Outside Manhattan Criminal Court last week, Brooklyn Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher called the scourge of shoplifting that’s set in over the past decade the result of “crimes of poverty, people who are stealing things like toothpaste . . . And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them.”
It’s hard to know which would be worse: that Gallagher isn’t aware that shoplifting is a gang-led, bulk-fencing scheme that costs jobs and that can escalate to deadly violence — or that she doesn’t care.
The criminals responsible for a disproportionate percentage of New York City retail theft aren’t driven by hunger (or by a desire for clean teeth).
They are repeat actors — people who steal and sell stolen goods for a living, or people who steal to support drug habits.
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 “engage[d] in shoplifting as a trade,” and others “driven by addiction or mental illness.”
Liberals don’t get it
Criminal rings help small-scale thieves resell their goods — at pawn shops, at bodegas and online.
In 2023, The New Yorker profiled a beneficiary of New York’s supportive-housing network, who resold stolen goods online to make a little extra cash.
That’s common: Open-air markets around the city regularly feature stolen toiletries for sale.
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.
This year’s tally of reported petit larcenies — 60,003 through early August — is 5% below last year’s, yes.
But it remains close to a quarter higher than the norm between the early 2000s and 2017 — 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.
That’s partly because people who shoplift don’t go to jail: fewer than nine percent of Rikers Island’s current inmates are in on any misdemeanor charge.
Gallagher, a democratic socialist who supports such lenience, doesn’t acknowledge what regular New Yorkers know: Mass shoplifting also harms regular people, making it harder to go to the store and pay for stuff.
As that well-known right-wing pundit Al Sharpton put it in 2022 when he discussed the “out-of-control” crime rise, “They’re locking up my toothpaste.”
The fact that you can’t easily buy mouthwash from the store anymore means fewer people work at the drugstores — as they’re losing business to Amazon.
As of June, 37,400 New Yorkers worked at “health and personal care” retailers — that is, drugstores — a full 10,500 people below the 2017 level.
That’s a loss of 22% of such jobs, when the nation as a whole has shed only 5% of jobs in that category.
And the supposedly “non-violent” crime of shoplifting can escalate.
In 2023 a CVS security guard, Scotty Enoe, tried to stop a thief at a Times Square store, only to be attacked.
Enoe stabbed the criminal, Charles Brito, in self-defense — and though DA Alvin Bragg tried to lock him up for manslaughter, a Manhattan jury acquitted him.
The state legislature in which Gallagher serves could have prevented this death: Brito was a serial shoplifter with more than a dozen prior arrests.
Just last fall, a Morton Williams guard in Hell’s Kitchen tried to stop a beer thief — and lost his life grappling with the perp.
Insult to poor people
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’s fact-free insistence that stealing toothpaste is a crime of poverty is an insult to poor people.
Most poor people don’t steal.
Thieves do — and they steal more when they think they can get away with it, thanks to progressivism’s misplaced pieties.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
