"Arrest poverty." is a fairly new, dumb phrase; but, the idea that poverty begets crime has been repeated so often with such certainty for at least as long as I can remember, that it took me a while to realize that it's far from that simple.
It's an attractive narrative in a lot of ways. Some of the most famous characters in world literature were people who stole out of desperation. In some ways, it's less scary than it is to think of criminals as broken machines or people who are so morally bankrupt that they just wanna take other people's stuff. Maybe it's easier to think that you would be doing the same thing if you were in a desperate spot. People definitely like to pretend that the major spike in theft in recent years are the little guys getting back at the evil capitalist system.
The thing is, the most convincing lies are build around a scintilla of truth. Yes, usually there's a small, short uptick in crimes like shoplifting and petty theft during economic downturns.
What's more true is that crime begets poverty.
First of all, let's acknowledge that it's a leftist lie that people are only targeting big, rich retailers -- they're not. It doesn't take much research to find stories out of places like Oakland and NYC of independently owned clothing stores being robbed more than once in a day. The thieves aren't even targeting white-owned businesses (as if that mattered). They're targeting whoever is the most vulnerable.
Also, stop pretending that, when these people do steal from Walmart or Target that they're just taking a little from the rich and it'll all be covered by insurance. No amount of theft is going to turn Walmart into a charity. As we've seen in Chicago, because of crime, Walmart had been losing money for years and decided to close their stores. The more claims you file with an insurance company, the more your premiums go up. Now, because of these thieves, and Kim Foxx's bullshit "We don't prosecute anybody." policy, all of those Walmart employees are poorer than they already were, and prices are going to be higher for everyone in the city.
Still, if it were true that it's poverty driving up crime and not the other way around, why are we seeing the rise in specific areas of crime.
If this crime wave were people feeding their starving families, you'd see a major uptick in people stealing small food items and trying to avoid confrontation.
We haven't seen that.
What we've seen is people stealing $500 worth of laundry detergent. If they're feeding laundry detergent to their kids, we should arrest them for a whole nother reason.
The aforementioned store in Oakland saw the theft of thousands of dollars worth of jeans and denim jackets. Well, to be fair, if you properly age denim and cook it into boiling water for a while, it'll make an awesome sandwich -- of course I'm kidding. This is bullshit. These are clearly organized retail theft rackets. If you're bruising this off, you're brushing organized crime off.
Finally, the real spike has been in violent crime.
A generally good person who is driven to steal out of desperation still knows that what he or she is doing is wrong, isn't ready to kill if caught, and is going to be embarrassed and apologetic if caught. You're not gonna see a guy who's willing to shove an eighty-year-old man so violently that it killed him to lift some power tools from Home Depot.
Especially with New York's bail reform, we've seen cases where a man was arrested and released sixteen times in one day before he beat a woman within an inch of her life. We've seen people arrested and released over a hundred times before they finally killed or maimed somebody.
In some places, culture has flipped to the point that employers are firing employees for simply documenting the thefts in progress. These are the same places with DAs who have decided not to prosecute any theft beneath a certain amount of damages, which is usually a pretty high amount.
When you're signaling to the world that, if you steal something here, we're not gonna punish you, in a lot of people's minds it becomes virtuous to even consider paying for something.
The more we implement a complete tolerance policy on crime, the more common it's going to be to see someone walk into the local piggely-wiggley with a knife or a gun and kill some minimum wage worker who got too close or took out a phone.
If you're on the illiberal left, I have this to say to you:
You are the problem. You are the cause of both crime and poverty. Your policies have created the vicious cycles.
If you're one of the people who went around saying that bail is racist, you've gotta own the fact that there a lot of people who are dead or crippled because a dude that should have been in jail was let out.
You have to own the firing of a military veteran who recorded three shoplifters stealing a bunch of detergent.
You have to own the firing of two women for recording the theft of a bunch of yoga pants.
You have to own the destruction of black-owned businesses in California, Chicago, and New York.
This is all you and your illiteracy combined with your unearned certitude.
You're the problem. Shut up for a couple of months and read a fucking book.