The article says prosecutors don't go after these thefts but I'd think the issue is with the cops and the number of arrests. After the BLM protests of 2020 (George Floyd) cops basically went hands off on these so called minor crimes, and so I'd imagine many of them don't even make it to prosecutors. We'd need a graph of incidents and arrests for years prior to 2020 (or months in early vs late 2020) to see the change.
The article claims that the BLM protests made little difference, and include a graph of various states comparing the amount of shoplifting with the amount of prosecution. Generally there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between states with large BLM protests and reduced prosecution.
For example, Oregon had huge protests and weak government responses, and yet prosecutes large amounts of shoplifting.
Blaming this on the response to BLM seems intuitive, but I have yet to see data that supports it.
There were not protests state wide, they were in a single county, the one in which shoplifting isn't prosecuted as much. A couple miles away, with different DAs, you will get arrested and prosecuted for even very minor theft.
> Unseating [Washington Co DA] Barton has been a priority for national progressive groups funding criminal justice reform in Oregon.
> “Washington County is the most extreme county I’ve ever worked in, and that’s because of the tough on crime, war on drugs, lock 'em up and throw away the key fanaticism coming from the DA’s office,” Decker said.
This is the person responsible for a 93% prosecution rate, being re-elected on the basis of "law and order" and relatively conservative viewpoints, backlash against the BLM protest responses that you talk about.
As others have said, aggregating at the state level makes no sense.
For example, in Austin, TX, I can't speak for retail crimes in particular but there has most definitely been a change in prosecuting other crimes. Hit-and-runs are an epidemic now in the city, primarily because the police won't even respond unless there is a major injury. I was in a hit and run, I got a detailed description of the car and license plate, and yet there were 0 consequences to the person that hit me. It actually makes more sense to run if you hit someone because there are literally no downsides (except for people with a conscience, of course).
But if you looked across TX as a whole, this data would definitely not show up.
My point is that you can have a democrat city abdicating law enforcement in a republican state. What matters for local crime is the city, not the wider state.
False. Law enforcement has many layers with concurrent jurisdiction. It’s not just city. How each jurisdiction polices can vary widely depending on where you are.
That depends on how rigorous their work was. If they did a good job, that would be a major career boost and would likely get them tenure. If they did a flawed but plausible sounding job, they’d likely get a book deal and could become a fixture on conservative media which would pay more but would limit the places they get tenure.
People love simple explanations. BLM obviously wasn't a causal factor, but general mayhem/disorder certainly facilitated things like shoplifting. There were a lot of people doing what sublime did back in '92 [1].
In Chicago there has been a dramatic drop off: the arrest rate for retail theft went from 43%-54% in 2016-2019 to 18% in 2021 and the number of cases brought to Chicago police has dropped from 8986-10792/year to 6166.
As a Chicago resident I’d say it’s mostly “quite quitting” by cops. You never see them working anymore, and the people I’ve talked to about their experience with police basically all say that they never even showed up, and if they did they refused to even fill out a report.
The union even officially called for work stoppages due to vaccine mandates.
> The article says prosecutors don't go after these thefts
the article says that was speculated but not borne out by the data.
> What is behind this unwelcome rise? Some speculated that prosecutors had gone soft on looting after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But it is hard to see any such trend in the data: generally states with more shoplifting prosecute more shoplifters (see chart).
As stated in another comment, the articles claim makes no sense. More shoplifting = more prosecuting has nothing to do with there having been a change after some event. There could still be a linear relationship between incidents and prosecutions, but a lower line after George Floyd. Specifically, a single cross sectional data point cannot prove anything about a time series or a claim about it.
Has the number of cops shooting people actually decreased?
Considering that they've never even looked for a bicycle, which is many times more expensive than a stick of deodorant, I'm seriously doubtful that they've ever have been hands on for these thefts.
