Paywalled Dec 23, 2021 Article

Excerpt:

If we’re concerned with the types of crime that destroy lives and businesses, endanger retail workers on the job, and discourage people from going out to enjoy themselves, then shoplifting is the wrong crime to focus on. The problem is violence, which frequently has nothing to do with shoplifting at all. But shoplifting is an easier conversation for the retail industry to have, and one that plenty of people—journalists included—are keen to get in on. It’s a thousand other zeitgeisty arguments in one: about the role of police and prison in society, about the efficacy of tough-on-crime politicians or “Defund the police” as a slogan, about how serious property crime is relative to other types of harm, about whether liberal local governments are actually inept, about why there’s so much open human misery on the streets of San Francisco.

Good old thieves, that is to say, are a palatable common enemy. Better to fear them than the other types of casual violence that have seeped into everyday life in America, and the rot that may have created it.