Note: This essay and the comics pages below are from MONSTER CRIME, available now.
Let’s be clear. There was no “surge” in retail theft beginning in 2020. There was no dangerous crimewave led by a mysterious new phenomenon called “Organized Retail Crime” (ORC).
This simply didn’t happen. According to the FBI, property crime, the category which includes shoplifting, has steadily gone down in the U.S. since the early 1990s. With the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, FBI data shows a pronounced drop in property crime. This drop was predictably followed later by a small rise corresponding with the end of pandemic lockdowns, but at all points between 2020 and now, rates have remained lower than pre-pandemic. And they continue to decline. By the end of 2023, criminologist Jeff Asher recently told NBC news, property crime had fallen to its lowest levels since 1961.
The retail crimewave lie follows a long, disastrous history of U.S. elites lying about crime in order to manipulate the public. As examples, we can point to Nixon’s “War on Crime,” which manufactured fear of black and brown criminality to successfully shift southern whites to the Republican party, and Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” officially declared when illegal drug use was declining nationally.
Our current crimewave lie, however, specifically dates back to the 2020 uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd. As mass protests filled the streets, the U.S. mainstream media and politicians from both parties repeatedly characterized the uprisings as “criminal.” Central to this characterization was the incessant coverage of property damage and “looting,” with news outlets playing footage of protestors breaking windows and similar aggressions against private property on a seemingly endless loop. The favored subject of this “property crime” footage? Groups of protestors, most often black and brown, taking things from stores.
Following the 2020 uprisings, media outlets—Fox News and The Wall Street Journal at the forefront—made a nearly seamless transition in their coverage. Instead of stories featuring store security footage of “looters,” they now promoted stories featuring store security footage of “organized groups” of shoplifters. Black and brown people smashing windows to grab luxury merchandise from Neiman Marcus, grabbing steaks from Trader Joe’s, filling backpacks from the aisles of Walgreens, and so on…
Text from Fox News at Night host Kevin Corke, December 4, 2021.
In this breathless coverage, we glimpse the origin of this specific crimewave lie.
And then corporate retail executives entered the picture. As Harvard Business Review reports, dozens of corporate retailers declared bankruptcy in 2020. Chaos in the global supply chain, a shift to online commerce, and a workforce often resistant to sacrificing life and health for minimum wage: the early pandemic era was undoubtedly challenging for capitalist enterprise. In this environment and with news outlets still regularly featuring stories of “smash-and-grab” thefts, executives from massive retail chains such as Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Best Buy, and Home Depot all began to point to one central culprit responsible for their struggles: “Organized Retail Crime.”
Text from Corie Barry, CEO of Best Buy, speaking in an earnings call, November 23, 2021.
The National Retail Federation (NRF), a lobbyist group, functioned as a primary conduit for these retailers’ claims, and the group offered shocking statistics. An NRF report stated that Organized Retail Crime was responsible for “nearly half” of all U.S. retail inventory loss, with ORC groups stealing over $45 billion in goods annually. Another retail lobbyist group, the Retail Leaders Industry Association, put this figure even higher, at $69 billion a year.
Statement on the website of the Retail Leaders Industry Association.
Not to be outdone, the California Retailers Association claimed that ORC caused $3.6 billion in annual losses in California alone, a figure roughly equal to 25% of all retail sales in the state. All of these numbers were repeated as facts by national and local news outlets. And the news outlets themselves were known to further inflate the numbers. In 2023, a television news reporter in Madison, Wisconsin confidently stated that Organized Retail Crime cost U.S. retailers $94.5 billion annually.
Unbelievably, all these invented numbers appear to have stemmed from a single source: one CVS executive’s 2021 testimony at a U.S. Senate hearing on retail theft. This executive stated at the hearing that “organized retail crime accounts for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers.”
Text from Ben Dugan, CVS Health, Testimony to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, November 2, 2021.
And where did he get this number? The executive took the figure from a 2015 NRF report estimating the total of ALL inventory losses from that year. This loss figure typically includes inventory lost to damage and spoilage. It includes “paper shrink,” a term for accounting discrepancies put down as losses. And, yes, it includes estimated theft from both employees and the public. The CVS executive took the entire 2015 losses estimate and asserted, in 2021, that this amount was stolen by Organized Retail Crime groups every year. To this day, this baffling testimony serves as the foundation for almost all statistics supporting the existence of the retail crimewave.
In December 2023, after a small trade publication published an article looking critically at their data, the NRF finally retracted the claim that “nearly half” of all inventory losses were due to Organized Retail Crime. This retraction served as an implicit admission by the most powerful retail lobbyist group in the United States that the ORC crimewave had been a lie.
Text (bottom panels) from David Johnston, National Retail Federation Vice President, December 7, 2023.
The damage, unfortunately, had already been done. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 77% of Americans believe the U.S. crime rate is rising. Lies about retail theft remain central to that misconception.
Manufactured fear is a remarkably powerful tool, and this specific case of manufactured fear has been utilized by a wide range of groups. In December 2021, the president of the Los Angeles police union pointed to shoplifting security footage to tell people not to visit his city for the upcoming NFL Super Bowl. “We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control,” he solemnly informed news cameras. Across the country, police unions and police departments regularly characterize their cities as suffering from surging crime (see my “I’m a Cop” comics for examples). The fictional retail crimewave has been used by U.S. police to increase their funding and as a warning against any checks of their power.
For their part, corporate retailers have utilized the lie as an effective excuse to, among other things, close stores in underserved neighborhoods. Walgreens, CVS, and Target all explicitly named Organized Retail Crime as their rational for multiple store closings, garnering widespread coverage from the press. When Walgreens CFO James Kehoe later admitted in an earning call to having exaggerated the situation (“Maybe we cried too much last year”), this received far less coverage.
Text from James Kehoe, CFO of Walgreens, speaking in an earnings call, January 5, 2023.
The lie’s utility can also be seen in the successful 2022 recall of Chesa Boudin as District Attorney of San Francisco, with police unions and politicians from both parties charging that Boudin’s “soft-on-crime” policies directly caused the mythical crimewave. Boudin’s recall represents just one small example of the wide application and unrivaled political utility of crime-centered lies.
Finally, the retail crimewave lie directly feeds mass incarceration—demonstrating in microcosm the vast destructive power manufactured fear of crime holds over the U.S. populace. According to the Brennan Center, “at least 30 states have specific statutes targeting organized retail crime,” and between 2022 and 2023, at least 9 states passed bills imposing higher penalties on shoplifting classified as “organized.” In North Carolina, for example, the “organized” designation applies to shoplifting “involving more than one person.” In Pennsylvania, it applies to shoplifting with a supposed “intent to resell.” In all these states, shoplifting prosecuted under the vague “organized theft” classification allows for drastically harsher sentencing. On the national level, the U.S. Congress is considering (though it is currently stalled) the “Combating Organized Retail Crime Act.” As we’ve seen repeatedly since Nixon’s successful manufacturing of a “War on Crime,” fictional narratives of criminality have very real consequences when they become codified as laws.
Text from California Governor Gavin Newsom, from a press conference announcing “the largest-ever single investment to combat organized retail crime in California history, ” September 12, 2023.
I’ll end by posing two questions to the reader:
Who profits from our fear? Where does the real horror lie?