Retail Apocalypse: 93% of NYC Grocers Hit by Shoplifters
“It’s like they feel they’re licensed to shoplift now," store owner says.
The retail environment is floundering in pantsuit-controlled New York. You can’t walk into a pharmacy and simply pick things up off the shelf anymore. No, that’s the privilege of a different era. Everything is behind lock and key all because progressives effectively legalized low-level crimes. But “petty crime” isn’t so petty when it’s the lifeblood of your business, especially when it employs so many working-class New Yorkers throughout the boroughs.
A recent National Supermarkets Association survey found that 93 percent of New York City grocers were victims of shoplifters in the past year.
“It’s like they feel they’re licensed to shoplift now,” Carlos Collado, who owns two Fine Fare stores in the Bronx and Harlem, told The [New York] Post. He bemoaned the state’s 2019 criminal justice reforms that made thefts less than $1,000 ineligible for bail.
“They feel there’s no consequences, and they’re making it a profession,” the 56-year-old added, explaining many crooks are stealing big-ticket items like Haagen Dazs ice cream to flip for cash.
Despite the belief of criminal apologists like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks crime is rising because “they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry,” this is why you often see vagrants carrying around sacks of seemingly random items.
Last week, Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have established a task force to study the retail theft disaster. In response, the Retail Council of New York State issued a statement saying they were “extremely disappointed” by the veto.
“Stores that invest in New York communities lose $4.4 billion to retail theft, and this illegal activity certainly has community safety implications,” read the statement from council president Melissa O’Connor.
This all comes after, earlier this year, a coalition of almost 4,000 retail stores called on New York officials to take action and stop the shoplifting, which has grown both more brazen and violent.
I sympathize with O’Connor, small business owners, and workers. But we don’t need to establish another “task force,” as well-intentioned as it might be. Why invest money and resources into yet another study to produce a white paper? We know the answer to the problem, as even Joe Rogan pointed out on his podcast. He pointed to an April article in the New York Times that reported that:
Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said.
“Hey, maybe you should lock all those folks up and you’d stop all of the shoplifting,” Joe said with a laugh suggesting the absurdity of the whole situation.
Part of this absurdity is the fact that the answers are well-established in criminal justice, through example. NYC’s crackdown on the rampant crime of the 1980s and 90s, under the behest of NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, gave us a blueprint on how it’s done.
During that time, the NYPD implemented the CompStat program to track and geographically map crime. As explained by former NYPD Chief of Department, Louis Anemone, in the Manhattan Institute’s documentary, “Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York,” the map showed clear patterns that enabled the city to embark on its legendary turnaround.
“Are these robberies all individual guys? Or are any of them linked? 10 percent of the locations in the city accounted for over 60 percent of the violence in the city, and that became clear early on as we were looking at the maps… We had 100,000 robberies, but there weren’t 100,000 different robbery perpetrators,” Anemone said in the documentary.
“There were some people doing a lot of the crime.”
Crime, nor human nature, hasn’t changed much in just a few decades. The same patterns are as true today as they were back then. Whether it’s shoplifting, robbery, or even murder, the city has learned the hard lessons that a few criminals cause a disproportionate amount of crime, and that low-level criminality begets higher-level criminality.
Many of our public safety woes have simple solutions. Not exactly easy, but simple. But, as I say repeatedly, we don’t like the solutions. They’re harsh and essentially silo a group of people away from the rest of us in prison. But that is the non-negotiable cost for a safe society. It was a cost New York was happy to pay as it emerged from its dark ages of the 70s and 80s.
We can wait until we sink back to those lows, or we can pay a cheaper toll now and avoid headaches later.
Queens high school chaos: Safety officer attacked, teacher targeted in separate incidents (NBC New York)
Alarming incidents by students at [Hillcrest] high school — including an alleged attack on a safety officer and a riot that targeted a teacher because she shared a pro-Israel picture — were at the forefront of a rally held by two dozen concerned parents, community members and elected New York City officials demanding change. […]
"Approximately 400 students acted disruptively roaming the school and calling for the removal of a Jewish educator," NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks said. "We immediately moved the educator to safety and took steps to restore calm." […]
In another incident at the same school a week before that, students attacked a uniformed school safety officer, police said. The students responsible for the attack were taken into custody and charged, the NYPD shared on X, though their names were not immediately released and it was not known what charges they face.
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (R-Northeast Queens) accused Hillcrest of attempting to cover up both incidents. She said on X that an “anonymous source within the DOE” shared the video of the safety officer attack with her.
Plain and simply: a lot of these kids don’t have a future. The only thing they’re learning is mob brutality from their friends and political propaganda from TikTok. You’re not going to magically undo this as if it were a Hollywood heartfelt teacher-student drama.
Divert DOE funding and establish boarding schools upstate. The moment the unruly kids get out of line, send them away. Give the kids who actually want to learn a chance. After boarding school, if they do well, they get to go to trade school. Easy fix.
FDNY veteran says heart damage from required COVID vax forced early retirement (NY Post)
An FDNY firefighter says he was forced to retire on half his salary after the city-mandated COVID-19 vaccine left him with permanent heart damage.
O’Brian Pastrana now wants a judge to award him a more lucrative disability pension, which would pay three-quarters of his final salary tax-free, according to court papers.
Pastrana, 37, got the jab in October 2021 because the city required it, and had an immediate allergic reaction, including swollen lips, chills and body aches.
Despite three trips to the emergency room, he claims he was forced to get the second Pfizer shot a month later.
[…]
By February 2022, the married father of two was diagnosed with myocarditis, which results in potentially fatal inflammation of the cardiac muscle, and was nearly in heart failure, court records show.
The US is strange. Both sides constantly virtue signal about how we support first responders and military, and yet we treat them like trash. They are disposable test subjects, and the implementation of vaccine mandates was no different.
If you risk your life to put out fires started by people falling sleep with cigarettes in their mouths; if you put yourself in harm’s way to stop violent crimes that won’t get prosecuted; if you unwittingly fight regime-change wars under our flag on behalf of morally bankrupt elected officials, our country should be elevating you, not constantly throwing you under the bus.
CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show (Public)
A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the “anti-disinformation” sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.
Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and other journalists behind the Twitter Files have released part 1 of a new whistleblower series blowing wide open what they’ve dubbed the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” The reporting validates what many have suspected: the US intelligence apparatus has been turned inward on its own citizens, specifically targeting those who stand opposed to the uniparty, deep state agenda.
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is a stunning church in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, well worth your time. Technically unfinished, it features an amalgamation of Byzantine and Romanesque styles in the original end of the structure, with a vaulting and sublime Gothic design in the nave. Open for worship and sightseeing. If you can join/organize a private tour, you’ll be treated to an exploration of the interior and will be able to ascend its steps for amazing views of the stained glass art. More information at stjohndivine.org.
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Great piece
Insane.