While different people have certain things in their minds they view as paramount, I have made my own decision as to the most important. It is clearly the biggest challenge we face because it goes to the underlying character of the people in our country. Those are our principles regarding stealing, and what we formerly thought of as right and wrong.
Proposition 47, which California passed in 2014, was the first of many laws passed enabling this trend. The ballot issue (which garnered almost 60% of the public’s support) decreased the penalty to a misdemeanor for shoplifting, forgery, grand theft, fraud, and writing a bad check if the amount involved was less than $950. This gradually caused an explosion in low-level crime for which the police did not have the personnel to enforce.
During a number of recent lunches with various people, I asked them a question about which they were kind of taken aback. I asked them if they had recently been to a CVS or Walgreen’s. Nearly everyone had. I then asked them if they had paid for their purchases before leaving. They looked at me quizzically and said various forms of YES. I then asked them why. No one would stop them if they decided not to pay. The store clerks are directed (even forbidden with the consequence of risking their employment) not to engage thieves. My lunch guests universally gave me a dissertation on why they did pay and the evils of shoplifting. Fortunately, my lunch dates are with a responsible crowd.
But not everyone is and not just the flash mobs entering stores and looting them. I began to question the quality of our societal values when I learned about the statistics on self-checkout, a modern development to save staffing dollars and provide supposed convenience for shoppers.
It turns out it is more than that. It has become an opportunity for a high percentage of shoppers to slip something in the grocery bags having not scanned it. Fifteen percent of shoppers admitted to stealing according to a study done by Lending Tree. This is not isolated as 44% of those people stated they planned to do it again. Another survey stated 92% of self-checkout individuals admitted to stealing. The cost of this to retailers is estimated to be just shy of $2 billion.
Many of us have become immune to breaking the law. Whether it is petty theft or other means of breaking the law, the moral condition of our society in recent years has gradually broken down.
We have seen this in the past but then saw a recovery. After the degradation of our large cities in the 1990’s, a theory proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling began to spread across the country. It was called the “Broken Windows Theory.” In essence it stated you had to keep your communities in fine shape and fix the smallest of things like broken windows because if they are left broken, that would lead to more and larger crimes.
In recent years, we have veered from that path. Charges of the policies being racist became prevalent. It was as if politicians and the people whispering in their ears thought people of certain races or ethnic backgrounds were necessarily more prone to ill-behavior and thus needed more latitude. This all culminated in the 2020 riots in Minneapolis that led to riots in other cities. The Governor of Minnesota did not immediately activate the National Guard, and the rioters destroyed a police station. Across the country, protesters took over an entire section of Seattle and there was no movement to stop them or remove them.
This was followed by a group of what appeared to be committed Americans entering our Capitol building when the building was not open for tours and breaking windows to enter. What were they thinking? Maybe they were motivated by seeing the mass destruction in 2020 with our law enforcement just standing aside while businesses burned to the ground and people’s livelihoods evaporated.
Our current leadership is telling us that crime is down because they are using bad data collected by the FBI. They need to seriously revamp their crime data collection process or alternatively disband what they are doing. People are being told not to believe their “lying eyes.”
Fortunately, the Bureau of Justice Statistics run by the Census Bureau manages the National Crime Victimization Survey. The survey annually asks 230,000 residents whether they have been victims of crime. They found urban violent crime in 2023 increased 40% over 2019. Property crime increased 26% for households. This is on top of the steep increase in shoplifting since the survey is of households, not businesses.
This trickles down again to other areas of life. In New York City in 2023, 48% of people got on a bus and did not pay. Like the store clerks who are told not to confront shoplifters, bus drivers are told the same. This has led in large part to a $1 billion loss for the NYC metro system. This does not include the fare skippers in the subway system. Many of these people are what would appear to be normal everyday residents who just decided not to pay in the absence of consequences. Their thought — the city can afford it.
Our federal government has enhanced this concept by illegally relieving borrowers’ college debt loans. Is there any doubt why our moral sense of right and wrong has gone astray when people see their leaders denying rulings by our Supreme Court and telling other citizens they don’t have to repay legally contracted debt? It must be true if some elected leaders are saying these actions are alright. Some may be thinking “why should I pay this bus fare when those college kids are skating on tens of thousands of dollars?”
We need to reestablish a sense of right and wrong. We need to reestablish that if you do illegal actions – even as small as your bus fare — you will be punished for those actions. We need to tell our citizens if you agree to borrow money that is secured by our federal government unless you have some unusually unfavorable circumstances you must repay that money.
Presently we are on the edge of losing our sense of the common good. It must stop. It is spiraling out of control, and we need to change course before it becomes irretrievable.
