XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns, alt.society.liberalism   
   XPost: alt.politics.trump   
   From: spencer_@verio.com   
      
   The shoplifters are winning — and they’re causing untold misery for   
   shoppers, retailers and store workers across the nation.   
      
   When will this utter madness end?   
      
   When will Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York lawmakers realize they need to   
   make attacks on retail workers an automatic felony — and see that the   
   perps suffer real consequences — in order to stem the tide?   
      
   Stores throughout the city are locking merchandise behind plastic   
   barriers.   
      
   And raising prices.   
      
   (If not closing altogether.)   
      
   Walgreens is debuting a store in Chicago where the goods in all but two   
   aisles are kept safely out of customer reach.   
      
   At a Home Depot in North Carolina, a worker was actually pushed to his   
   death by a shoplifter running off with stolen merchandise.   
      
   This is the sick world progressives have wrought.   
      
   They excuse it by claiming shoplifting is a crime of poverty, and prog   
   prosecutors turn around and vow not to go after the thieves.   
      
   https://nypost.com/wp-   
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   In New York, 327 people accounted for some 30% of the city’s 22,000   
   shoplifting arrests in 2022.   
   Paul Martinka   
   Now-ousted San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin proposed to fight the scourge by   
   addressing “root causes.”   
      
   Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg promised during his campaign to go soft on retail   
   theft, and delivered.   
      
   Chicago’s Kim Foxx dramatically eased felony requirements for shoplifting   
   almost as soon as she came into office.   
      
   Boston’s DA until last year, Rachael Rollins, ordered her prosecutors not   
   to go after shoplifters without special permission from their bosses.   
      
   The result: Retail theft — no matter how serious, and even when   
   perpetrated by organized-crime gangs — has been de facto legalized in blue   
   cities (a problem aggravated by shrinking police forces and perverse pro-   
   criminal reforms).   
      
   These are not crimes of poverty, the data show.   
      
   In New York, 327 people accounted for some 30% of the city’s 22,000   
   shoplifting arrests in 2022.   
      
   (Reported thefts, north of 63,000 for 2022, were up 45% over 2021 and   
   nearly 275% compared to the mid-2000s.)   
      
   They’re sociopathic crimes of opportunity. And they have deadly   
   consequences everywhere.   
      
   Witness Jeff Rasor crying out for help from law enforcement on Nightline   
   after his father, that North Carolina Home Depot employee, was brutally   
   murdered by a cold-blooded shoplifter trying to make off with three   
   pressure washers.   
      
   Hardly Jean Valjean stealing bread for his family.   
      
   Just as bad are this crime wave’s less spectacular but equally corrosive   
   effects.   
      
   Like goods under lockup — not just in Chicago (where Walgreens absurdly   
   dodges about it being a response to crime) but here in New York and   
   elsewhere.   
      
   Or Whole Foods abandoning its SF flagship because of crime, and multiple   
   Walmarts and Targets shutting down over the same issues.   
      
   Even giant chain stores are turning into lawless, dangerous places, with   
   unabashed crooks owning the aisles — where both shoppers and employees are   
   afraid.   
      
   That’s to say nothing of mom-and-pop operations crushed into oblivion.   
      
   Or workers who are put in an impossible position by sneering leftist DAs   
   and other electeds: Let criminals get away with it or risk death.   
      
   Something must be done. The bill from Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton (D-   
   Staten Island) and Assemblyman Manny De Los Santos (D-Inwood) currently in   
   committee in New York’s Legislature to make attacking retail workers an   
   automatic felony would be a more-than-necessary start.   
      
   But only a start.   
      
   Contra Boudin, retail theft must be addressed by swift, harsh consequences   
   — above all for serial offenders — and no more pabulum about equity or   
   justice.   
      
   Unless and until lefty DAs wake up, the social decay, economic pillage and   
   tragic bloodshed they’ve authored will continue.   
      
   https://nypost.com/2023/06/02/shoplifters-are-literally-killing-folks-its-   
   time-to-end-the-madness/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)