New York City is having a bit of trouble with repeat retail crime offenders, but Mayor Eric Adams’ latest soft-on-crime approach to solving the problem is downright laughable.
You’ve all seen the videos — a number of punks barge into a store at once, grab whatever they can, and then flee the scene. Here’s an example of what that looks like:
Per Fox 5, retail theft in general jumped 44% in 2022 in NYC. The crisis is so bad that Adams even mandated that masks should be taken off to enter stores — the opposite of the COVID days — to help reduce this sort of crime.
It apparently didn’t work because now he has a new plan, one that he says is top-notch.
“Last year alone, 327 repeat offenders were responsible for 30 percent of the more than 22,000 retail thefts across our city, ” Adams said this week. “This hurt our businesses, our workers, our customers, and our city.”
That’s putting it mildly, Adams, but let’s hear what this plan does.
“This plan will help us invest in diversion programs and in underlying factors leading to retail theft, work upstream to stop some of the factors leading to a crime before one takes place, trains retail workers in de-escalation tactics and security best practices, and takes numerous actions to increase necessary enforcement against repeat shoplifters and deter organized crime rings perpetrating these thefts,” he said.
Wow, based on that you might expect the Big Apple to be returning to its days of broken-window policies, stop-and-frisk, and other tough-on-crime methods. Nope, you’d be wrong to expect that.
According to Fox 5, the plan “includes giving first-time offenders intervention programs instead of prosecution, de-escalation training for retail employees, establishing neighborhood retail watch groups to share information about a theft in real-time with one another and the police, and installing kiosks in stores to connect would-be thieves with social service programs.”
What sort of criminal, intent on stealing everything and anything he can, would stop and say, “Hey, look, a kiosk. I think I’ll get a pamphlet.”
Ralph Cilento, a retired NYPD Lieutenant Commander of Detectives and adjunct professor, also wasn’t very impressed with the strategy.
“So when people come in that were just about to steal, they won’t because they realize that stealing is a source of a different problem for them. So they’re going to use the kiosk to access social services,” Cilento told the local Fox affiliate. “I’m sorry, but that’s just a pipe dream. And that is he’s doing that specifically to satisfy his liberal base, which I understand he has to do.”
And Cilento hit the nail on the head with that last part. Despite the Democrats’ insistence that they support the police as well as law and order, they know that if they ever put in the policies needed to stop this problem, then the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s of the world would protest to no end. So the best they can offer is a kiosk, a slap on the wrist, and training for innocent store employees.
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