Scary Rhetoric About Crime Doesn’t Pan Out

Headlines trumpeted Target closing stores because of horrendous increases in retail crime. Except: that’s probably not true. Back in January, Popular Information reported on a similar story from Walgreens, which had to backtrack after being fact checked.  

“Walgreens has been joined by other major retailers who have been echoing similar cries and drumming up fear …

“Publicly available data, however, contradicts the theft-wave narrative. The number of shoplifting offenses dropped 46 percent between 2019 and 2021, according to the FBI’s crime data explorer. The National Retail Federation (NRF), a trade group that represents retailers like Walgreens and has amplified the theft-wave narrative, has also found that shrink declined to 1.4% of total retail sales in 2021, from 1.6% in 2020.”

Similar claims about a wave of shoplifting in San Francisco were also debunked in July. In August, a three-part CNBC series reported “Companies say organized retail crime is on the rise, but there’s no data to prove it.” What’s really going on? “Companies are quick to blame organized theft for shrink losses, but behind closed doors the parallel issues of employee theft and self checkout are their primary focus areas.” 

While the Star Tribune uncritically repeated Target’s claims about the reasons behind its store closings, CNBC reported Target’s statemetn but also noted that claims about increasing theft are not borne out by industry-wide numbers and that:  

“Target’s business has struggled for more than a year with company-specific challenges, including a glut of unsold inventory, backlash to its Pride merchandise collection and a pullback in consumer spending on discretionary items such as apparel and home goods.”

Maybe the nine stores closed by Target have particularly high crime rates, or have been victimized by what CNN business describes as “organized retail crime.”  

Or maybe crime is an easier reason to give than “company-specific challenges.” 

Rhetoric about crime rings my warning bells. Too often, that kind of talk is a political ploy—like Ron DeSantis claiming that Florida is safer than New York City. First, the comparison of a state versus a city is misleading. Second, Miami is actually far more dangerous/crime-ridden than New York City. 

According to the FBI’s 2020 Uniform Crime Report, the homicide rate in Florida was 5.9 murders per 100,000 people and the violent crime rate was 384 per 100,000. That put Florida right in the middle, the 25^th state in crime. New York, meanwhile, had a murder rate of 4.2 and a violent crime rate of 364 in the same time frame, making it the 32^nd state. So in 2022, New York was safer than Florida. (Minnesota was #39, with  a murder rate of 3.4 per 100,000 and a violent crime rate of 278 per 100,000.) 

Want more mind-numbing statistics?

The Daily Beast compares New York City with Miami: 

“For New York City, the homicide rate in 2020 was 5.6 per 100,000 people, slightly below the national average of 6.5. Miami, however, experienced a 12.8 homicide rate per 100,000 in 2020—more than twice that of NYC. Miami’s violent crime rate of 556 in 2020, though, was a bit lower than New York City’s 584.”

Republican politicians and voters focus a lot on crime, and insist that crime is rising dramatically. While crime statistics are complex and often incomplete, nothing in those statistics backs up this Republican crime rhetoric. The Brennan Center for Justice has an analysis well worth reading in full, but I’ll close with just these two paragraphs:

“Despite politicized claims that this rise was the result of criminal justice reform in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, murders rose roughly equally in cities run by Republicans and cities run by Democrats. So-called red states actually saw some of the highest murder rates of all. This data makes it difficult to pin recent trends on local policy shifts and reveals the central flaw in arguments that seek to politicize a problem as complex as crime. Instead, the evidence points to broad national causes driving rising crime. …

“These increases in crime rates are serious on their own terms and should not be trivialized. Nationally, however, they do not return us to the high crime rates of the early 1990s. From 1991 to 2014, the national murder rate plummeted by more than 50 percent, from 9.8 to 4.4 killings per 100,000 people. By comparison, the murder rate for 2020 stood at around 6.5 — a rate last seen in the late 1990s but still well below the high point of the last quarter century. The rate of violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2020 has been relatively flat, comparable to the rate last seen a decade prior in 2010.”