It turns out shoplifting isn’t spiraling out of control, but lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes anyway.
Over the last couple of years, it seemed that America was experiencing a shoplifting epidemic. Videos of people brazenly stealing merchandise from retailers often went viral; chains closed some of their stores and cited a rise in theft as the primary reason; and drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens started locking up more of their inventory, including everyday items like toothpaste, soaps, and snacks. Lawmakers from both major parties called for, and in some cases even implemented, more punitive law enforcement policies aimed at bucking the apparent trend.
But evidence of a spike in shoplifting, it turns out, was mostly anecdotal. In fact, there’s little data to suggest that there’s a nationwide problem in need of an immediate response from city councils or state legislatures. Instead, what America seems to be experiencing is less of a shoplifting wave and more of a moral panic.
For some time, retailers had indeed been complaining about a rise in theft. In April, the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group for retailers, published a report to back up that claim. It said that nearly half of all inventory loss in 2021, which amounted to roughly $94 billion, was driven by “organized retail crime” — that is, coordinated shoplifting for the purpose of reselling goods on the black market. As it turned out, organized shoplifting didn’t come close to costing businesses that much: With a few exceptions, major US cities actually saw lower shoplifting rates in 2022 than in 2019, and in December, the National Retail Federation retracted its alarming claim.
That’s not to say that shoplifting ought to be ignored. Particularly concerning are reports of organized rings stealing merchandise to turn a profit, rather than people who steal products they need but can’t afford, like baby formula. One expert told the New York Times that organized retail theft accounts for roughly 5 percent of total inventory loss — a far more modest estimate than the National Retail Federation’s original erroneous claim, but one that still amounts to billions of dollars a year. While that’s a minuscule problem for big retailers, small businesses that are targeted can feel the pinch. Added security measures also mean a more unpleasant experience for consumers, as well as a potentially more expensive one because, as some analysts say, the added costs for retailers are reflected in higher prices.
In the years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, progressive prosecutors, who pushed for a more lenient and less punitive criminal justice system, had been gaining ground. But their critics have pounced on faulty statistics like the one put out by the National Retail Federation as evidence that America needs to expand policing and once again impose harsher penalties for petty crimes, reversing reforms that have sought to reduce incarceration rates, including looser enforcement of laws around things like drug possession, loitering, or, in some cases, shoplifting low-cost goods.
Now, those more forgiving criminal justice policies are at risk, in part because of a perceived trend that appears to have been overblown.
What we actually know about shoplifting
In the early months of Covid, shoplifting declined because businesses closed and people stayed home. But as life started going back to normal, so did shoplifting, and rates of retail theft started to creep up again.
The change since 2020 wasn’t at all drastic. A report by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, which looked at 24 big cities, found that amid generally lower shoplifting rates in most cities, seven saw increases. Some were modest — shoplifting incidents in Pittsburgh grew by 8 percent between 2019 and 2023 — but others were more serious. New York City, for example, saw a 64 percent increase in that period, though even there, the trend seems to be coming to an end: The city saw lower shoplifting rates in the first half of 2023 than in 2022.
There had been evidence that fears of a major shoplifting wave were overblown. In 2021, Walgreens closed five stores in San Francisco, citing a rise in organized shoplifting. When the San Francisco Chronicle analyzed police data, the newspaper found that there was little evidence to back up Walgreens’s claim. The Chronicle reported that “the five stores slated to close had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018.”
In an earnings call with investors last year, a Walgreens executive suggested that the company had indeed overstated concerns about shoplifting. “Maybe we cried too much,” he said, adding that it may have resulted in the retailer spending more than it should have to bolster security.
So where did the National Retail Federation get the number that nearly half of retailers’ “shrink” — the industry term for inventory loss due to a range of factors, including theft but also damage and tracking mistakes — was a result of shoplifting? A spokesperson for the group told Reuters that it came from 2021 congressional testimony from the former president of the advocacy group the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, who claimed that retailers lose $45 billion a year because of organized retail theft. But it’s unclear where that number came from.
Previous reports from the National Retail Federation showed that shoplifting was nowhere near as dire. In a 2020 report, the lobbying group found that retailers lost, on average, roughly $720,000 for every $1 billion in sales due to organized retail theft. Shoplifting, in other words, amounts to less than 0.1 percent of total revenue — a cost that retailers often accept as part of operating a business.
