Retail Crime Is Becoming Harder to See
When Shoplifting Falls, Where Does the Loss Go?

By the D&D Daily Staff

After years of rising theft numbers, retailers received some encouraging news this summer: shoplifting appears to be moving in the other direction.

The National Retail Federation's 2026 Impact of Retail Theft & Violence report found that responding retailers experienced an average 12.4% decline in shoplifting incidents and an 8.1% decline in merchandise theft incidents between 2024 and 2025.

But those numbers don't necessarily mean the broader retail crime problem is shrinking.

While traditional shoplifting declined, retailers reported increases in several other forms of external theft and fraud. Among respondents, 69% reported increases in phone scams, 51% in loyalty fraud and 42% in gift card theft or fraud. Half also reported increased repeat-offender activity, while 40% reported an increase in ORC-related events.

That creates an important challenge for loss prevention teams: some forms of loss may increasingly occur without merchandise simply walking out the front door.

Today's retail environment stretches across stores, ecommerce platforms, loyalty programs, gift cards, distribution networks and customer-service channels. Each creates potential vulnerabilities, and organized groups can operate across several of them.

NRF describes the trend as an evolution in criminal tactics, with organized groups increasingly exploiting both physical and digital environments. The findings do not establish that declining shoplifting is directly causing increases in other types of fraud. They do, however, demonstrate why retailers can't rely on shoplifting numbers alone to assess their exposure to external crime.

For AP leaders, that could mean taking a broader view of what constitutes retail crime intelligence. Store incidents remain important, but so do suspicious transactions, fraudulent calls, loyalty activity, gift card patterns and supply chain events that may reveal connections invisible at the individual-store level.

Declining shoplifting is a positive development. But the changing numbers also offer a reminder for the industry: a quieter sales floor doesn't necessarily mean there are fewer threats.

Some of the loss may simply be becoming harder to see.


Carrier Vetting Battles Cargo Theft
Carrier verification: who's really hauling your freight?

The rise of strategic cargo theft and freight fraud has raised the stakes for carrier vetting

Such high-value cargo thefts and acts of identity fraud are increasing in number and sophistication, putting pressure on freight brokers and other industry players to strengthen their carrier vetting practices.

To protect their freight, transportation businesses are implementing continuous verification, monitoring and layered security approaches rather than traditional onboarding checks alone.

“The key is you’ve got to follow the process every single time,” said Chris Burroughs, president and CEO of the Transportation Intermediaries Association.

He noted the rise of technology companies offering carrier vetting support and pointed out that they, too, can vary in their approaches, using different algorithms and data points.

The vetting platforms verify different kinds of information, such as banking details, motor carrier numbers and commercial driver licenses, said Keith Lewis, vice president of operations for Verisk CargoNet.

“Even if you put all those solutions together, you still may not be able to prevent a theft,” Lewis said.

A layered approach that combines vetting platforms, telematics and alerts is needed to prevent theft and recover stolen cargo, he added.

When a logistics company partnering with Verisk CargoNet falls victim to fraud or theft, that company can issue an intelligence alert, Lewis said, naming the entity whose identity appears to have become cover for cargo thieves.

The speed of freight transactions and the industry’s long-held trust in email relationships can allow several loads to be diverted before detection, Lewis and others said. In its cargo theft analysis covering the second quarter of this year, Verisk CargoNet said business email continued to be the main means of access for many sophisticated schemes. ttnews.com


America's Property Crime Leader?
Report: District of Columbia tops national property crime rates
The District of Columbia, New Mexico and Colorado topped the list for the highest property crime rate in the United States, according to a new report.

The Hirsch Law Group compiled 2024 FBI data across all 50 states and the District of Columbia to determine where criminal activity is surging. The District of Columbia recorded 6,982 property crime cases per 100,000 residents, with the most common offense being theft or larceny.

New Mexico followed in second place with 4,946 property crime cases per 100,000 people. Colorado was in third with 4,080 cases per 100,000 residents.

The report considered three categories of criminal activity: crimes against persons, property crimes and crimes against society. Tennessee was the only state to land in the top ten for all three categories, earning fifth for crimes against persons, fifth for crimes against society and ninth for property crimes

In the District of Columbia, assault accounted for 21,437 of its 22,320 offenses against persons. In D.C., there were 3,178 incidents of crimes against people per 100,000 residents, topping the national leaderboard.

Since President Donald Trump was elected, he has spent considerable effort cracking down on crime in the District of Columbia.

Since the crackdown, crime in the city has reportedly gone down. The Metropolitan Police Department reports overall crime has fallen 20% in the last year, with motor vehicle thefts down 53% and, robbery down 16%, and total property crime down 22%. wfmz.com


Crime Data Is Finally Becoming Clearer
How The Crime Data Battle Was Won
It’s 2026 and the drop in murder seems like it is barely news. The trend itself has been happening for nearly four years at this point, so it certainly is not new, but there is also so, so, so much more crime data available now than there was just a few years ago that the old complaints about the slowness of knowing crime trends are no longer valid.

The 2025 crime trends didn’t make as much news because they weren’t really news. The first thought that came to my mind, as someone who thinks about these things, was that the crime data battle has been won.

Here’s how: I started collecting crime data from cities that published it in 2015 when I noticed a sample of big-city data could predict national trends within a few percentage points. This entire endeavor was only possible because of the Obama administration launching the Police Data Initiative earlier that year.

The NIBRS transition doesn’t just mean we’re now able to collect data on a wider swath of crimes than under the old Summary Reporting System. It also forced thousands of agencies and scores of states to modernize their crime data collection and reporting systems.

Now, thanks to the NIBRS transition, there are states reporting weekly and even daily data to the FBI rather than waiting until April of next year to report it. This isn’t quite baseball’s Statcast for crime but it’s an incredible advancement in just a few years.

The second major leap came from the FBI itself. In August of last year the FBI began publishing monthly data updates through its Crime Data Explorer. These updates are incomplete — in that not every agency reports each month — and they are unaudited. But if you understand the drawbacks in the monthly updates you can appreciate the incredible beauty in having all of this data suddenly available. jasher.substack.com


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