Re: It's not only NY, LA, San Francisco. Retail crime has hit a bustling Kansas metropolis

[Start shooting them]

On 29 Nov 2021, Bob Duncan <bob7d...@gmail.com> posted some
news:so3ikf$ild$9...@news.dns-netz.com:

> Just start shooting the niggers who steal and it will stop very
> quickly.

A local Victoria’s Secret lost $30,000 a month to theft, authorities
say. The Cabela’s has reportedly lost more merchandise than any other in
the nation. They’re not in San Francisco, Chicago or New York, the way
some might assume. They’re in Wichita, Kansas.

A pattern of store thefts - not just one-off petty shoplifting
incidents, but more serious planned and brazen heists from pricey
luxuries to everyday products – has retailers on edge across the
country. In some cities like San Francisco, retailers are closing up
shop, pointing the finger at crime.

But it’s not just big coastal cities grappling with the problem. In
America’s Midwest, a bustling, mid-sized metropolis, known for its rich
entrepreneurial heritage as home to both Pizza Hut and The Coleman Co.
is also wrestling with the gravity and pervasiveness of retail theft.

“I’ve lived in this city my entire life and to see this much retail
crime, it’s shocking,” said Captain Casey Slaughter, who is in charge of
the Wichita Police Department’s property crimes bureau.

Republican Kris Kobach, Kansas’ attorney general, said retail crime is a
“spiraling problem” in his state, adding that Kansas and Missouri are
among the top 10 states in the nation for volume of retail crime. Kansas
lost approximately $642 million in stolen goods in 2021, he said.

“People are frustrated. Store employees are frustrated,” he said in an
interview with CNN.

In Kansas, Kobach says one scourge is fueling another: drugs, especially
fentanyl addiction.

“There is a link between drug trafficking and organized retail crime,”
Kobach told lawmakers in June. “Organized retail crime is a problem that
is getting worse, not better. And it does not exist in a vacuum. These
criminal enterprises often overlap with the trafficking of drugs.”

National chains, local theft
Wichita police chief Joe Sullivan, who heads up the largest police
department in Kansas, in April provided some startling numbers on
escalating retail crime in Kansas’ largest city, which is home to nearly
400,000 residents. Speaking at an event with the Sedgwick County Board
of Commissioners, Sullivan said stores of some popular retail chains in
Wichita are among the worst hit, nationally, by retail theft.

“We talked to some of our largest retailers, and within those chains,
some of their stores in Wichita are their biggest problems,” Sullivan
said during the meeting. “These are national chains, and some of these
stores in Wichita have the highest rates for retail theft either
regionally or nationally.”

A Victoria’s Secret store in Wichita, he said, was losing tens of
thousands of dollars a month to theft. Worse, Sullivan said Cabela’s,
which sells sporting goods and outdoor products, cited its Wichita store
as number one in the nation among its stores for theft.

Victoria’s Secret did not provide a comment specifically addressing
theft at its Wichita store but said in a statement to CNN that “the
safety of our associates and customers is always our top priority. We
take matters of theft seriously and work closely and in cooperation with
the appropriate authorities on these types of investigations. We will
prosecute shoplifters to the full extent of the law.”

Cabela’s did not respond to a request for comment. Sullivan’s office
also cited Dick’s Sporting Goods and Academy Sports and Outdoors stores
in the city as leading in the region for store thefts. Both retailers
did not respond to requests for comment.

Lego sets, power tools, clothing, jewelry
Retail crime overall, Slaughter said, is up 34% so far this year in
Wichita, compared to last year, and up 35% versus a five-year average.

Among the most stolen items reported by retailers, Slaughter said, are
high-priced clothing, Lego sets, jewelry, footwear, beauty and cosmetic
products, sporting goods, power tools, and Tide detergent, which is
typically cited as one of the most shoplifted items nationally.

Because most retailers have a non-intervention policy in place to
protect employees and shoppers, he said thieves are taking advantage and
“basically taking anything that can be quickly carried out of the
store.”

The stolen merchandise frequently ends up in online marketplaces or
smaller neighborhood stores where it’s sold for a quick profit,
Slaughter said.

Nationally, merchandise “shrink,” or the value of merchandise lost to
theft, fraud, damage and other reasons, is estimated to have cost
retailers $94.5 billion in 2021, up 4% from $90.8 billion in 2020,
according to the National Retail Federation, which attributed nearly
half of the loss to large-scale theft.

Still, some groups have pushed back on concerns about retail theft,
pointing out that consistent data can be hard to come by and that
employee theft and other factors can play a role in missing inventories.

And one Walgreens executive earlier this year suggested perhaps that
company had overstated the impact of retail theft.

On Tuesday, the retail industry got some fighting power to curb the sale
of stolen and counterfeit items online when the bipartisan INFORM Act
went into effect. The new law requires online marketplaces to collect,
verify and disclose information – including bank account information,
tax ID number and contact information - of third-party sellers of
high-volume products, making it harder for sellers of counterfeit and
stolen products to get away with it.

Drug addiction’s tight grip
In Wichita, Slaughter said many stores have hired off-duty police
officers to boost security, but theft persists because in his view the
root causes are equally difficult to quash.

“Drug addiction has gotten worse in the city,” he said. “Almost every
time a suspect is caught, we find drug paraphernalia on the person. It’s
shocking to us when we don’t find it.”

Fentanyl addiction is a particularly urgent problem in Kansas.

Kansas logged the nation’s second largest percentage increase in drug
overdose deaths in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, with most overdose deaths involving fentanyl, a powerful
synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine or
heroin.

