Sacramento Target says shoplifting is a violent issue. Actually, it’s not that bad | Opinion

Shoplifting is not the serious issue that retail lobbyists would have you believe it is.

Some people who commit petty crimes to obtain basic necessities are the ones who deserve our sympathy, not the megacorporations who have created the narrative that they are the victims when they are, in fact, the villains of the story.

Opinion

Yet the shoplifting issue in California posits corporations such as Target as the injured parties, while ignoring people who must steal water and diapers to survive, punishing them in the same way as violent offenders.

Penalizing the petty crime of shoplifting in the same category as robbery or organized retail crime is a flimsy excuse to grow the police state — and Sacramento’s police budget has already ballooned to over $225 million, a record high.

I’m not saying shoplifting isn’t a crime, nor that it isn’t a problem. It’s simply not as bad as some people would like you to believe. Retailers contribute $3.9 trillion to the nation’s annual gross domestic product and are the country’s largest private-sector industry, what they say has a lot of sway with politicians, whether or not it’s true. They throw around huge numbers about the rates of shoplifting, with questionable data to back it up.

It’s hard to track, to be sure, but the best estimates cite organized retail theft at around 7 cents per $100, according to the National Retail Federation. Yet California lawmakers are moving swiftly on the topic as though it’s an emergency: Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo’s (D-Los Angeles) Assembly Bill 1990 has swept through the legislature. It would allow police to arrest shoplifting without a warrant, even if they did not witness the crime.

Only one legislator voted no, Asm. Ash Kalra (D-San Jose), while nearly half of the Assembly, including mostly Democrats, declined to vote. The bill is currently awaiting approval by a second committee.

Not all theft is created equal

Corporations like Target can report thirsty people stealing a single soda bottle or a pack of underwear as the same crime as a smash-and-grab robbery or organized retail crime. Misleading rhetoric from retailers and law enforcement has played a role in this.

Commercial shoplifting is defined under Prop. 47 as “entering a commercial establishment with intent to steal property valued at less than $950 during business hours.” According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state saw a 28.7% jump in commercial shoplifting in 2022. But this number is deceptive: Shoplifting numbers plummeted in 2020 and 2021, during the height of the COVID pandemic.

Despite the increase in 2022, the shoplifting rate in California actually remains 8% below the pre-pandemic level, the PPIC reported.

Most incidents also only involve one or two shoplifters, rather than the two or more that the National Retail Federation defines as organized retail crime, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. Organized retail crime is usually committed by sophisticated criminal networks that plan their attacks for weeks.

Target has been accused in lawsuits of tracking repeat thieves using illegal face recognition technology until their theft totals more than $1,000 so that the company can allegedly prosecute for a higher crime.

Petty shoplifting simply doesn’t happen as often as you think, nor is it as violent or disruptive as some people would like you to believe.

“While shoplifting is a misdemeanor with a punishment of up to six months in jail,” the PPIC wrote, “district attorneys have the discretion to charge commercial burglary as either a misdemeanor or a felony; felony convictions can come with a sentence of up to three years.”

And guess who typically faces those higher charges? People of color, especially Black people, are arrested at a rate that is up to 9 times higher than white people in some California counties. A 2017 analysis by a statistician at Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University estimated Black people were arrested and charged with organized retail theft more than twice as often as white shoplifters.

Our latest national obsession

Shoplifting has long been a rallying cry for both political parties, and images of people behaving badly seem more prominent than ever as a popular topic of viral videos online. But this ire and focus on shoplifting may simply be a reactionary swing back to aggressive law enforcement after the city’s — and in fact, the nation’s — turn toward more progressive policing policies in recent years.

But why are we even defending Target?

This is the same business that has driven out mom-and-pop shops from our community without investing anything back into Sacramento other than low-paying jobs, and they’re cutting those now to replace checkout stands with robots. A 2019 study found that more than 75,000 jobs had been lost to retail automation — typically a majority female-held job, too.)

Statistically, corporate wage theft is a far more rampant problem than shoplifting, and Target is a serious offender.

Target has paid more than $187 million for its workplace crimes, nearly half of which was spent paying off consumer protection-related offenses alone, such as false advertising, fraudulent business practices, privacy violations and product liability. It is currently facing a class action lawsuit in Minnesota for underpaying employees, and another that was filed in 2023 in Illinois for the same crime. In 2020, Target agreed to pay $5 million in cash and provide over $3 million in debt reduction to settle litigation alleging it charged improper hidden fees for failed transactions in Walter v. Target.

Locally, too, Target has shown it doesn’t deserve Sacramento’s sympathy: Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper criticized the Land Park Target location for preventing law enforcement from arresting the very shoplifters they are so worried about.

In a November 2023 post on X, Cooper wrote that Target contacted the county’s property crimes detectives and sergeant specifically to help the location with shoplifters and retail crime, but the project seemingly didn’t go so well.

“We coordinated with them and set up an operation,” Cooper wrote. “We were told by (Target’s) head of regional security that we could not contact suspects inside the store; we could not handcuff suspects in the store; and if we arrested someone, they wanted us to process (sic) them outside… behind the store… in the rain.

“We were told they didn’t want to create a scene inside the store and have people film it and put it on social media. They didn’t want negative press.”

So Target doesn’t treat its employees well and it doesn’t treat its shoppers well — now it seems like it actually doesn’t want shoplifting stopped, they just want to complain about it so much that it’s causing a nuisance to the city.

Target doesn’t deserve our sympathy

If Target can’t handle the location or the business they chose to build and run at that location, then by all means, they should give it up. Maybe Sacramento can turn the lot back into the popular baseball field it used to be. It would certainly be a better use for it.

In the meantime, they need to stop calling the police if they don’t plan to utilize them, stop treating petty crimes as though they’re violent robberies, and stop persecuting and prosecuting poor and transient Sacramentans who are barely surviving, outside in a record heatwave.

My sympathy is for the people just trying to survive in a sweltering capitalist hellscape that’s often literally on fire. I have zero sympathy for a faceless megacorporation with an annual revenue of $107.4 billion.