311–320 of 351 posts
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"They were robbing the store, and I think one of them had a machine gun!"
"i think they had some counterfeit $100 bills as well"
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An option not available to small businesses, as the shoplifters have no doubt already learned. Another hidden tilting of the playing field against small business.
So will we see a startup: Uber for alternative policing to whom small retailers submit surveilance camera footage, and expect a series of crimes to be merged into a single case?
retail theft accounts for around
$45 billion in annual losses
Anyhow. Another 45 billion reasons ecommerce and crypto currencies will grow.
You cannot steal a product from a website. And you cannot make fake payments with Bitcoin.
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Followed by a smug article decrying the entire situation from some smug blogger.
Not usually the entire situation - usually just lamenting greedy corporate fatcats rather than the literal inability to maintain a business based on the margins, volume, and shrinkage.
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In your opinion, did the multi-decade drop in American crime, regularly discussed by academics who have some tentative theories to explain it, happen or was it all faked? https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
murders are hard to fake. The rest of crime data is more subjective than people realize. I was robbed at gunpoint for 1$. I did not report the crime.
I would not be surprised if the murder rate reduction is significantly attributable to changes in statistical reporting. I know a few cities that play games with the numbers even on murders.
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Unintentional consequences of the California three strikes law perhaps? Prosecutors unwilling to hand out mandatory 25 year sentences for petty theft?
This is not how the three-strike law works. You don't get a life sentence for petty theft. Under Penal Code section 667(e), you can receive a life term if you are convicted of a serious or violent felony AND you have twice before been convicted of serious and violent felonies. See https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/us/california-convicts-ar...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-archives-steven-bell-the-bic...
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One of my observations coming from Bangladesh, where policing is pretty inadequate, is that criminal law is really there to prevent the growth of organized crime. So you have to think about crime as a system not in terms of individuals. Harsh punishment may not deter a given criminal. But it may well make it hard to recruit dozens of low level people to engage in low value illegal activity that adds up to something s…
That doesn't seem to be working so well with drugs. We've filled prisons with people engaged in low level illegal activity but we don't seem to have made any dent in illegal drugs. In fact, probably the opposite.
On the other hand the reality is that there is a limited supply of drug users. Demand side enforcement could end the "war" quickly.
Enforcement of sellers is dumb, people selling drugs isn't the problem. It's their usage that's what we want to stop so the enforcement should be on that side.
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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!
Corporations want taxes cut to nothing and complain when the public doesn’t want to protect their private property. Funny how that works. I notice it’s WSJ complaining. More “government is inept” sentiment to justify private armies.
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In the US, we generally have "Shopkeeper's privilege", which lets shopkeepers detain a person reasonably suspected of shoplifting while an investigation happens. Usually that involves just calling the police, or taking their picture and telling them they're banned for life, and then letting them go.
I think GP knows shopkeeper's privilege exists and is asking why stores often don't let their employees use it.
> 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…
The fact that Amazon will fence stolen goods for a thief is absolutely part of the story. Used to be a whole criminal enterprise to be able to make money off of stolen goods. Now, anyone can start shoplifting and turn that into cash through FBA. If you can find someone selling something for cheaper, you can turn around and sell it online via Amazon FBA. Turns out, stealing is a great way to drive down costs (assuming…