New York City is amid a crime wave. In 2022, major crimes rose by 22%, and likely the largest contributor to the spike was shoplifting — which shot up an astounding 44%.
At the beginning of 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams claimed he understood the severity of the problem and that he would place special focus on addressing it. He made his mission clear: to ensure that New Yorkers are safe.
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Fast-forward a few months, and Adams has now unveiled his highly anticipated, and much-needed, plan to tackle the shoplifting problem in New York City. Unfortunately, though, the plan is an utter disappointment. It will do nothing to reduce crime and may, in fact, exacerbate the problem.
The proposal has five main elements. It is designed to: 1) enroll first-time offenders in intervention programs rather than prosecuting them, 2) train retail employees in de-escalation, 3) establish “neighborhood retail watch groups,” 4) install kiosks in stores where potential criminals can connect with social services, and 5) create a database to “track repeat offenders and facilitate stronger prosecutions.”
With the exception of the repeat offender database, this plan is a masterclass in how to appear to be tackling a problem while really doing nothing.
The former police captain and supposedly “tough on crime” mayor of New York believes that the way to stop crime is by training employees how to stop a possibly armed burglar with their words, not prosecuting first-time offenders, and giving criminals the option to rethink their decisions, maybe mid-crime, in order to connect with social services.
No wonder so many Twitter users were wondering whether or not the proposal is even real.
Seriously, what does Adams really believe those kiosks will accomplish? Ralph Cilento, an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired New York Police Department lieutenant, was correct to point out that it is “a pipe dream” to believe that “when people come in that were just about to steal, they won't because they realize that stealing is a source of a different problem for them. So they're going to use the kiosk to access social services.”
What is most concerning about this plan is that it seems to eschew what we know works to reduce crime: things like increasing the number of visible, uniformed police in high-risk areas, increasing jail time, and guaranteeing prosecution for all offenders. None of this is a mystery, yet so many pretend that it is. What these measures would do is increase the likelihood of a criminal being caught and lower the demand for crime. This, in turn, reduces the expected return from crime and ultimately reduces crime itself. In short: When you increase the cost of crime, you get less of it.
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Ignoring what works in favor of empty buzzwords does not come without a cost. The 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith was right when he wrote, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
Smith’s quip reveals that someone must bear the costs of crime and the only question is who. Will it be the criminal or the innocent bystander? For moral people spanning the ideological spectrum, the answer should be clear.
Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.