{"id":1007803,"date":"2026-08-18T03:12:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T03:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1007803\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T03:12:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T03:12:18","slug":"hey-progressives-shoplifting-isnt-need-its-just-plain-greed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1007803\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey progressives: Shoplifting isn’t need, it’s just plain greed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Outside Manhattan Criminal Court last week, Brooklyn Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher called the scourge of shoplifting <\/a>that\u2019s set in over the past decade the result of \u201ccrimes of poverty, people who are stealing things like toothpaste . . . And that means if you\u2019re stealing those things, you need them.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to know which would be worse: that Gallagher isn\u2019t aware that shoplifting is a gang-led, bulk-fencing scheme that costs jobs and that can escalate to deadly violence \u2014 or that she doesn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

The criminals responsible for a disproportionate percentage of New York City retail theft <\/a>aren\u2019t driven by hunger (or by a desire for clean teeth).<\/p>\n

They are repeat actors \u2014 people who steal and sell stolen goods for a living<\/a>, or people who steal to support drug habits.<\/p>\n

As The New York Times reported in 2023, just 327 people in 2022 were responsible for almost one in three city shoplifting arrests, with some \u201cengage[d] in shoplifting as a trade,\u201d and others \u201cdriven by addiction or mental illness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Liberals don\u2019t get it<\/strong><\/p>\n

Criminal rings help small-scale thieves resell their goods \u2014 at pawn shops, at bodegas and online.<\/p>\n

In 2023, The New Yorker profiled a beneficiary of New York\u2019s supportive-housing network, who resold stolen goods online to make a little extra cash.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s common: Open-air markets around the city <\/a>regularly feature stolen toiletries for sale.<\/p>\n

Even as the most violent crimes in New York City have abated in the past few years after their post-2020 surge, theft remains much higher than a decade ago.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s tally of reported petit larcenies \u2014 60,003 through early August \u2014 is 5% below last year\u2019s, yes.<\/p>\n

But it remains close to a quarter higher than the norm between the early 2000s and 2017 \u2014 that is, before New York state changed its criminal-justice laws, particularly around evidence production and cash bail, to make it harder to incapacitate repeat thieves.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s partly because people who shoplift\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0go to jail: fewer than nine percent of Rikers Island\u2019s\u00a0current inmates<\/a>\u00a0are in on\u00a0any\u00a0misdemeanor charge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gallagher, a democratic socialist who supports such lenience, doesn\u2019t acknowledge what regular New Yorkers know: Mass shoplifting also harms regular people, making it harder to go to the store and pay for stuff.<\/p>\n

As that well-known right-wing pundit Al Sharpton put it in 2022 when he discussed the \u201cout-of-control\u201d crime rise, \u201cThey\u2019re locking up my toothpaste.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that you can\u2019t easily buy mouthwash from the store anymore means fewer people work at the drugstores \u2014 as they\u2019re losing business to Amazon.<\/p>\n

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As of June, 37,400 New Yorkers worked at \u201chealth and personal care\u201d retailers \u2014 that is, drugstores \u2014 a full 10,500 people below the 2017 level.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a loss of 22% of such jobs, when the nation as a whole has shed only 5% of jobs in that category.<\/p>\n

And the supposedly \u201cnon-violent\u201d crime of shoplifting can escalate.<\/p>\n

In 2023 a CVS security guard, Scotty Enoe, tried to stop a thief <\/a>at a Times Square store, only to be attacked.<\/p>\n

Enoe stabbed the criminal, Charles Brito, in self-defense \u2014 and though DA Alvin Bragg tried to lock him up for manslaughter, a Manhattan jury acquitted him.<\/a><\/p>\n

The state legislature in which Gallagher serves could have prevented this death: Brito was a serial shoplifter with more than a dozen prior arrests.<\/p>\n

Just last fall, a Morton Williams guard in Hell\u2019s Kitchen tried to stop a beer thief<\/a> \u2014 and lost his life grappling with the perp.<\/p>\n

Insult to poor people<\/strong><\/p>\n

The only reason that shoplifting has fallen slightly in the past couple of years is a modest rollback of the criminal-justice lenience that Gallagher supports. The fact that judges can now set bail for repeat shoplifting means the NYPD re-arrests just 13% of suspects with the first 30 days of their release, down from 20%, The Post reported in April. Worst of all, though, Gallagher\u2019s fact-free insistence that stealing toothpaste is a crime of poverty is an insult to poor people.<\/p>\n

Most poor people don\u2019t steal.<\/p>\n

Thieves do \u2014 and they steal more when they think they can get away with it, thanks to progressivism\u2019s misplaced pieties.<\/p>\n

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute\u2019s City Journal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Outside Manhattan Criminal Court last week, Brooklyn Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher called the scourge of shoplifting that\u2019s set in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1007804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,4219,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,5877,10883,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1007803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-crime","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-opinion","tag-poverty","tag-shoplifting","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117114329300924218","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1007804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}