Media Say Conservatives Invented ‘Right-Wing Shoplifting Freak-Out.’ Here Are The Facts

The media are on the verge of declaring smash-and-grab robberies “mostly peaceful looting.”

In response to viral video footage of mobs demolishing store display cases and calmly walking out with armloads of merchandise, a growing number of media outlets claim the whole phenomenon has been exaggerated by “right-wing media” looking to create a “moral panic,” retailers angling to hoodwink the public, and “law enforcement lobbyists” desperate for an excuse to increase police funding. But these conspiratorial allegations are often refuted by the stories’ own reporting — not to mention numerous independent sources.

In recent weeks, the media seem to have created a new genre of coverage: smash-and-grab denialism. Outlets from The Atlantic, to NBC News, to the Los Angeles Times have dabbled in the narrative, which MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tied together during a December 29 segment titled “Debunking The Right-Wing’s Shoplifting Freak-Out.” Hayes admitted the nation’s skyrocketing homicide rate is “real, and really bad.” But he claimed without proof that “right-wing media is [sic] constantly peddling … a completely propagandistic story, specifically about out-of-control retail theft,” which has “basically no evidence to actually support it.” Hayes also, predictably, played the race card. “Like, there is nothing that Fox [News] loves more than surveillance footage of, particularly, black people stealing a thing, and they will run that 24/7 if they can,” Hayes asserted.

Coverage of smash-and-grab crimes is far from limited to “right-wing” sources. Last November 24, CNN ran a story by Faith Karimi titled “Why some US cities are facing a spree of ‘smash-and-grab’ crimes.” The New York Times followed suit two days later. The Washington Post reported in December that “large-scale ‘smash-and-grabs’ have been on the rise this year.” Even Hayes noted the “narrative that America is awash in crime” has appeared in “a lot” of “local news, as well,” although he ignored the fact that coverage of the same story across media outlets from every part of the political spectrum — conservative (Fox News, Newsmax), liberal (CNN, NYT, WaPo), and nonpartisan (local news) — increases the likelihood that the story is true.

That is the problem. Few things destroy a politician’s chances at reelection like a crime surge, especially one spread throughout cities controlled by the same party — so the same media that spent 2020 whitewashing “mostly peaceful protests” and 2021 denying the existence of CRT in public school curricula must now insist that spooked consumers collectively hallucinated a crime spree.

One of Hayes’ guests, Amanda Mull, got the revisionist ball rolling with an essay in The Atlantic accusing stores and retailers of fomenting a “moral panic” and of backing measures that “encourage people to see even the pettiest property crime as a mortal sin.” (Deliberate theft is a mortal sin; Mull should mull over staying in her own lane.) But she admitted that in San Francisco’s “central district, where expensive fashion boutiques and other kinds of retail outlets are clustered together, larceny theft was up 88 percent from 2020 as of early December.”

Mull essentially makes two arguments: She rightly notes the difficulty of finding accurate crime statistics about smash-and-grab crimes; and she claims, while shoplifting may be up from 2020, it is down long-term. Unfortunately, numerous measures say otherwise. New York City had seen “more than 26,000 shoplifting cases through September alone, the most to that point in the 26 years the numbers have been tracked,” according to the New York Post. On the other side of the continent, the Los Angeles Times admitted that statistics show a 56% increase in organized retail crime nationwide between 2015 and 2020, with store owners experiencing “losses to organized retail crime at $2.1 billion nationwide.”

Hayes diverted his viewers’ attention to a December 27 NBC News report that tried to downplay the reality of smash-and-grab robberies in Los Angeles: “LAPD warn of crime wave, but data shows theft, robberies down.” Yet 20 paragraphs into the story, NBC admitted, “Robbery is up 5.2 percent this year compared to this point in 2020 … and theft is up 0.7 percent, recent LAPD data shows.” The story added, “the department says coordinated thefts are on the rise … the recent wave has been unprecedented and overwhelmed retail workers and shoppers with a sense of helplessness.”

Much of the problem in finding accurate statistics stems from the fact that too many perpetrators are never arrested in the first place. (More on this later.) Thus, the only statistics available are those collected by the shopkeepers and their representatives. The National Retail Federation noted in its annual report that their respondents’ biggest complaint since 2015 is the increase in “store-related violence” and organized retail crime. Half of all stores suffered more shoplifting in 2020 than in 2019, and 57% of stores said they experienced more organized retail crime during the pandemic, with 22% calling it a “significant increase.” Despite the spike,

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