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Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

wsj.com

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Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#241

Post by avalys »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #227
JackFr wrote: post #13

Mods, please correct headline. This hardly a story about Amazon. It's a story of how Northern California's choice not to prosecute theft has resulted in a massive increase in criminal activity. That CVS has to privately hire security in the face of $10 million/year of goods being brazenly looted out of its stores has little to do with any Amazon policy and more to do with the policies adopted by local district attorn…

> choice not to prosecute theft Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. "The judicial branch of California explains on its page about Prop 47 that the new law “reclassifies certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.” Thanks to Prop 47, shoplifting offenses involving property valued at less than $950 are prosecuted as misdemeanors, not felonies, but they are still prosecuted. Such offenses are punisha…

That's nice. Now, tell me, how many misdemeanor thefts has the San Francisco County DA actually prosecuted since he's been in office?

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#242

Post by haOk »

Corporations don’t want to pay taxes so they can be rich in the first place, now they’re mad what tax dollars there are won’t be spent on them?

WSJ is manufacturing consent to smack talk government.

If they don’t owe paying taxes, the public does not owe them public services.

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#243

Post by MichaelZuo »

josephcsible wrote: post #151
gryz wrote: post #126

Could a setup like with Amazon Go stores help here? Let in only customers with a verified account.

The shoplifter gangs will just jump over the turnstiles. I imagine any store impervious to this attack wouldn't meet fire safety requirements.

Huh? Have you never seen turnstiles with tall plastic barriers? It would take quite a lot of strength to jump over 4–5 feet.

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#244

Post by coderintherye »

rayiner wrote: post #240
kevinpet wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm concerned about lawlessness, but if the only alternative is that $950 theft is a _felony_ that's messed up. This seems more like a case of not being able to deal with crime than lax sentencing.

Nobody will risk prison for $950 of stuff. If you make it basically a ticket, then you can easily get dozens of people to be able to steal a meaningful amount of stuff.

This is patently false, do you think people didn't go to prison prior to the law change? In fact, so many people were risking prison time for petty theft that is what led to enacting the law in first place to deal with the overcrowding in the state prison system, as summed up in this layman article: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#245

Post by YuriNiyazov »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #227
JackFr wrote: post #13

Mods, please correct headline. This hardly a story about Amazon. It's a story of how Northern California's choice not to prosecute theft has resulted in a massive increase in criminal activity. That CVS has to privately hire security in the face of $10 million/year of goods being brazenly looted out of its stores has little to do with any Amazon policy and more to do with the policies adopted by local district attorn…

> choice not to prosecute theft Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. "The judicial branch of California explains on its page about Prop 47 that the new law “reclassifies certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.” Thanks to Prop 47, shoplifting offenses involving property valued at less than $950 are prosecuted as misdemeanors, not felonies, but they are still prosecuted. Such offenses are punisha…

It doesn't matter what the judicial branch says on paper. What matters is the process. In California, the decision to prosecute a misdemeanor must happen within 24 hours of that misdemeanor happening, otherwise it won't be pursued? Reclassifying something as a misdemeanor, when combined with other policy choices around misdemeanors, means that a fraction of them are actually prosecuted. So, you get your facts straight, please.

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#246

Post by amanaplanacanal »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #74
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you got any videos of statistical trends or other evidence that what you believe is actually true? Or are we just working from viral anecdata?

> According to federal data, adults with substance-abuse disorders make up just 2.6 percent of the total population but 72 percent of all jail inmates sentenced for property crimes. Addicts are 29 times more likely to commit property crimes than the average American. Furthermore, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics found, “[39 percent of jail inmates] held for property offenses said they committed the crime for money…

Just one more reason why we should be providing legal drugs to addicts, instead of feeding the enormous black market.

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#247

Post by bsanr2 »

bko wrote: post #3

> The target was no ordinary shoplifter. He was part of a network of organized professionals, known as boosters, whom CVS had been monitoring for weeks. The company believed the group responsible for stealing almost $50 million in products over five years from dozens of stores in Northern California. The story isn't about people selling stolen goods on Amazon. It's about organized theft operations. One way to stop th…

Not to downplay the seriousness of theft, but there's something to be said about the scale. A few people working in an uncoordinated fashion is a crime problem; a structured group essentially working in symbiosis with a retailer's systems (and its blindspots) sounds more like a system design issue on the community and company level. Why do these people need or even want to steal so much? How can a company sustain these kinds of losses? It seems like there are inefficiencies to consider from several vantage points.

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#248

Post by fortran77 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #100
kneel wrote: post #48

Going to CVS is a timesink now that I have to walk around and ask employees to open cases for me. Why can't they use vending machines?

Hang on, we’ve had literally thousands of years with stores where you could pick up an item and run away, but don’t. There is now are organized shoplifting crime groups, and your solution is to design specialized vending machines for teeth whitening strips, phone chargers, etc? I’m not saying it is a net good to deploy violence on poor people. But don’t you suppose that society would benefit overall if there were phy…

These aren't "poor people." They make a good tax-free living from stealing.

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#249

Post by bsanr2 »

j_walter wrote: post #141
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, did the multi-decade drop in American crime, regularly discussed by academics who have some tentative theories to explain it, happen or was it all faked? https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...

That was real and everyone can agree on that based on what they see as well as the data. However you can't go to a single SF neighborhood and find people that think crime has dropped recently. There are boatloads of articles about people having their cars broken into so often they leave them unlocked because replacing windows was so expensive. Videos of people shoplifting while security stands by and does nothing bec…

No one considers that perhaps ever-increasing inequality in the Bay Area has also increased both the incentive to commit crime and the disincentive to prosecute it. It would stand to reason that the people who are desperate would be more desperate than ever, while the people who are well-off would be more able to eat the costs than ever. No one is happy but the dynamic is grotesquely sustainable.

Re: Retailers are spending millions to combat organized theft from stores

#250

Post by kmstout »

babyshake wrote: post #105
floren wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SF city government seems to have realized that there's another way to make crime "go down": refuse to prosecute for anything, ideally make it pointless for the cops to even show up, until people stop bothering to report crime. Wow, shoplifting is at record lows!

In The Wire, this is called juking the stats.

"Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels."

--Prez

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