Oh, I’m not buying any of the narrative. We have a moral panic about the terrors of social media every few months. If it’s not Tide Pods, it’s stealing stuff from schools, or random people getting punched on the bus, or mobs of black kids turning over jewelry stores. It’s all the rage for about two weeks, and then everyone promptly forgets about it because really it’s a few incidents and then it peters out.
This one has been ginned up by Fox News for a few months now. CNN just picked it up today.
CNN has been lurching closer to Fox lately.
It happened here a year ago, not so many people and not at such high end stores. But it happened a few times and then stopped. I don’t remember if anyone was prosecuted for it.
I don’t know about nationwide, but is absolutely on the rise in the SF Bay Area. Here’s a story from a local paper on the incidents in this last week: Bay Area organized robberies bring calls for accountability
And from the SF Chronicle: Bay Area’s ‘wild weekend’ of retail crime underscores huge challenges for law enforcement
It will take a strong response to tamp down on this or there will be copycats (or repeat offenders).
This really is just another symptom of income inequality. I mean if they couldn’t afford lavish estates with pools this might not be a problem.
This isn’t petty crime. If anything it’s organized crime. It’s not one lone shoplifter. It’s a conspiracy to commit grand larceny.
the organized crime should be targeted by the police. What the CEOs want is the ability to harass anyone they don’t like and accuse them of crime/ get folks long criminal records for shoplifting/etc.
The big issue here is police indifference/incompetence/complicity with the organized crime, and the organized criminals.
Those Bastards!
This isn’t shoplifting. Cops don’t even care about shoplifting. This is organized mayhem.
Cops definitely care about shoplifting here. Easy money for them.
Every conversation I have had or heard with a store employee here was that shoplifting was their problem. Especially now when everything is a misdemeanor.
Today Best Buy CEO blamed thefts for high employee turnover. Not low wages, insufficient hours, poor scheduling but … shoplifting.
If people wouldn’t keep stealing stuff, the employees would be able to relax more and not have to restock the shelves.
“I disbelieve this obviously true news story, and I am calling it fake news because I don’t like it.”
“Also, CNN is reporting it, and man have they become the enemy lately, amirite?”
Some of y’all might as well be wearing MAGA hats at this point.
Heh, I imagine that any would-be thieves would be stymied by one, not knowing where the valuable stuff is among the eight billion pieces of junk, and two, the sheer physical difficulty of accessing stuff that is probably stacked to the (high) ceiling and accessible by I dunno robots or something.
Personally, I find the prospect of a mob of people storming into a mall or store where I or my wife might be shopping freakin’ terrifying. I don’t go out shopping like that much, at all, but when I do I’m always pretty preoccupied with looking for whatever it is I’m looking for, and certainly in no mental state to handle a violent mob assaulting the place. And given the sorts of stores that are likely to be targeted–however common or uncommon such attacks actually are–it seems likely that a significant portion of the shoppers there are going to be on the older side of the curve, making the whole thing even more dangerous even if the robbers are not, in particular, aiming to harm individuals.
OTOH, I really don’t see how “MOAR POLICE!” is going to help much. Consider the optics of bunches of squad cars and uniformed officers hanging around your upscale retail outlet or boutique. Not only will it read sort of crass to your bougie clientele, everyone else will see it like the Swiss Guard surrounding Louis XVI. And really, how effective can it be? Put a bunch of cops around Neiman Marcus, and the mob just hits the Nordstrom’s five miles away.
I suggest setting up a bunch of display cases full of Chinese knock-offs up front and letting the mob have its way with that!
This is why you go in and steal the robots!
That’s just some ‘security consultant’ mouthing off about causes without any actual evidence that this particular thing is really a cause. He does the same thing with ‘defund the police’ — blames this stuff on poor morale among police officers because of ‘defend the police’. There isn’t really any reason to believe most of what he’s saying. Maybe it’s true, but he isn’t offering an ounce of evidence to back it up.
It’s hard to believe you can steal a car that is worth less than $950. You’d probably need a tow truck to pull that off.
This, plus those cops will totally shoot and kill someone who is stealing a handbag, and probably shoot someone who isn’t stealing a handbag for good measure.
Chesa Boudin is talking about getting tough on crime! You know it must be bad in San Francisco.
The police reform effort is getting hurt by big crime spikes.
More smash and grab crime in Texas:
The targeted building was the former work place of our new DA, who has been trying to reform the Austin police.