Like any crime, shoplifting is often underreported, and it’s hard to figure out the extent to which it is. That’s in part because there is no national data set to parse, and many law enforcement agencies have not reported their recent crime data to the FBI, according to the Marshall Project. But Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, said there are factors other than the total number of reported incidents to consider when trying to understand the overall picture, including how shoplifting incidents have changed.
The Council on Criminal Justice report found that the number of shoplifting incidents that involved another crime, including assault, increased by 9 percent between 2019 and 2021. That could mean shoplifters have a higher tolerance for risk than they used to: an argument that security might be too lax. It could also indicate more organized crime. Still, those incidents accounted for less than 2 percent of overall shoplifting events, and they also started to decline in the first half of 2023.
Regardless, part of the reason so many retailers and lawmakers have sounded the alarm on a rise in thefts might be because reports of shoplifting had plummeted when Covid first hit, and then shot back up after stores reopened. That created the impression that the problem was spiraling out of control when in reality, shoplifting rates remained below pre-pandemic levels.
“People don’t know if something is high or low or medium on some scale, historical or otherwise. But they have a sense of whether it’s getting better or getting worse,” Gelb said. “And when things are moving in the wrong direction, people want to see action.”
The great American shoplifting scare has already had consequences
Since the number of reported shoplifting incidents rose after the initial collapse in 2020, there have been plenty of media reports and viral videos about the potential crime wave. Republicans used the alleged lawlessness, particularly in big Democratic cities, to paint a grim picture of Joe Biden’s America. It didn’t matter what the reality was; it seemed that the public’s perception of rising crime was enough for politicians from both major parties to feel the need to look tougher — be they Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, or Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and candidate for president.
As a result, many policies that were championed by progressive criminal justice reform advocates, including the progressive prosecutor movement, have come under scrutiny, criticized as not only insufficient at combating crime but as policies that promote breaking the law.
Evidence points to the contrary. In Boston, a former district attorney implemented a policy of declining to prosecute certain low-level offenses that are associated with poverty, such as shoplifting. In one study, researchers found that the new policy had positive impacts — not only in reducing the number of people who get sucked into the criminal justice system but also in reducing the likelihood of reoffending. Low-level and nonviolent crimes, researchers found, also did not increase as a result of looser enforcement.
As shoddy data about shoplifting helps stir up fear of a potential crime wave, voters are becoming less tolerant of those kinds of policies, and progressive prosecutors have faced tough election cycles in recent years as a result. That includes Boston, and other places, too: Chesa Boudin, the former San Francisco district attorney who became nationally prominent for his more lenient approach to addressing low-level crime, was recalled in 2022, for example, after a fearmongering campaign about rising crime, including shoplifting, was launched against him.
Legislatures have also started passing stricter laws. Since 2022, at least nine states have imposed harsher penalties for organized retail crime offenses, according to CNBC.
But given how unclear the data on shoplifting actually is and how much is still unknown, this could ultimately be a misdirection of resources — as Walgreens seems to have figured out after beefing up security measures. And given that preliminary data from 2023 shows that the apparent shoplifting trend might actually be moderating, it’s worth waiting for more data before drafting up laws that could have lasting consequences.
In a presidential election year, that might be too much to ask for. Everything, after all, is politics, and shoplifting — real or imagined — is no exception.
The Yemen-based, Iran-backed group hasn’t been fazed by a US-led response.
Houthi rebels based in Yemen launched another attack on commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea Thursday, sending an explosive, unmanned vessel near a US Navy ship — within a day of warnings from a US-led coalition, dubbed Operation Prosperity Guardian, meant to protect the area.
The attacks, which have been ongoing for weeks, threaten to significantly disrupt the flow of commercial goods through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, an important route for trade between Asia and Western countries. It’s an approach that, for relatively little cost to the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors, has exposed the ineffectiveness of the US coalition response — and has ratcheted up the tension in the region, which has been increasing on multiple fronts after Hamas’ attacks in Israel on October 7.
