Current Events > Shoplifting in Los Angeles down 30%

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://mobile.twitter.com/PplsCityCouncil/status/1471168304316252169

Yo who's up for shopping at Louis Vuitton???

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/4/3/AAACPvAACtGz.jpg

Shoplifting decreased when shops closed down due to corona?!

Shoplifting is down because the people responsible catching it, don't give a fuck most of the time. And those people are probably stealing as well.

Sheiky-Baby posted...

Shoplifting is down because the people responsible catching it, don't give a fuck most of the time. And those people are probably stealing as well.

what are you basing that on?

Stalolin posted...

what are you basing that on?

My cousin's friend works at Wal-Mart at self-checkout in Washington for awhile now, and the stories they had. I no longer look at retail the same again.

CyricZ posted...

Yo who's up for shopping at Louis Vuitton???

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/4/3/AAACPvAACtGz.jpg

Right lol. I think it was yesterday I mentioned a mall in LA using concertina like wire fencing to detour mob lootings.

Sheiky-Baby posted...

My cousin's friend works at Wal-Mart at self-checkout in Washington for awhile now, and the stories they had. I no longer look at retail the same again.

Had a dude come up to me with some beer and he approached me like we were lifelong best pals. After 10 minutes he says well it was good to see ya in the hopes that i woild just let me walk out. Im like hey, ya gonna pay for that? He tries to play it off. Oh silly me!

Sheiky-Baby posted...

My cousin's friend

Oh ok then

I guess shuttering stores and a world ending plague DOES decrease crime after all

Several years ago, fearmongering about crime rates would get you directed to statistics that crime has been overall going down for decades. That's not politically beneficial right now, though. Crimes, especially violent ones, are bad, but there are other motives at play here than a general fear for safety and a desire to do good. Violent crime has been at its rough current position for a decade with ebbs and flows.

It's like when the Summer of the Shark had less shark attacks than the previous year

That's not actually what the article says, but okay.

BilalPowell posted...

Shoplifting decreased when shops closed down due to corona?!

Middle hope posted...

I guess shuttering stores and a world ending plague DOES decrease crime after all

Especially when that plague has been happening since 2015 like these statistics indicate!

...wait a minute

I worked retail in the SF Bay Area, shoplifting was happening every day and the big hits happened at least once every other week. It was constant. We just stopped calling police for shoplifting unless something else happened like assault or if they really trashed the place.

It was so pointless to call because most of the time they got away by the time police arrived. Even when caught it doesnt matter because its just a misdemeanor and the same shoplifter will just hit our location a week or two later.

I assume the lack of reporting is at the very least one of the factors in these reports. Also 2015 is when Prop 47 went into effect.

Any decent sized business won't generally call the police on shoplifting regardless of how tough on crime your city or state is. It's already too late once you call and they can write off the losses.

We once called the police over a damn bogus prescription and they were like "The person isn't there anymore, so what do you want us to do? We'll take a report."

s0nicfan posted...

That's not actually what the article says, but okay.

what does it actually say?

They are probably only stealing the necessities that can't be afforded.

I just don't know if I want to hear about how fucking bad society is from the same people that laugh at you for thinking society is bad because of pandemics, climate change, corporate greed, lack of affordable healthcare, etc. The historical perspective and the statistics magically disappear. Suddenly, we don't need to recognize how much worse it could be if we lived in a different decade or a different country.

Stalolin posted...

what does it actually say?

Well, for one the statistics they reference includes shoplifting but is much broader than shoplifting.

The category that includes shoplifting personal/other theft per LAPD is down 32% from 2019. A San Francisco Chronicle analysis of that citys shoplifting crime data showed that the number of monthly reports had changed little in the last three years, though it also raised some major questions about the accuracy of shoplifting reporting to law enforcement.

So it could be possible that personal theft has drastically decreased because of quarantine, and retail theft has gone up but when you put them into a common category depending on how they weigh those statistics based on frequency and or cost you get a very different number.

Second, the article also mentions that the more recent string of crimes would not have even fallen under that statistic anyway because of how they get reported:

it also raised some major questions about the accuracy of shoplifting reporting to law enforcement. Smash-and-grab thefts are classified differently because they involve violence, trespassing and high-value hauls, and suspects have been charged with robbery, burglary or grand theft after recent incidents in L.A. and San Francisco.

