Changing The Vocabulary Doesn’t Make It Right

Yesterday, PJ Media posted an article about the new term for shoplifting.

The article reports:

Do you know what the problem with capitalism is? It doesn’t want to sell stuff to people. Calling it “a late-capitalism horror story,” the Washington Post’s Maura Judkis might have just written the stupidest possible piece about Blue America’s state-sponsored shoplifting craze. 

“America is a sticky-fingered nation built on stolen land,” Judkis scolded her readers on Friday to their self-loathing delight, “and its current moral panic is about shoplifting.”

Judkis tells the story of Washington’s Columbia Heights shoplifter-beloved CVS location, where by last week, there was “almost nothing left to steal… and that gives you an idea of which items have actual value.”

“The thieves don’t even bother” with blank CDs or greeting cards, we’re told without any surprise. “The good magazines like Vogue and GQ and Sports Illustrated are gone, but there are still a few copies of Traditional Home, some special issues of Life devoted to Willie Nelson, and a Woman’s World that declares: ‘Bye bye, jiggly fat!'” The soft drinks are gone, “but three gallon-sized jugs of Arizona green tea are still on the shelves on one recent visit.”

The good stuff — including Dawn dish soap, L’Oreal shampoo, MiraLax, Clairol root touch-up hair dye kits, DayQuil, NyQuil, diapers, Cetaphil, Neutrogena face wash — are all either behind Plexiglass, available only at the counter, or under lock and key. 

“Other shelves, stretching entire aisles, are totally empty.”

If you’ve been reading the news these last four years, you know that the Third World shopping experience is a familiar sight in cities like Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

Yet Judkis insists that “the data is murky” whether or not America really has a shoplifting problem. But that misses the point, doesn’t it? America doesn’t have a shoplifting problem, but poorly policed neighborhoods in America’s Democrat-dominated blue cities do.

The article concludes:

Judkis did leave one question unanswered: where are those free-lance reparations specialists going to shoplift now that the local CVS has closed? I’d wager this month’s car payment that she’ll have a somewhat less understanding take if the O.C. shoplifting gangs ever come to Georgetown or Adams Morgan.

I’m reminded once again of Barack Obama aide Ben Rhodes’ blithe assessment of young reporters — the ones who cut their teeth covering politics during the Obama years. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington,” he told New York Times Magazine in 2016. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Dealing With Crime In New York City

Mayor Adams has released his plan to deal with crime in New York City. On Saturday, Hot Air posted an article about the plan.

The article reports:

New York, as with other Democrat-run cities, is experiencing a crime wave. Retail theft–shoplifting–has gone through the roof. Gangs of people go into stores and steal with impunity, leaving with thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. It is both organized crime and disorganized. Thousands of people engage in the practice, with hundreds at least who do it as a living.

The article reports the plan:

The new crackdown includes giving first-time offenders intervention programs instead of prosecution, de-escalation training for retail employees, establishing neighborhood retail watch groups to share information about a theft in real-time with one another and the police, and installing kiosks in stores to connect would-be thieves with social service programs.

No, this isn’t the Babylon Bee.

The article concludes:

Kiosks offering social service programs. Neighborhood groups to watch the crime happen–nobody, after all, is authorized or encouraged to interfere. We all know what interfering with a crime will get the good samaritan: time in Riker’s.

De-escalation training? Now that is funny. Expect to wind up on YouTube being smeared as a White Supremacist for not allowing yourself to be victimized. Oh..you don’t have to imagine it. It happens, and the MSM and the Left work overtime to destroy you.

…It took 6 months to come up with this plan.

Six months.

What is the point? When the tough-on-crime ex-cop suggests that kiosks with social service information are the solution to an ongoing crime wave, there really isn’t a point in sticking around. Pick up and leave.

As long as actions don’t have negative consequences, they will continue.

Policies Have Consequences

Hot Air is reporting today that Target is cutting back its store hours in San Francisco in an effort to limit shoplifting.

The article reports:

Normal store hours are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. They’re cutting back to 6 p.m. because, the company claims, “for more than a month, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores.”

Only a month? Walgreens has closed 17 stores in San Francisco since 2016 because it didn’t pay to keep them open with so many locals taking the five-finger discount. Target’s new policy raises the ominous possibility that the problem is getting worse, which would make sense. With the pandemic all but over in the highly vaccinated Bay Area, more thieves may be out and about lately.

Read this post for background on San Francisco’s problem with shockingly brazen shoplifting. A state law that passed several years ago made it a misdemeanor to steal less than $950 worth of goods, a wrist-slap that’s encouraged repeat offenders. Go figure that three California cities (San Fran, L.A., and Sacramento) are among the top 10 in the United States for organized retail crime. Not all of the theft is organized, of course — sometimes it’s random homeless people or addicts acting alone — but a surprising amount is being driven by rings selling the stolen merchandise on the black market.

The article notes that the shoplifting problem in San Francisco has gotten so bad that the 7-Eleven on Drumm St. in the Financial District does business only through a metal door.

The article also notes:

SFPD’s Central Station reported auto burglaries skyrocketed 753% in May compared to the same time last year during lockdowns and they’re still up 75% compared to the same period in 2019

“They don’t even care. They tell us what the hell are you going to do,” said [a] tourism operator who did not wish his business to be identified.

One family who did not wish to be identified showed KPIX 5 pictures they took as they witnessed thieves in action just before pulling into a parking lot on Embarcadero and Bay Street.

What is needed is a Mayor and City Council that will make shoplifting and theft unprofitable again. We know this will rapidly change the city because we saw it happen when Rudy Giuliani took over as Mayor of New York City. The turnaround was rapid and obvious. San Francisco needs a Mayor and City Council who understand broken windows theory.