still are wide open to fence goods. I would say Amazon FBA is actually upping the bar on selling stolen goods its kind of a lot of work. Plus you have to pay FBA fees and the Amazon commissions.