Since the article doesn't provide the percentage increase or decrease of smash and grab crimes we can't say for sure whether they have increased or decreased, but we have a sense of the damages by looking at retail organizations that have to report loss:
And that's not discounting the hard numbers that retail groups have been publishing that are independent of what's being reported from the LAPD:

Its latest report found that total shrink the industry term for all inventory losses from theft and fraud, internal and external, as well as paperwork errors grew from 1.4% to 1.6% of sales on average from 2015 to 2020. The estimated portion of those losses coming from organized retail crime grew from 0.045% to 0.07% in the same timeframe.

With $3.1 trillion in bricks-and-mortar retail sales in 2020, that puts estimates for total shrink at $49.6 billion and losses to organized retail crime at $2.1 billion nationwide.

Which isn't completely accurate either because it includes internal theft like employees stealing from the register.

There's also the issue of the fact that the groups actually tracking the amount of shrink stopped in 2019, meaning there would be no way to compare those numbers to 2020 or 2021, meaning any comparison made here is apples to oranges.

Although the NRF publishes its organized retail crime estimates each year, the group stopped publishing a detailed breakdown of the sources of shrink in 2019.

You also need to consider that the category of shop impacts the frequency.

Mathews said some categories of retailers face higher rates of organized retail theft, with those that sell easily portable and salable goods at higher risk. In his Senate testimony, Dugan reported that CVS Health loses more than $200 million a year to organized retail crime, or 0.21% of its $91 billion in 2020 retail revenue, a rate three times higher than the national average.

Thanks dude Ill look into this in detail tonight or tomorrow.

iPhone_7 posted...

I worked retail in the SF Bay Area, shoplifting was happening every day and the big hits happened at least once every other week. It was constant. We just stopped calling police for shoplifting unless something else happened like assault or if they really trashed the place.

It was so pointless to call because most of the time they got away by the time police arrived. Even when caught it doesnt matter because its just a misdemeanor and the same shoplifter will just hit our location a week or two later.

This is 100% correct, and I have been told the same thing. During self checkouts, even if they get caught, even if you knew they were stealing, you couldn't do a damn thing, physically stopping them was out of line, and you would get in trouble by management instead, you can try calling the police, but the customer would just make a big scene, and the managers will just let them go. One person got off with a 70+ inch Roku 4k tv once.

Right so it seems like there are a lot of interesting points in your post that ultimately mean nothing? Youre not really saying anything meaningful here that the article doesnt also acknowledge. What are you actually trying to say?

Sheiky-Baby posted...

Shoplifting is down because the people responsible catching it, don't give a fuck most of the time. And those people are probably stealing as well.

Shoplifting is down based on the numbers from inventory, not the crappy security guards and their accounts.

"through 2020, the most recent data available"

eggcorn posted...

"through 2020, the most recent data available"

isnt that kind of the point being made?That media outlets are just taking the cops word for it and amplifying a bunch of anecdotes.

Stalolin posted...

Right so it seems like there are a lot of interesting points in your post that ultimately mean nothing? Youre not really saying anything meaningful here that the article doesnt also acknowledge. What are you actually trying to say?

It all ultimately means I'm your daddy. Dur.

Stalolin posted...

Right so it seems like there are a lot of interesting points in your post that ultimately mean nothing? Youre not really saying anything meaningful here that the article doesnt also acknowledge. What are you actually trying to say?

What I'm trying to say is what I said in the first place: the article doesn't actually say shoplifting is down.

It says that the broad category which includes shoplifting is down, but there are other crimes in that category. It also says that smash and grabs aren't being recorded as shoplifting so the crimes that we are talking about when we say shoplifting are actually distributed across a number of different categories with different statistics. We're seeing an increase in shrink, which also includes shoplifting and is much more specific, but shrink also includes employees theft. Finally, the group that explicitly tracked shoplifting the way that we would be discussing it stopped tracking it in 2019.

In other words, there's nothing in the article that explicitly proves that shoplifting specifically is down 30%. There is data that suggests that it is going up, and depending on the type of store it may be going up a lot, but it's difficult to interpret because the data is spread across multiple broad categories that include other crimes which may very well have gone down significantly and because we don't have very accurate data since it's not being tracked anymore.

Wouldn't police distrust cause all crime statistics to drop long term because less people are reporting already committed crimes?

This isn't a gotcha question, I honestly don't know how crime statistics are calculated, but I'm assuming it's only reported crimes.