The Law-abiding & Lawbreaking Know - "Cops Aren’t Coming to the Rescue"

Not Your Father’s Shoplifters

Criminals get bolder as American cities abandon broken-windows policing.

In U.S. cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, shoplifting has become an epidemic. The question is what’s worse: the brazenness of theft today or how what was once unthinkable is now considered unstoppable.

Thieves no longer need to hide their behavior. Today the shops themselves forbid staff to try to stop shoplifters.

At the same time, shoplifting has grown sophisticated. Smash-and-grab mobs overwhelm store employees and leave with garbage bags full of merchandise. Organized criminal enterprises recruit drug addicts to do the actual stealing and then sell the stolen goods on platforms such as eBay.

It’s all a product of a growing social dysfunction born of the abandonment of broken-windows policing. Broken windows originated in a 1982 article for the Atlantic magazine by James Q. Wilson of Harvard and George L. Kelling of Rutgers. They argued that if you sweat the small stuff that really makes city residents feel unsafe (aggressive panhandling, public urination, petty crime), you’ll catch problems before they metastasize. Their metaphor was the broken window.

“If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired,” they wrote, “all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” Broken windows are “a signal that no one cares”—an emboldening message for those who would commit serious crimes.

Though broken windows revolutionized policing and transformed New York into America’s safest big city, it has since come under attack. Many conflate it with a “zero tolerance” approach, or with stop and frisk, which is a tactic. Although imposing consequences for lawbreaking is a critical component of broken windows, its real aim was to restore public order by giving police and local authorities more discretion.

Since then we have unlearned most of its lessons. Quality-of-life offenses—e.g., treating the sidewalk like a toilet or sleeping in the streets—are no longer enforced. California, like others, raised the felony threshold for theft to $950, and “reforms” such as eliminating cash bail for many crimes let thieves back on the streets.

But to view shoplifting solely in dollars and cents, or as mere “property crime,” is a mistake. For one thing, the human costs of store closings are enormous: employees lose jobs and benefits, customers lose access to quality goods at affordable prices, and neighborhoods suffer the loss of the tax revenue and vibrancy that healthy businesses bring.

The epidemic of shoplifting is only one part of today’s urban dysfunction. There are many other proxies, from routine subway fare-jumping to the homeless retaking our streets and the discarded drug needles that litter our parks. The law-abiding and lawbreaking alike know that the cops aren’t coming to the rescue.

That lawlessness has become routine speaks to the inability of authorities to distinguish between predators and victims. When a 61-year-old Harlem bodega worker stabbed a 35-year-old ex-con in self-defense, he was charged with second-degree murder and chucked into Rikers Island jail. That is, until a public backlash led the district attorney to drop all charges.

Shortly before Kelling died in 2019, I asked him about the New York’s scaling-back of broken-windows policing. He said it was fine to “pull back on a few things” in response to changed circumstances, but the risk was that people would see others behaving badly and copy them. “You don’t know where the tipping point is.”

I think we’ve found it.  wsj.com