Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They're wrong

>Are you really so focused on just this one sort of crime, or does your opinion extend equally to all other crimes?

In the US, there are thousands of crimes on the books, which are not enforced and are ridiculous [1]. So no, I do not think that all crimes should be punished.

>So why must all shoplifting by punished, with the police doing most of the work at the store?

This is a loaded question. I don't think the police should be doing most of the work at the store, but I think the police should take the apprehended criminals from the store when called. And DAs should prosecute those, and the judges should try them, that's all. Nothing of this happens right now. This is why stores do not try to apprehend criminals as the same police, DA and judges will happily go after the business and its employees if the criminal is hurt in the process or claims to be hurt[2].

1. https://www.distractify.com/p/ridiculous-laws

2. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/us/new-york-bodega-stabbing-m...

You seem to be hung up with something I did not say.

I am fully aware that tax avoidance is legal. My Dad taught me the key part of Gregory v. Helvering when I was about 12 - "the legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted."

1) I described "loopholes" in this context as a completely legal way to reduce the amount of taxes paid, so of course it can mean to pay taxes.

The term as I described it is quite common. Wikipedia uses it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance in "Other multinationals, such as Apple for example, also exploit fiscal loopholes, diverting profits from high tax countries into others with lower corporate tax rates." -- Apple exercised their right to use a loophole to pay lower taxes. Not illegal, and yes, the still paid taxes.

This isn't reddit, I am not a redditor, I don't know reddit vocabulary, so don't use your reddit blinders when you read what I wrote.

2) I said that larger organizations have greater ability to use said completely legal and economically justified loopholes (I gave two such examples).

3) As a result, when measured by tax revenue per acre instead of tax revenue per entity like you suggest, big box stores bring in less than other forms of retail -- and sometimes even negative tax revenue if infrastructure costs are fully included. (I provided sources).

4) Thus, if tax revenue guides where local government should direct tax money, they should give less support to big box stores than, for example, downtown retail shopping.

Since I meant to be serious, and not present a sophomoric straw man, let's narrow things down to a specific example I gave:

Which should police investigate more - shoplifting from Walmart or wage theft at Walmart, and why?

My question is meant to probe what goes into your decision to prioritize investigating two related types of crime which can both take place at Walmart. It is meant to be more head-to-head than jliptzin's series of questions early in this thread "Someone want to explain to me why my tax dollars should go towards protecting target and Walgreen’s inventory? When they have one security guard in their entire store? When police could instead be spending that time finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away?".

How is your [2] at all related to shoplifting? It feels like you are trying to raise the emotional level by switching to manslaughter.

This alternative topic has consumed endless discussion over the years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo... and https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-16-860403... from the 1980s as two examples. NYC has had a long time to refine how to handle something like your [2], and there is no way it makes sense to discuss it futher here.

> I don't think the police should be doing most of the work at the store, but I think the police should take the apprehended criminals from the store when called.

Right, but the top-level topic centers more about Target is locking things up, and how shoplifters can grab-and-run, and why Walgreens seems to only have "one security guard in their entire store".

Larger companies already expect "shrink" (theft by employees and customers) and factor it into their calculations of how much staff to have, how much security to have, the effect of locking up particular items, the use of self-checkout vs. cashiers, etc. They have long ago figured out how to maximize profit in the face of shoplifting.

In your terms, Walmart already allows crime to go unpunished because they don't want to spend enough to identify those crimes.

The police response - no matter how good! - is rather useless if over-worked employees don't notice the shoplifting so never contact the police, or if the police physically can't arrive until many minutes after the thieves have left.

Low wage employees of large companies, as a general rule, do not get paid to risk bodily harm to stop thieves. Your [2] is a rare exception, ... and also not an employee of a large company.

In general discussion, the argument is the city should direct the police to do more to help prevent shoplifting. Which means the big companies will go to their spreadsheets and figure out how to spend even less money on security and staff, ending up with more profit as the government ends up subsidizing their security.

Please read https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2021/02/11/how-mixed-use-de... again. The emphasis should not be "major tax payers" because that puts the thumb on the balance in favor of big box stores.

It should be on tax revenue per acre, which for Carmel resulted in a 10x improvement over big box stores on greenfield sites, for reasons given in that link.

Your "major tax payers" needs further qualifiers. If the major tax payer is a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, that's far different than if it's a big box store.

Why? The evidence is that Walmart "absorb retail sales from nearby stores without significantly expanding the market." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08912424124579...

Lose a Walmart and other stores will make up for it, because the demand is there.

> Not to mention it's illegal: one is still entitled to the protection of law even when not paying any taxes,

Well that's a non sequitur. I don't have a clue what you are talking about. Can you point to a relevant court case?

When I set up a public-facing web server, I take every precaution to make theft of my data (and my customers) as difficult as possible for thieves. Firewalls, frequent security patches, defensive programming, etc. Walmart and others seem to do the opposite. They fire cashiers and install self checkout lanes that are so hard to use that even honest people end up shoplifting accidentally, I can’t even imagine how much theft dishonest people are able to get away with. They have the antitheft alarms at the exits but whenever they go off, 90% of the time there’s no security guard to deal with it or employees just don’t care. So, it’s clear they don’t take it seriously.

I don’t run my servers on Windows XP and allow anyone in the world to connect on any port and leave my database open with no authentication controls and then complain when the police aren’t arresting every person who is stealing my data.