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Notes -
Mayor Adams Announces Plan to Combat Retail Theft in New York City
https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/340-23/mayor-adams-plan-combat-retail-theft-new-york-city#/0
From the Mayor himself:
The plan is detailed as follows:
Establish two new diversion programs — “Second Chance” and Re-Engaging Store Theft Offenders and Retail Establishments (RESTORE) — to allow non-violent offenders to avoid prosecution or incarceration by meaningfully engaging with services to help address underlying factors that lead to shoplifting.
Install resource kiosks in stores to connect individuals in need to critical government resources and social services.
Launch an employee support program to train retail workers in de-escalation tactics, anti-theft tools, and security best practices to help keep them safe in the event of an emergency and to support employees who have been impacted by thefts.
To increase necessary enforcement against repeat shoplifters and deter organized crime rings perpetrating these thefts, the administration will:
Create a Precision Repeat Offender Program (PROP) in which retailers can submit dedicated security incident reports to the NYPD to better identify and track repeat offenders and facilitate stronger prosecutions by the five District Attorneys’ Offices.
Establish a neighborhood retail watch for businesses in close proximity to one another to share real-time intelligence with each other and with law enforcement in the event of a theft. This program builds upon the NYPD’s Operation Safe Shopper initiative created under Mayor Adams’ leadership as Brooklyn borough president to expand video surveillance camera usage among participants.
Advocate at the state and federal level for additional online sale authentication procedures to prevent the resale of stolen goods to build upon the federal Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) for Consumers Act, which goes into effect in June 2023.
Establish a New York City Organized Retail Theft Task Force, comprised of retailers, law enforcement agencies, and other stakeholders to collaborate and respond to retail theft trends.
From my end: What prompts this entire rigamarole in the first place? Why can't you just go to jail for repeat shoplifting?
On the other hand I have no relatable experience from my own environment with this sort of thing. Shoplifting was just something teenagers did to get a free Snickers, or the much more rare person stealing clothing. This kind of behavior seems so alien and weird. Can you really maintain 'normal' shopping culture with this sort of thing happening? Or will this be 'solved' by more technology and automation where the most you will see of what you buy is an image on a screen until you pay the machine. Moving us one step closer to real life idiocracy.
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!
Years ago, for my sins, I worked in a small local grocery store (the tale of how to fuck over and exploit your employees while becoming a millionaire when a million was real money is one for another day).
On a night shift I was unlucky enough to be robbed by the professional thieves. The slickness of the job is that one distracts you by asking you to get them something off a shelf behind you/serve them at the deli counter while the other one grabs around for whatever they can lift - luckily the till was shut, but at that time when we sold lottery tickets the money was kept in a cashbox under a shelf, and Thief Two leaned over and grabbed that while Thief One distracted me.
Needless to say, my employer ate the face off me, but what could I do? Oh, and around the same time there was a spate of armed (for the value of "armed" when the thief had a knife) robberies from petrol stations and small shops, and my employer instructed us that should someone come in and threaten us with a knife to open the till, we should lock the till, throw the key where they couldn't get it, and be prepared to be stabbed to protect our employer's precious sweet money. I think the expression on my face probably conveyed "Hump that for a game of soldiers", because they became quite insistent on how it was my duty to risk injury or death so they wouldn't lose out on a day's takings.
This is why (1) I think the teens who shoplift for a laugh, as well as the idiots on the reddit site who go on about how it's not stealing and besides the stores have insurance, etc. should get a damn good slap until they have this nonsense knocked out of them and (2) there are people who shoplift because they genuinely have no money and are hungry or their kids are hungry. The vast majority are not these cases.
They're professional thieves and they will use kids and even babies in their stealing (it's an old trick to bring prams or buggies into the store, hide the goods under the child, then scream your head off about 'don't touch my child' if a shop assistant or security guard tries to search them).
Re: security guards - now that anyone can walk into a store, grab something off the racks or the shelves, and walk right back out while telling you to fuck yourself, because any attempt to even lay a hand on them is ASSAULT, THAT'S ASSAULT, I'M SUING YOU AND THE STORE, there's not much they can do in reality.
Nice policy. I'll tell you the three things this will achieve:
(1) Sweet
(2) Fuck
(3) All
As for "second chance" for non-violent etc. that might work if it's a kid and you get them young enough before they've started their career of petty juvenile crime and you get them out of their home environment of thieves and worse. Leave them in their criminal family and the environment of "take the suckers for a ride, wrap the social workers around your little finger, spout the line about how it's all society's fault" will undo any good you try to do.
