NEW YORK (NewsNation) — Amid an influx of shoplifting across New York City, Mayor Eric Adams unveiled plans focusing on intervention and prevention that can help provide business owners with relief and a renewed sense of security.
The shoplifting has gotten so bad that businesses along 125th Street in Harlem have formed a group to help identify repeat thieves and then turn the information over to police who eventually arrested 18 people.
Adams’s new crackdown plan includes giving first-time offenders intervention programs instead of being prosecuted, providing de-escalation training for retail workers, establishing a neighborhood retail watch group that can share information with each other in real-time when a theft happens and installing kiosks in stores to help potential shoplifters find social programs.
“Now it’s time to take that documentation and move it into implementation so we can ensure that we stop what is happening across this nation and retail thefts,” Adams said. “We believe we have a model that we will share with our law enforcement partners across the country.”
Yet, a lot of the public believes the mayor’s plan is full of “crackpot” ideas and they have zero confidence it’ll make a difference. Some have said the plan is light on repercussions and heavy on neglect.
NYPD crime statistics show a 44% increase in shoplifting crimes between 2021 and 2022. The city made more than 22,000 retail theft arrests last year, according to the data.
Adams also noted that nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city last year involved 327 people who were arrested, released and rearrested more than 6,000 times. This means each of those people was arrested at least 20 different times for theft in 2022.
Elsewhere across the U.S., retail theft in the opinion of many people has reached the epidemic level with smash-and-grab robberies happening more frequently and thieves walking out of stores with piles of clothes or handbags.
The National Retail Federation estimates retailers lost close to $95 billion last year due to what they call shrink — a term used when retailers lose inventory to shoplifting.