5 ms·

Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities

Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?

762236 1y ago
[flagged]
outside1234 1y ago
This turned out to not actually be a thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shoplifting-retail-crime-theft-retraction.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
- arduanika 1y ago
  pengaru did not say anything about organized shoplifting. The lock and key were definitely a thing, and still are. Please read comments before responding to them.
- pengaru 1y ago
  Come visit SF and let's go shopping downtown.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
It's unclear if the decline in prisoners stems from a decline in crime. While I generally believe the statistics that violent crime has decreased, it may be the case that the judicial system and even the government in general just have no enthusiasm for prosecuting or punishing it. In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
- pengaru 1y ago
  > those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5. Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    > The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer. And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
- antonymoose 1y ago
  I live in a deep Red Bible thumping, back the blue, law and order county / state. About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month. After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock. He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months. The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation. This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will. If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    There should be statutory limitations for prosecutors concerning the use of plea deals. No more than 1% of cases in any calendar year should be permitted to even offer plea deals, so that they use that tool sparingly and only when appropriate. If they waste it out of laziness or apathy, then the subsequent cases that year would have to be brought to trial. This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
    - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      Most convictions are due to plea deals. If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped due to Sixth Amendment violations and people languishing in prison awaiting trials. It would be gridlock. "Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States." https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-cases-are-settled-with-a-plea-bargain https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
      - analog31 1y ago
- techjamie 1y ago
  Asset Protection manager here. Our protection decisions are based on theft trends independent from our staffing. And generally, the theft scales with how much business a store receives, rather than how many staff they employ. More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere. If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
energywut 1y ago
Putting poor, desperate people in jail isn't going to solve the systemic issues that create poor, desperate people. Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future. A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons. Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  This article claims that the inmate costs per state range from $23k/year (Arkansas) to $307k/year (Massachusetts). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-states/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  > Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen Who pays matters.
  - energywut 1y ago
    We pay. We pay to house inmates. It costs us a TON of money to house prison populations.
- rahimnathwani 1y ago
  Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future. Prisons make people less likely to become criminals. Your comment focuses on prison and the impact it has on a single criminal who is caught, convicted, and put in prison. Sometimes this is a useful way to look at things. I think it's far more useful to consider prison's impact on all the people who are not in prison. It serves as a crime deterrent.
qingcharles 1y ago
Depends on the area. The area I lived in last year, it was rare to enter a Walgreens that wasn't actively being pillaged by shoplifters. I remember when they announced they were closing the only local Wal-mart (due to excessive shoplifting, allegedly) -- that same day the shoplifters went in like a swarm of locusts and stripped it bare. They had police at both exits, but they were powerless.

Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?

762236 1y ago

[flagged]

outside1234 1y ago

This turned out to not actually be a thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shoplifting-retail-crime-theft-retraction.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...

arduanika 1y ago
pengaru did not say anything about organized shoplifting. The lock and key were definitely a thing, and still are. Please read comments before responding to them.
pengaru 1y ago
Come visit SF and let's go shopping downtown.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

It's unclear if the decline in prisoners stems from a decline in crime. While I generally believe the statistics that violent crime has decreased, it may be the case that the judicial system and even the government in general just have no enthusiasm for prosecuting or punishing it. In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.

pengaru 1y ago
> those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5. Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  > The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer. And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
antonymoose 1y ago
I live in a deep Red Bible thumping, back the blue, law and order county / state. About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month. After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock. He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months. The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation. This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will. If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  There should be statutory limitations for prosecutors concerning the use of plea deals. No more than 1% of cases in any calendar year should be permitted to even offer plea deals, so that they use that tool sparingly and only when appropriate. If they waste it out of laziness or apathy, then the subsequent cases that year would have to be brought to trial. This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    Most convictions are due to plea deals. If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped due to Sixth Amendment violations and people languishing in prison awaiting trials. It would be gridlock. "Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States." https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-cases-are-settled-with-a-plea-bargain https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
    - analog31 1y ago
techjamie 1y ago
Asset Protection manager here. Our protection decisions are based on theft trends independent from our staffing. And generally, the theft scales with how much business a store receives, rather than how many staff they employ. More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere. If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.

energywut 1y ago

Putting poor, desperate people in jail isn't going to solve the systemic issues that create poor, desperate people. Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future. A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons. Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.

3eb7988a1663 1y ago
This article claims that the inmate costs per state range from $23k/year (Arkansas) to $307k/year (Massachusetts). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-states/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
> Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen Who pays matters.
- energywut 1y ago
  We pay. We pay to house inmates. It costs us a TON of money to house prison populations.
rahimnathwani 1y ago
Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future. Prisons make people less likely to become criminals. Your comment focuses on prison and the impact it has on a single criminal who is caught, convicted, and put in prison. Sometimes this is a useful way to look at things. I think it's far more useful to consider prison's impact on all the people who are not in prison. It serves as a crime deterrent.

qingcharles 1y ago

Depends on the area. The area I lived in last year, it was rare to enter a Walgreens that wasn't actively being pillaged by shoplifters. I remember when they announced they were closing the only local Wal-mart (due to excessive shoplifting, allegedly) -- that same day the shoplifters went in like a swarm of locusts and stripped it bare. They had police at both exits, but they were powerless.