In a statement Wednesday, the US and its 12 coalition partners issued a final warning to the Houthis that they would “bear the responsibility of the consequences” should they continue attacks on container ships transiting the maritime route. In response to that vague warning, the group detonated an explosive unmanned surface vessel (USV) in the vicinity of several commercial vessels, as well as a US Navy ship, though none of the vessels were damaged. And on Saturday, a US warship shot down a drone launched from Houthi-controlled territory “in international waters of the Southern Red Sea in the vicinity of multiple commercial vessels,” according to a statement from US Central Command.
With the Houthis committed to antagonizing commercial vessels, the question of a possible response remains — and the coalition doesn’t have many clear options that could effectively stop the attacks without risking open conflict with Iran. Meanwhile, with Iranian support, the Houthis have shown that their approach is effective, even against the world’s major naval power.
The Houthis hit the West where it hurts
The Houthis have said that they are targeting vessels that are in some way associated with Israel in response to that country’s attacks on Gaza and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Palestinian enclave. Israel’s attacks have killed nearly 23,000 Palestinians and is rendering the region “uninhabitable,” according to UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths.
The Houthis have carried out around two dozen attacks on commercial vessels in the area since November 18, NAVCENT Commander Vice Admiral Brad Cooper told reporters Thursday, including launching ballistic missiles, drones, and now a USV. The US announced Operation Prosperity Guardian on December 18, naming Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom, Bahrain, the Seychelles, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Norway, as partners in the effort.
As Craig Fuller, the CEO of FreightWaves, told Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast this week, “The United States has the largest navy in the world, it’s also one of the only blue water navies— it can go anywhere, defend any place on the planet,” and “the whole purpose of that is to protect freight lanes. One of the primary calls of the US Navy is its role to protect commerce and ensure global trade.”
Cooper told the press that “about 1,500 merchant ships have safely transited the waters of the Red Sea since the operation began.” But as Bloomberg reported in late December, shortly after the coalition was announced, shipping traffic was down 40 percent in the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea. Both that waterway and the Suez Canal are critical to international trade — not just the oil and energy products that come from the Middle East, but container ships that carry consumer goods, as well as the machinery and parts necessary for manufacturing, affecting supply chains at several different levels.
And even if some cargo ships are transiting safely, the increased insurance costs or risks could be too much for some companies to bear. Furthermore, despite US warnings, the attacks haven’t stopped. “It’s very clear from the way the conflict has proceeded in the way the Houthi attacks have escalated, even as the US has tried to respond, that what the US is doing is not really having a deterrent effect of any sort,” Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox.
The attacks are pushing shipping companies to change their transit routes, with industry leader Maersk saying it will pull its vessels from the Red Sea route in favor of a longer route around the Cape of Good Hope “for the foreseeable future” after Houthi militants attacked one of its ships January 1. Maersk controls about a sixth of global container shipping, according to Reuters, and the alternate route tacks on as much as three weeks to shipping times.
Not only does it take longer for products to reach their destinations, but the extra time also leads to extra costs for shipping companies — for fuel, salaries, and insurance, for example — as shipping firm Hapag-Lloyd told Reuters Friday. Companies then pass on those increases to consumers.
“I think the clear lesson from what’s unfolded in the Red Sea is that it doesn’t take all that much to disrupt shipping,” Kavanagh said. “And these types of gray zone attacks,” or attacks by non-state actors like the Houthis, “on commercial ships are very difficult for the United States to respond to in a measured way, while also balancing escalation risks.”
The US has few good options
The US told the Houthis Wednesday that they should not expect another warning should they continue their attacks in the region; now that that warning has been ignored, the coalition’s plan for a response has to deter attacks without escalating the overall regional conflict. But it’s not clear the coalition can actually accomplish that task.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the US is exploring options to strike Houthi targets, which could include hitting missile and drone launchers, radar locations on the Yemeni coast, and Houthi munitions facilities.
There are many complications in using force against the Houthis, not the least of which is that many of their weapons systems are mobile. But, as Kavanagh said, there’s only so far the US can go in retaliating. “They can shoot down the drones and missiles, which is inefficient and very costly” for the US. “They can take a step up from that and strike targets, inside of Yemen, the staging areas where some of these fast boats are, that unmanned sea vessels are leaving from or, as they’ve already done, try to attack ammunition or munitions depots. But then above that, what’s the next step that you take that doesn’t lead to direct attacks on Iran?”
