Retail theft is up bigtime across the United States – but not necessarily in the places you might think.
According to a new report from the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), Los Angeles and Dallas saw the largest increases in retail theft during the first half of both 2022 and 2023.
Retail theft in Los Angeles was up 109 percent during these timeframes while Dallas saw a whopping 73 percent increase in shoplifting.
In 2020 when the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) "pandemic" was first being launched, shoplifting incidents across the United States fell dramatically in 24 of America's largest cities. This is because everything was shut down, and people were told to stay at home.
After the COVID sham started to fall apart, retail crime started to rebound. In the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of pre-"pandemic" 2019, incidents of retail theft were up 16 percent across America overall.
Compared to mid-year 2019, the two American cities that saw the biggest decreases in retail theft were St. Petersburg, Fla., at -78 percent and St. Paul, Minn., at -65 percent.
(Related: Earlier this year, outdoor goods retailer REI closed its last Portland location due to rampant theft.)
San Francisco, Seattle saw largest decreases in crime during first halves of 2022, 2023
It may come as a surprise to some, but the two cities that saw the largest decreases in retail crime during the first halves of both 2022 and 2023 were San Francisco and Seattle, which saw -35 percent and -31 percent decreases, respectively.
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Across America as a whole, the median value of goods stolen during these time periods increased between 2019 and 2021, likely due to inflation. In 2019, the average shoplifting incident resulted in a loss of $75, while in 2021 it reached $100.
"Looking at 90 percent of incidents and excluding those in the top 10% in terms of value, the value of stolen goods in shoplifting incidents in 2021 was $756 or less, a $184 increase from 2019," CCJ reports.
As for more serious shoplifting incidents that count as felonies, these nearly doubled from the onset of the "pandemic" through now from eight percent to 16 percent.
More than 95 percent of shoplifting incidents in 2019, 2020 and 2021 across America involved one or two people, while 0.1 percent, or one out of every 1,000 incidents, involved more than six people.
At the same time, the percentage of cases lacking information on the number of people involved increased from 16 percent in 2019 to more than 25 percent in 2021. This could be due to the "protests" that erupted following the George Floyd psy-op, which essentially normalized retail theft.
More shoplifting incidents these days also involve violence compared to pre-"pandemic" levels. While store assaults were seven percent lower in the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2022, they were eight percent higher for the same time period compared to 2019 before anyone had ever even heard of COVID.
CCJ first started tracking all this almost immediately after COVID was unveiled on the world stage. The group highlights an increase in "smash and grab" incidents, which are all over the news these days as looters ransack grocery stores, high-end apparel stores, drug stores and whatever other businesses they can find to target.
In 2023, California apportioned $267 million to try to combat retail thefts. This past June, a similar effort was launched at the federal level as the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held a hearing on rising rates of organized retail theft across America.
"The city-specific data included in this report are drawn from open-data sources from 24 cities that, over the past five years, have consistently reported specific shoplifting data," CCJ says about how it compiled all this data.
"Additional data come from the U.S. Justice Department's National Incident-Based Reporting Program (NIBRS).7 The NIBRS data include a sample of 3,812 local law enforcement agencies. The analyses examine the changing frequency of reported shoplifting, trends in other property offenses, changes in the value of stolen goods, offenses that co-occur with shoplifting and the number of people involved in each incident."
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