Hamburglar shows truth of mass shoplifting — it’s not about poor, it’s about money-making thieves
A man brazenly swiped a whole aisle worth of steaks at a Trader Joe's on East 14th Street in Manhattan If shoplifting is a crime of poverty, now an article of progressive faith, how come shoplifters tend to hit the high-end shelves?
How come Steak Guy departed Trader Joe’s Tuesday with 10 packages of fine eatin’ — rather than, say, 10 cans of Spam? The Spam would be easier to handle, no? (Not that luxury-label Trader Joe’s would carry it, but you get the point.) How come when the locusts descend on the ice cream freezer at the local Rite Aid, the Ben & Jerry’s seems always to go first?
And why is it that the craft beer is carted off, but rarely the low-end brews?
Easy. Because the bodegas that are fencing the goods aren’t interested in canned meat, off-brand ice cream or skunky beer. They want the good stuff. And now things have gotten so bad that even Al Sharpton is torqued.
While there’s always more to a story than the obvious, conceptually this is not astrophysics: When bodegas are buying, and with law enforcement is taking a bye, why wouldn’t addled or addicted unemployables rush to serve the market? And not always addled, addicted unemployables. Many thieves are not poor in any exculpatory sense of the word — but merely opportunists after easy bucks.
And the slow-motion urban looting that’s been stripping bare retail shelves nationally, and across the five boroughs, is just such an opportunity. It started in Manhattan with a few pints of ice cream — and when thieves realized that the cops didn’t care, and that the stores themselves wouldn’t push back, it escalated.
“They come in every day, sometimes twice a day, with laundry bags and just load up,” a clerk at an about-to-close New York chain drug store told this newspaper recently. “They take whatever they want, and we can’t do anything about it.”
Another
thief casually stole two soda cans from the same besieged Trader Joe’s
store in Manhattan as if shoplifting laws were non-existent Indeed, the fellow who boosted 10 steaks from Trader Joe’s in broad daylight Tuesday was stopped by a store employee on his way out — but only to be asked, politely if ludicrously, to leave the grocery basket behind.
Which he did, though it’s not clear why; nothing bad would have happened to him if he hadn’t.
And this is the point: Crime without consequences generates more crime; and, wow, does New York — and America — have crime!
The current wave began following the Michael Brown/Eric Garner/George Floyd “peaceful protests” set cities alight from coast to coast.
Politicians got the yips, squishy-soft urban prosecutors were elected and police from the command level down to the cop on the corner flinched — with predictable results.
Crime abounds, sometimes spectacularly so, in New York — now up sharply year-to-year in all save five of the city’s 77 police precincts. “No neighborhood is safe,” a Brooklyn cop told this newspaper. “At this rate we will lose the city by St. Patrick’s Day.”
Well, maybe not by then; it’s been freezing out. So give Gotham until the Fourth of July at least. But here’s a question: If this doesn’t begin to turn around by Election Day, will it have consequences for Gov. Hochul and the soft-on-crime caucus in the Legislature? Because Albany, ultimately, is where the solutions lie. And now there’s this bizarrely ironic twist: Wednesday, even Al Sharpton was demanding shop-lifting relief.
Al Sharpton is now noticing the detrimental effects of New York’s progressive crime policies
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