The Houthis, meanwhile, can continue to frustrate the global shipping industry “mainly by increasing [the] volume of attacks,” Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Vox.
Critically, the Houthi attacks have not targeted oil tankers or other energy cargo, as Fuller pointed out — preserving one of the region’s most important commodities so as not to inflame regional actors like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, who hope to stop a wider regional escalation.
“Most of the countries in the region have opted out [of the US-led coalition], because they’re worried about Iran, and … they don’t want to be seen as protecting Israel, because the Houthis have said that Israel is their target.” Kavanagh said. “So there has been very big coalition response [that] has been very ineffective at the same time — the goals of that coalition have also been very unclear. So they have very little participation, very limited capabilities, and no clear goals.”
Even if the coalition is somehow able to decrease the number of Houthi attacks while avoiding direct conflict with Iran, other regional fronts continue to escalate; in Lebanon, for example, a senior Hamas leader was killed Tuesday, apparently by Israel. The war has also brought about renewed attacks on US posts in Iraq and Syria by Iran-backed groups, and the Iraqi government is preparing to remove US coalition forces from the country.
“People think about escalation in the region as like a switch was flipped — and I think it’s important to recognize that the alternative is also possible,” Kavanagh said. “You actually see it happening already, which is just sort of a steady increase of violence, and tit-for-tat strikes get gradually more and suddenly, you’re at [an] intolerable level.”
Leave Gypsy alone!
When a prisoner leaves the carceral system, questions related to their stability and support are paramount: Can they find steady work? Can they secure adequate housing? Can they reintegrate themselves into a positive social environment?
How quickly and how well parolees and freed inmates can answer these questions plays a huge role in shaping their future. Yet very few former prisoners have ever had to face these challenges while also enduring the level of public scrutiny now affixed to Gypsy-Rose Anderson, née Blanchard. (Typically known as Gypsy Blanchard, she’s recently legally hyphenated her surname and updated the styling of “Gypsy-Rose.” )
The story of Blanchard-Anderson, her mother Dee Dee, and the disturbing events that ultimately culminated in Dee Dee’s murder in 2015, has been told and retold across the media landscape, most notably in a 2016 BuzzFeed article, a 2017 HBO docuseries, and a fictionalized 2019 Hulu drama, The Act. But Gypsy has received perhaps her biggest stage ever in the wake of her December 29 release. She has trended across social media, done high-profile interviews, and celebrated with her now-famous prison pen pal turned husband, Ryan Anderson. She’s also been promoting an upcoming Lifetime docuseries filmed while she was in prison. Throughout it all, she’s been upbeat, charming, and even inspiring.
However her recent media appearances might frame her, we shouldn’t assume that Blanchard-Anderson will naturally step into the role of public figure.
Anderson, now 32, was 24 when she was sentenced to 10 years for her part in the brutal murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. She ultimately served just eight years. Her light prison time was primarily due to a giant mitigating factor: the lifetime of horrific, bizarre abuse to which Dee Dee had subjected her. From Gypsy’s childhood, Dee Dee had insisted her daughter had muscular dystrophy as well as other debilitating ailments that required her to constantly use a wheelchair and a feeding tube, and undergo a series of dangerous, painful, and unnecessary surgeries. (Although Dee Dee Blanchard was never formally diagnosed with Münchausen syndrome by proxy, it’s widely understood she most likely had the disorder; this was the true crime case that brought the syndrome to the public’s attention.)
In order to further the fantasy and swindle supporters and benefit agencies out of funds, Dee Dee infantilized Gypsy, lying about her age and claiming she was developmentally disabled and had the mind of a small child. Gypsy received only a second-grade education and continued to perform the role of a very young girl well past puberty. Though her mother restricted her access to the outside world, Gypsy sought connections online, where she met 23-year-old Nicholas Godejohn, who became her secret boyfriend. Gypsy was then 22, but she spoke and acted like a girl in her early teens. Although she was legally an adult, her mother had gained power of attorney over her; she controlled nearly every aspect of Gypsy’s life and rarely allowed her to leave the house.
