"Organised retail crime gangs are behind a shoplifting spike."
Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
501–510 of 763 posts
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ooooooooohhhhhhh!! So I steal some consumer goods, put them in individual boxes, send them to Amazon warehouse and they distribute for me. I simply never put that together. But surely Amazon is literally handling stolen goods? Is there a smoking gun email?
> But surely Amazon is literally handling stolen goods? Is there a smoking gun email? If Amazon were a mom and pop fence, the local cops could bust them in a sting. But Amazon is a huge megacorp, so even if the cops try to catch them in a sting nothing will stick because Amazon will claim their shear scale rendered them completely oblivious to everything and therefore not criminally culpable. Yeah, it's bullshit.
I mean, RICO was designed for this sort of use case. But Amazon does have lucrative deals with the intelligence community.
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without American cop show bluster, without pretrial detention except for serious crimes, and without lengthy prison sentences.
Mostly, except pretrial detention for minor crimes is unfortunately still not that uncommon in Europe. The lack of bail often makes this worse, a weird obsession with “fairness” forces us to continue locking up people with sufficient assets to insure against absconding. Poor people can’t afford bail? Better make everyone else suffer too.
It is unfair indeed. A fair solution would be to improve conditions for everyone so that they can live in comfortable conditions before trial.
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some societies do better than others at stopping crime too. Can we set our bar to match Singapore in that respect?
I actually wrote another comment in this thread about Singapore [1]. The subway there was particularly interesting to me. While the New York media has used subway deaths to drum up support for police, Singapore has entirely solved the root problem in a non-carceral way by investing in infrastructure. Plenty of other countries have done the same, actually. The knee-jerk response of adding more cops actually makes soci…
I would have thought Singapore had more policing in all respects versus US cities.
Also the subway stories are probably more about general fear of whatever criminals are apparently lurking down there. It can get kind of scary in the subway when it's deserted. especially Upper Manhattan where it's so deep down. Meanwhile when I travel in developed Asian cities, it's not scary at all. Just really really crowded.
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just a database of serial numbers .
A database of serial numbers alone wouldn't be sufficient. Counterfeiters frequently copy real serial numbers and print them on fake products. There are more effective means such as tamper resistant RFID tags, but those aren't cost effective for cheap items. And often no one bothers to check anyway.
I think serial numbers would be enough to stop the vast majority of people selling stolen items.
It would require companies to track serial numbers that go into the store, and serial numbers of items put on shelves, or otherwise legally leave the store. After a while, it'll be clear which items & serial numbers were legelly sold vs. stolen. And, to address the original point, copied stolen serial numbers still aren't any good.
The serial numbers of stolen items get reported to the authorities and/or Amazon, and it becomes their legal problem. As another post in this thread poins out, pawn shops have to do something similar to check for stolen items. So there is some sort of legal framework in place.
Im not saying that this should be i plemented or anything, I'm just trying to say that individual serial numbers might work. It will not be easy to implement, and cost money. But so does rampant theft. Maybe it's worth pursuing.
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
So on the one side I see news reports of dozens of cases of serial shoplifting offenders out on the streets, and the NYC DA informing his staff and letting the public know that if you steal less than $500 you will not go to jail. But you're claiming that the DA actually intended to send them to jail. So he was baiting them to commit the crime? I don't buy it. And you're claiming that his prosecutors have no discretio…
I am speaking of the perspective of having seen about 200 cases of this type in the last few years (this is a moderately low sample size among practitioners) in the place in question and from having discussed the issue with colleagues who have more experience than that over longer time periods in the same place. You are free to disregard my "word of mouth" claim in favor of an elected prosecutor's press releases and…
You are only seeing the cases that make it to the courthouse, right? How many shoplifting events are ignored, missed, or otherwise let off before things make it that far? OK, there is no discretion on the cases they allow into court but there is a hell of a lot of discretion before things get to that point.
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#507I'd wondered if someone figured out how to turn deodorant into meth, since they started protecting it like Sudafed even after Sudafed was removed from the Sudafed boxes sold as Sudafed (phenylphrine is not pseudoephedrine and is not effective). Sudafed, baby formula, deodorant, and razor blades, together could sound like a Jesse Pinkman shopping list before he found a high school chemistry teacher to help him. At the…
> phenylphrine is not pseudoephedrine and is not effective This is a scientific fact supported by all the research. And yet for some reason the FDA approved it as effective.
you don't say!
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#508It just so happened my wife and I were in a CVS (a US pharmacy chain) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (think pooches inside Gucci bags), and I wanted to get a Deodorant. We had to call the staff to unlock small pigeon hole after another just to see what was written on the labels. As always it is not just one thing - the lady that came to help us was in a Hijab and was studying medicine and was helping her parents…
No post body was provided.
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like the organized retail theft (gangs of people robbing a store) cracked down on, but in general I'd prefer a softer touch on general petty shop lifting. These are different things, with different motivations, and cracking down on someone stealing because they have nothing doesn't actually prevent that from happening more (you need to address the underlying issue). The organized crime, however, should be harshly…
Although I generally agree there's little positive effect from harshly punishing very petty thieves, saying "address the underlying issue" is a major cop-out basically indicating you have no interest in fixing anything. What do you think the "underlying issue" is? Drug abuse? Lack of education? Paucity of low-skill jobs? Not enough affordable housing? Discrimination? Lack of opportunities for ex-prisoners? Inflation?…
It's not a cop-out, it's exactly how other countries have eliminated this problem.
The US is the largest incarcerator in the world, yet it still has these problems. Your suggestion is that we can imprison our way out of this, but prison makes people poorer, in some cases permanently, which ultimately makes the problem worse.
Re: Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
#510443 comments as I write this. I searched for the word "boost" and "Fentanyl" and was surprised that neither word had been mentioned. There is another engine driving this phenomenon: addicts "boosting" to feed their addiction. Drug use is another crime that society seems uninterested in prosecuting or punishing as of late. Add illicitly manufactured Fentanyl (1) to that recipe and you have an absolute onslaught of ret…
We already tried this. It was called The War on Drugs and it failed totally, completely and unambiguously. If there's one thing to understand about the last 60 years of United States drug criminalization and enforcement, it's that those policies have utterly failed to curb drug abuse and addiction. There are a mind-boggling number of studies which show that criminalizing drug use doesn't create fewer drug addicts.
What is a better solution?