If it's adults, forget it. You have women training their four year old kids to be thieves, what snowball in hell's chance do you think they're going to reform? Here's a typical case plucked from the headlines in my own country, which leads me into the "connect individuals to critical government resources and social services".
You think the woman in that case isn't connected with social services etc.? You think that her lawyer, representing her after 158 previous convictions, isn't going for the sob-story angle about "Murphy had lost her job and fallen into homelessness because of a “bad drug addiction” in hopes that this time yet again a judge will fall for it and go easy on her?
As for "train employees in de-escalation tactics", oh yeah that's gonna work. "Oh please, Ms. Shoplifter, I know systemic racism and poverty have impacted you which is why you're grabbing a carefully calculated amount under what would get you done for a felony, but if I just ask you nicely you'll hand everything back".
Sure.
Such policies achieving sweet fuck all is the feature, not a bug.
"So where's the part where we start catching criminals and punishing them?"
"That's the neat part, we don't."
As @CriticalDuty mentions above, any sort of effective policy would mean more blacks in jails and prisons, which is unacceptable to those who consider black lives to matter more.
The laundry list of soft-hearted, impotent plans-for-action that excuses the agency and accountability of criminals sounds like right-wing parody, complete with forced acronyms for do-nothing programs and task (lack of) forces.
Pretty typical anarcho-tyranny, when shoplifters have greater protections than the employees or good Samaritans who try to stop them.
At this point we might as well just drop the act and have third base coaches stationed at store exits, to enthusiastically wave shoplifters out the store.
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This. I work American retail, and this entire policy is insanely funny because it’s so obviously stupid.
Why would anyone engage with “RESTORE” to avoid jail time when it’s already pretty rare to be caught, and even if you are, you won’t be prosecuted, let alone go to jail. Why would they try to get into these programs (which seems like an admission of guilt) when you could do nothing? At best those sorts of programs will basically move theft from the customer facing parts of the store to the back room and teach thieves how stores work so they’re able to steal better. Nobody with a brain is going to let thieves into this program at their store.
"Your Honour, my client is a single mother of three children and if she is sent to jail, there will be nobody to take care of them. Yes, she has 140 previous convictions, but she only went out robbing expensive goods because she fell under the influence of her boyfriend who persuaded her to do so. The fact that when arrested she was walking around with a Gucci handbag which is one of the items she stole should mean nothing. We ask the court to consider a remedial sentence since there is now a programme to teach people "it's not your fault you went out robbing, it is down to structural poverty and systemic racism and in fact you should be getting reparations" and she has a place on it".
Oh, that will be a beautiful thing to see in operation, the grift.
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Part of this entire tragedy is that there are decent, lower middle-class/working-class black people who are tired of this shit, think it's bad, hate that their neighbourhoods are turning to shit, hate that being black is automatically associated with crime, think the pond scum who behave like this should be punished - and white liberals will flat-out ignore them and talk over them in favour of showing off how good allies they are in regards to "anti-white fragility, anti-white supremacy, against anti-blackness, etc."
The question is, of course, how many of them change their voting behavior based on this?
Because if those votes reliably end up in the same hands every time, it doesn't really matter what their more nuanced opinions are.
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I agree completely. One of the biggest tragedies is that White virus signaling is creating racism and destroying Black communities.
Because of all the crime and theft, a lot of people are less likely to assume that a black person in their vicinity is “safe”, at least until they know for sure. People are more likely to assume trouble from even innocent things (I could see the bike incident as a misunderstanding, but why would anyone in that situation assume it’s not a scam or an attempt at a crime?). You might think twice about hiring blacks as well. This doesn’t help black# move up.
At the same time, nobody who can afford the rents outside of the hood wants to open a business there. Even before this crime wave, most businesses in that area have bars on the window and guns behind the counter. Even that’s no longer enough, as it’s basically forbidden to try and stop crime in progress and calling the cops is as waste of time. So it’s basically no business zone. Which means no goods nearby available to those people and no jobs (making building a resume very difficult).
I think honestly a tough on crime approach is what helps minorities.
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Yeah. As Chris Rock put it decades ago: "a black man that got two jobs, going to work every day, hates a nigga on welfare". Nobody hates the trashy black underclass so much as decent black people who are busting their asses to get by and have to tolerate these other people's bullshit.
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