Compounding all of this, Gypsy has also alleged sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather, who hasn’t explicitly denied it. He also allegedly sexually abused Dee Dee, which paints a picture of the role family dysfunction and generational trauma have played in this tragic case. It’s little wonder, then, that Gypsy looked for a way out. For her, this meant convincing Godejohn that murdering her mother was the only way she could ever truly be free. Godejohn is now serving a life sentence without parole for his role in the crime.
In many ways, it’s a relief to watch Blanchard-Anderson as she performs this press tour: She looks healthy, and her voice, long that of an eerie child’s, more closely matches her real age. She largely seems unscathed from her time in prison, and she certainly seems to have plenty of support.
Yet it’s also hard to know what to make of the public frenzy and the media circus surrounding her. She’s been compared to the wrongfully convicted true crime celebrity Amanda Knox, but Knox came from a stable middle-class family — she was never trying to flee her life. Some have compared her to George Santos, but unlike Santos, Blanchard-Anderson’s persona was never hers to control.
Of all the recent comparisons, the most apt may be that of Britney Spears and the fight to end her long conservatorship. While Britney’s story does not involve committing acts of violence, there are a striking number of parallels between the two women’s lives. Both struggled for years to break free of controlling parents and extremely dysfunctional families, as well as from a legal (and, in Gypsy’s case, medical) system that not only utterly failed to recognize the danger they were in, but actively contributed to their victimization. Both women found new fans among the public as their plights became known, and became causes célèbre in the road to their ultimate release.
Britney was a Disney child star; young Gypsy performed for her supporters, who donated to fundraisers for her fake medical bills. Each of them was manipulated into becoming an entertainer early in life. Both were robbed of their childhoods, left with little to no agency over their own lives and even their own personalities. Subsequently, where most adults would be settling into the middle phases of their lives, Britney and Gypsy have had to begin with the very basics of building their identities for themselves. And both women will now have to navigate that delicate path under the watchful eyes of millions.
There’s an inherent performativity as well to this post-prisoner life for both women: Britney has been tasked with setting the distorted, toxic record of her own life straight, while Gypsy has been tasked with communicating her own successful rehabilitation. At a basic level, this is because that’s what parolees need to do, but the public’s zeal for reclaiming her — even to the point of forgetting there was an actual murder involved — takes Gypsy’s mea culpa tour to new heights. Her followers have been eagerly awaiting her release since it was first announced in September 2023; anticipation is high for whatever she does next. A certain ominous glee mingles with that excitement, a type of salacious, prurient interest in watching her succeed or fail. Again, it’s impossible to not think of Britney and the nonstop public scrutiny that followed her at both the peak of her career and the end of her conservatorship.
It’s difficult to contemplate Blanchard-Anderson, the budding media personality, without remembering the traumatized girl who only gained the public’s attention after resorting to an unthinkable act in response to a lifetime of unthinkable abuse. We may be excited for Gypsy-Rose, but we shouldn’t assume we know who she is. Like Britney, who has had her share of ups and downs since her conservatorship finally ended, Gypsy has to fully reinvent herself. That’s a daunting prospect if she also has to frequently stop and give another interview to People magazine.
We shouldn’t assume, either, that her story fits into familiar tropes. As another inadvertent true crime celebrity, Vili Fualaau, recently told the Hollywood Reporter, these stories often aren’t as black and white as the media likes to paint them. Blanchard-Anderson was absolutely a victim, but arguably to some degree so was Godejohn; it’s much harder to valorize the person holding the murder weapon than the one who urged them to use it, but both, in the end, are culpable. There are parts of Blanchard-Anderson’s story that will never fit neatly into the kind of reality TV survival narrative that the media currently seems anxious to place her within.
It’s not clear, either, whether any of this publicity will be helpful to her at all, even if she’s besotted with fame. The answer may not be as simple as “Leave Gypsy alone,” but turning her into some kind of Chicago-esque celebrity murderess probably isn’t the way forward either.
So what if we get a Gypsy-Rose season of Dancing With the Stars? She might have fun — along with the audience, sure — but would that ultimately aid her recovery? There’s a trepidation in watching this redemption arc up close, especially when you’re not sure you’re supposed to be watching at all.