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Journalists who repeat over and over again allegations of uncontrollable corporate theft play a part in a narrative that benefits big business and perpetuates prison policies.
After former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd, the initial police account of Floyd’s death circulated widely. The statement said Floyd was in medical distress and pointed out that the police were not using weapons, but it omitted that Chauvin had knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes as he called for help. and, finally, stopped breathing.
The deceptive and dishonest statement crystallized for the whole country what many in the criminal justice system already knew: the police lie. Police are not a reliable narrator of crime and public safety because they have their own interests to protect. They want to avoid punishment and amass big budgets and power, and they come up with stories that, on the whole, advance those interests over others. In view of this, Barry Petchesky wrote in April in Defector, reporters relying on police statements should at the very least append the qualifying officers’ statement, making it clear that what officers say must always be questioned and verified.
The same lesson applies not only to the police, but to all who could benefit from a greater number of police and prison systems, including the wealthy corporations that view arrests and prison terms as means of protection. their results. This is the kind of basic skepticism that should at this point be de rigueur for any journalist or policy maker.
Yet in San Francisco, just months after Chauvin’s conviction, that lesson has not been learned. Leading newspapers are repeating police and retail talking points like parrots about a supposed spate of shoplifting that they say is out of control, despite lack of evidence or any apparent investigation into the existence such evidence. And that narrative is dangerous, providing water to political opponents of criminal justice reforms who use the fear of rampant crime to advocate more harmful and discriminatory prison policies.
The San Francisco Chronicle paints a dire picture. An alarmist headline reads: Organized Crime Leads to SF Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens in Five Years and Describes Seniors Losing Access to Prescription Drugs and Other Essential Services After their neighborhood pharmacy was forced to close. The newspaper dubbed this account last week on the basis of a video of a single shoplifting incident, in which a man stuffs things into a garbage bag and then runs off on a bicycle. Likewise, the New York Times reported that the banal crime of shoplifting has spiraled out of control in San Francisco, with stores closing largely because the scale of thefts made business untenable.
The source of this information? The retailers themselves, supported by anecdotal law enforcement reports.
The stories are taken from a San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing that Supervisor Ahsha Safai called last month. There, the Chronicle reports, retailers attributed the majority of the losses to professional thieves rather than opportunistic shoplifters who may be motivated by poverty, with a CVS chief calling San Francisco a hub for organized crime. retail. That leader is Brendan Dugan, CVS Healths director of retail organized crime and business investigations, who said professional crime accounts for 85% of the company’s dollar losses in San Francisco.
The Chronicle and The Times also reported that the retailer says criminal justice reform is to blame, particularly Proposition 47, which California voters passed in 2014 to reduce penalties for thefts worth less than $ 950. According to the supermarket chain Safeway, the new law, which has been a vital tool in the fight against mass incarceration, has led to a dramatic increase in losses from shoplifting.
For his part, Safai wrote on Twitter that the numbers speak for themselves and posted a chart produced by Walgreens that uses four cartoon thieves to indicate the prevalence of professional theft in San Francisco. (By comparison, New York City only has 1.5 cartoon thieves.)
In neither of these reports did anyone seemingly ask for actual data, or the methodology used to obtain it, or, say, the definition of retail organized crime and how retailers could possibly know exactly what theft they are from. responsible. And when commentators like Adam Johnson, co-host of the Needed Quotes podcast and former editor of The Appeal, and law professor John Pfaff pointed out, they were faced with disbelief: Are you accusing Walgreens of having falsified this data? tweeted Michelle Tandler, a self-proclaimed Moderate Dem and founder of a life skills company. Michael Shellenberger, writer and commentator on environmentalism, asked: Why would Safeway lie?
More in-depth reports would have provided grounds for skepticism. He could have mentioned that Walgreens announced in 2019 that it was closing hundreds of stores nationwide as a cost saving measure and that, as Johnson noted, Walgreens is closing stores in New York at a faster pace. high without allegations of endemic organized crime.
Overall, thefts are down from the five-year average from 2015 to 2019, and, according to police data, theft (which includes shoplifting) is down 14% from at this same point last year.
Beyond that, the stories could have explained how real data shows crime in San Francisco, including property crime, has dropped to record levels. Overall, thefts are down from the five-year average from 2015 to 2019, and, according to police data, theft (which includes shoplifting) is down 14% from at this same point last year (or, to compare to a year without a pandemic, down 33% from the first five months of 2019). The Chronicle dismissed the relevance of this based on a police explanation, writing that police said incidents are often underreported and have become more violent and brazen.
And Safeways’ claim that criminal justice reform is the source of more crime could have been refuted by the 2018 University of California, Irvine study, which found that although theft increased moderately, overall we find very little evidence to suggest that Proposition 47 led to an increase in crime in California.
Even more egregious is the failure to note or investigate the long history of retailers pushing for drastic shoplifting penalties based on questionable allegations of significant crime waves.
An October 2020 report by the consumer interest group Public Citizen explained how, in recent years, the retail industry has advocated against criminal justice reforms that reduce sentences for shoplifting and / or supported tougher anti-shoplifting laws in 18 states, with retailers winning in 11 of those states. In California, major grocers, including Safeway, collectively spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support an unsuccessful 2020 ballot measure to overturn Proposition 47 and create longer jail terms for shoplifting, among others. severe criminal penalties.
Then there is the Retail Organized Crime Warning, or ORC in industry parlance. The term sounds ominous, suggesting a network of thieves operating a sophisticated business. But state laws and the retail industry use it widely to describe coordinated theft of almost any kind, and in some cases, theft involving one person. The National Retail Federation, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of retail businesses, publishes an annual survey of retail organized crime and ORC gangs that does not define either term and is based entirely on a survey of retailers. retailers (a total of 61 in 2020). The group then uses this survey to claim that organized retail crime affects 9 in 10 retailers, and among ORC victims, three in four report an increase in the past year and to demand federal legislation on the organized theft in the retail trade.
State laws targeting organized retail crime can be just as broad, allowing prosecutors to lay charges against people struggling with poverty or substance use issues. Safeway and California Grocers Association-backed 2020 ballot initiative, Proposition 20, would have created a new crime for organized retail theft defined as two or more people shoplifting together at least two times in six months for a total value greater than $ 250. In Arizona, there is no dollar threshold, and a person can commit organized retail theft on their own if they steal something with the intention of selling it. The offense carries a three-year prison sentence.
That’s all to say, when chain stores like Walgreens tell you stores are closing due to organized crime seniors lose their local pharmacy because shoplifting is out of hand and not because of planning. corporate strategy or to pay CEOs $ 25 million in signing bonuses is at least worth digging into their history.
Why is all this important? Because that’s how mass incarceration happens. Police and financial interests wanting their protection tell stories that raise fears of increased crime in this case, that well-meaning reforms have led to an onslaught of organized crime journalists whitewash those stories through the news and then these stories become fodder for campaigns against reform and reformist politicians. It is now happening in San Francisco, where a Silicon Valley-funded campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s prosecutor, is based on false claims that crime exploded during his tenure. The end result, when these efforts are successful, is more arrests, more people in jail, and longer prison terms, which will inevitably fall harder on the poor and people of color.
Businesses aren’t crime statistics experts, nor are they honest statistics brokers, and they shouldn’t be treated any other way.
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