Shoplifters are LITERALLY killing folks. It’s time to end the madness
The shoplifters are profitable — and so they’re inflicting untold distress for customers, retailers and retailer staff throughout the nation.
When will this utter insanity finish?
When will Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York lawmakers understand they should make assaults on retail staff an automated felony — and see that the perps endure actual penalties — with a purpose to stem the tide?
Shops all through town are locking merchandise behind plastic boundaries.
And elevating costs.
(If not closing altogether.)
Walgreens is debuting a retailer in Chicago the place the products in all however two aisles are saved safely out of buyer attain.
At a Residence Depot in North Carolina, a employee was really pushed to his dying by a shoplifter working off with stolen merchandise.
That is the sick world progressives have wrought.
They excuse it by claiming shoplifting is against the law of poverty, and prog prosecutors flip round and vow to not go after the thieves.
Now-ousted San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin proposed to combat the scourge by addressing “root causes.”
Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg promised throughout his marketing campaign to go gentle on retail theft, and delivered.
Chicago’s Kim Foxx dramatically eased felony necessities for shoplifting virtually as quickly as she got here into workplace.
Boston’s DA till final 12 months, Rachael Rollins, ordered her prosecutors to not go after shoplifters with out particular permission from their bosses.
The consequence: Retail theft — regardless of how critical, and even when perpetrated by organized-crime gangs — has been de facto legalized in blue cities (an issue aggravated by shrinking police forces and perverse pro-criminal reforms).
These are not crimes of poverty, the info present.
In New York, 327 individuals accounted for some 30% of town’s 22,000 shoplifting arrests in 2022.
(Reported thefts, north of 63,000 for 2022, have been up 45% over 2021 and almost 275% in comparison with the mid-2000s.)
They’re sociopathic crimes of alternative. And so they have lethal penalties all over the place.
Witness Jeff Rasor crying out for assist from legislation enforcement on Nightline after his father, that North Carolina Residence Depot worker, was brutally murdered by a cold-blooded shoplifter attempting to make off with three stress washers.
Hardly Jean Valjean stealing bread for his household.
Simply as unhealthy are this crime wave’s much less spectacular however equally corrosive results.
Like items underneath lockup — not simply in Chicago (the place Walgreens absurdly dodges about it being a response to crime) however right here in New York and elsewhere.
Or Complete Meals abandoning its SF flagship due to crime, and a number of Walmarts and Targets shutting down over the identical points.
Even large chain shops are turning into lawless, harmful locations, with unabashed crooks proudly owning the aisles — the place each customers and staff are afraid.
That’s to say nothing of mom-and-pop operations crushed into oblivion.
Or staff who’re put in an unimaginable place by sneering leftist DAs and different electeds: Let criminals get away with it or threat dying.
One thing have to be accomplished. The invoice from Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton (D-Staten Island) and Assemblyman Manny De Los Santos (D-Inwood) at present in committee in New York’s Legislature to make attacking retail staff an automated felony can be a more-than-necessary begin.
However solely a begin.
Contra Boudin, retail theft have to be addressed by swift, harsh penalties — above all for serial offenders — and no extra pabulum about fairness or justice.
Except and till lefty DAs get up, the social decay, financial pillage and tragic bloodshed they’ve authored will proceed.