In Sedgwick County, drug-associated deaths among residents increased by
91% from 2015 to 2020, according to county data.

Marc Bennett, district attorney of Sedgwick County, said the drug crisis
is one reason why individuals, desperate to feed their addiction, are
turning to crime, including being recruited by criminal enterprises
behind large organized retail crime sprees. Organized retail crime
offers criminals a business model of pure profit, “with no overhead,
rent, product cost. It’s pure profit,” he said.

“There’s also a vulnerable population in and around Wichita that is
unhoused or struggling with mental illness,” he said. “There’s an
opportunity when people are desperate to be pulled into these criminal
enterprises.”

Harold Casey is closely tracking the drug crisis in Wichita and across
29 counties in Kansas.

Casey is CEO of SACK (Substance Abuse Center of Kansas), a Wichita-based
non-profit specializing in the prevention, treatment and case management
of individuals affected by substance abuse. His organization works with
800 to 900 individuals a year in hospitals in Wichita and about 1,200 a
year in Sedgwick County jails, as well as people in homeless shelters.

“Most of our clients are uninsured, unemployed and homeless,” he said.

Most worrisome to him is the increasing number of drug addiction cases
among teenagers, he said. “In Wichita, we’re experiencing a lot of
overdose deaths in teens,” said Casey. He explained that parents often
cite a familiar pattern - their child connects with a dealer on social
media and gets access to drugs.

“Fentanyl is becoming the drug of choice here because it’s cheap and
more accessible,” he said, adding that 11% of SACK’S current cases
involve fentanyl and 36% methamphetamine.

She’s 35, a mom, addicted and shoplifting from stores
Scott Poor, a Wichita-based criminal defense attorney, has a running
caseload of clients involved in property theft. “It’s plenty of home
burglary, breaking into a garage, self-storage units and store theft,”
he said. “A bulk of the cases are drug-related property crime.”

He recalls one in particular, a current client.

“She’s a young lady in her early thirties, and she has a serious problem
with fentanyl,” said Poor. His client last September was charged with
shoplifting from a local ranch and home goods store on three consecutive
days, each time stealing bulk cases of ammunition.

“She’s not into shooting sports. But she is an addict, deeply hooked on
fentanyl. She’s a mom who has lost her kids to Children and Family
Services.”

In mid-March, Poor says his client shoplifted from an Ulta Beauty store
and a Victoria’s Secret store on the same day. “She stole $477.32 worth
of products from Ulta and $322.59 of items from Victoria’s Secret,” said
Poor. “They got her on video.”

Poor was with his client in court on Monday. She was sporting a black
eye, he said.

With high-value store thefts, Poor said his clients committing the crime
aren’t stealing basic necessities like bread and diapers. “They are
going after items they can turn around quickly for some good money, like
at pawn shops,” he said. “If it’s not drugs, then they need money to pay
rent.”

Kobach, the state attorney general, told CNN he recently spoke with an
employee at Walgreens who said she was upset about thieves repeatedly
targeting her store. “She violated company policy by following them and
trying to stop them, but it was because she doesn’t want the store or
the neighborhood to get a bad reputation,” he said.

In early June, Kobach testified before a House Judiciary Committee
hearing on “Organized Retail Crime and the Threat to Public Safety.”

“When one thinks about the explosion of organized retail crime in the
United States, the State of Kansas may not intuitively jump to mind,” he
told lawmakers. “But Kansas is particularly illustrative for two
reasons: Kansas is one of the hardest hit states, and we are attempting
solutions that other states have not yet tried.”

One of the main reasons that organized retail crime is surging in Kansas
is because many cases don’t get prosecuted, Kobach said in his
testimony. “There is a shortage of prosecutors in most counties.”

The other challenge is that serial thieves “almost always steal a dollar
amount just below the felony theft level,” he testified. “In Kansas,
they steal roughly $900 to stay below the $1,000 threshold.”

But a new Kansas law set to take effect on July 1 would give the state
AG more authority to prosecute organized retail theft rings. He said the
law would make Kansas the first state in the nation to give the state
AG’s office original prosecutorial authority in all cases where a course
of criminal conduct occurs in two or more counties.

“This allows my prosecutors to prosecute cases with state resources
where a county or district attorney does not have the capacity,” he
explained in his testimony.

“The more we tolerate this form of crime, the more it will degrade our
culture,” said Kobach. “That’s not the kind of society we want to live
in.”

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/not-only-ny-la-san-155814723.html

getaclue
2 hours ago

As a Wichita Kansas native, I'll give you three guess's, and the first
two don't count, to choose which demographic is stealing from these
stores. My son's first job was at a sport's store. He had a "shoplifting
story" every time he came home from work and it was ALWAYS the same
people. Numerous times the stores in that particular area would call
each other to let them know a specific group was out "working".
Employee's would get license plate numbers, models of cars used,
descriptions of "perps", etc. If police were called there were times it
would take over an hour for them to arrive. There were numerous times
the police DID show up, got the information and actually found the
people who were stealing. Store employee's ALWAYS knew when a group was
coming into steal. A group of six or more walked into the store, each
person would grab a cart and then split up going different directions.
Once they were done "shopping", they made a mad dash to the front door
where a car was waiting just outside with the engine running. A day or
two later, the stolen items would appear on the local "Craigs List".
These people should ALL be taken to a deserted island with just the
basic necessities (a camping "starting kit"). Once on the island they
can either kill each other or learn to WORK TO SURVIVE. Living off the
tax payer has become a way of life and it's past time for this to STOP.
And by the way, Kansas is a SOLID RED trump state, just in case anyone
wants to blame Democrats.