Macy's in downtown Philadelphia is marked with yellow crime scene tape.
Police investigating a deadly double stabbing, they say happened Monday
after two unarmed security guards stopped a would be shoplifter.
The security here backs off and gets the merchandise back.
Allows the male to go on.
But about ten minutes later, police say the man returned to the store
and stabbed one of the guards and then the other after he tried to help.
Another day, another retail theft story.
Unfortunately, this time it involves two unarmed security guards getting stabbed by
this shoplifter, who they had confronted as he was attempting to steal merchandise
from this Macy's in Philadelphia.
Now, unfortunately, after he left, he came back and proceeded to stab
one of the security guards, a 27 year old by the name of Eric Harrison,
tragically killing him as a result.
But he also stabbed the second security guard, as that security guard showed up
to help his friend after he got stabbed.
Now, this particular Macy's in Philadelphia has been dealing with a lot.
Let's watch this Macy's store is a hotbed of shoplifting, with over 250
reported retail thefts so far this year.
The deadly incident comes as retail crimes have been getting
a lot of attention nationwide.
Though there's conflicting data on nationwide shoplifting, it is up in
some major cities, including New York and Los Angeles, where a flash mob
recently stole $12,000 worth of apparel from a Nike store in Philadelphia.
Police say there has been an uptick in property theft this year,
including shoplifting.
Now, one of the city's most popular department stores has also
become the scene of a violent crime.
Yes. Okay, but what if.
Just hear me out here.
What if we conduct a study that looks at shoplifting across the country
while excluding those big cities?
Then one could argue shoplifting actually down.
Oh, down in America. In fact, a study actually did just that.
And reporters were stupid enough to just write the results
as if they should be taken seriously.
So let's get into it.
Okay, so as CNN reports, a study released last month,
pay close attention here, guys.
Drawing on police data found that shoplifting reports were 16% higher in
the first half of 2023 compared with 2019.
But critically critically, if you exclude New York City's stats, the number
of shoplifting incidents actually fell 7%, or about 2550 fewer than in 2019,
according to the Council on Criminal Justice, which conducted the study.
Okay, we're going to get to the Council on Criminal Justice in just a moment,
because clearly this is not an unbiased source that did this study.
It is a nonprofit that gets donations for pushing for, in their minds,
criminal justice reform, in my mind, soft on crime policies that have
been terrorizing people in big cities.
Okay.
But like the fact that they literally printed that
if you just exclude New York City.
Actually in the area. Shoplifting.
Down. Not up.
Down. No. Come on.
Guys, the problem is the big cities, right?
Nobody's saying that there's an epidemic of shoplifting in Dubuque.
They're talking about San Francisco, LA, New York, etc.
that's been the story the whole time.
It's a joke of a study. And why would you exclude New York anyway?
What a weird thing to do, right?
Unless you wanted to have the numbers seem like they were going down
when they were actually going up.
- That's exactly right. - Right.
It's you know, look, guys, to be fair, the number of fruits and vegetables
have gone down a lot in America.
When you take out fruits or vegetables, like anybody can play this game,
there's a very silly game.
What were the numbers overall, why are you taking out the things
that don't help your cause?
It's I mean, it's just so brazen.
So CNN's reporting actually didn't include the entirety
of their analysis and findings.
And when I say they I'm referring to the Council on Criminal Justice.
So I did a lot of digging on this story.
And so what else did they find through their analysis?
The median value of goods stolen in shoplifting incidents grew from about $75
in 2019 to roughly $100 in 2021, excluding
cases ranking in the top 10% by value.
The value of stolen goods in the vast majority 90% of shoplifting
incidents in 2021 was $756 or less,
a $184 increase from 2019.
So even with their tricky methodology, there was still an like a significant
increase in the value of the merchandise that was being stolen.
- You know what that reminds me of? - It's amazing.
Sometimes in order to help the rich, what they'll do in Congress
is they'll play think tanks.
We'll play these tricks where they're like, well, if you include
the dis exclude the top 0.1%.
Actually, the rich are paying their fair share.
But wait, why are we excluding the richest people in the world
and the ones doing them?
The greatest tax evasion?
No. What they do is they'll focus on the dollar amount they pay in taxes as
opposed to the percentage of their income.
- So people play. - With these numbers.
All the time.
And that's why it's our job to look through it
and tell you what the reality is.
There's more. There's more.
From their study, the proportion of reported shoplifting incidents
that involved an assault or other crime rose 9% from 2019 to 2021,
but constitutes a small share less than 2% of overall shoplifting events.
Store assaults were 7% lower in the first half of 2023
than in the first half of 2022.
But like, I hate when they do this.
No, no no, please compare the numbers to before the pandemic.
And when they actually do that, they were 8% higher, okay, 8% higher
for the same period compared to 2019.
In other words, things have in fact gotten worse, even with them doing
these tricky maneuvers of excluding things that are inconvenient for their study,
things have gotten worse.
They have no choice but to confess and admit that, the share of shoplifting
incidents categorized as felonies in five of the cities nearly doubled
from about 8% prior to the pandemic to almost 16% in the first half of 2023.
But then, they note, inconveniently, that state statutes set felony
theft dollar thresholds in California, it is not considered a felony.
Okay, so like that skews the numbers. And there's another thing to keep in mind.
The reporting of these incidents is spotty, to say the least,
especially if you're living in a state that has, you know, some of
these prosecutors who refuse to prosecute.
So calling the cops usually leads to nothing
because the cops won't do anything.
So they just don't even bother reporting the incidents.
That is a problem as well.
Finally, I want to get to the Council on Criminal Justice because they push
for criminal justice reform and in order to continue receiving donations, which is
how they make their revenue, you need to make the case that we need to soften
laws on crime, and you can't do that if you're in the middle of a crime spike.
If you see more and more of these smash and grab incidents,
or more and more of these retail theft situations leading to the closures
of various stores in these big cities.
And so Adam Gelb, who's the CEO and president of the Council
on Criminal Justice, says the overall data doesn't indicate a great shift
in the average shoplifting event.
But the brazen ransacking incidents, coordinated on social media
and captured on video, clearly suggests there is a sense
of lawlessness afoot that anything goes.
That's because in some parts of the country, anything goes.
I think it's pretty hard to deny that, and I'm going to make my case
for that in just a moment.
Okay?
We typically think of serious violent crimes like mass shootings
as the offenses that spark fear and drive the politics of crime.
But these mass shoplifting events have the potential to derail two decades
of criminal justice reform.
That is what they're concerned about.
And they're concerned about it because, well, why don't we look
at their financial filings they get.
A ton of money, millions and millions of dollars in donations from like private
entities, philanthropic organizations in order to push for criminal justice reform.
That's their whole shtick. That is how they make their money.
That is how they make a living.
And when you take a look at their financial filings
and where the majority of the money goes, let's go to the next graphic.
This is from ProPublica.
They look at the financial filings of nonprofits.
This is a nonprofit.
And you'll notice that 44.2% of their total expenses in 2021
went to executive compensation.
Another 14.1% went to other salaries and wages.
So, in other words, just to be abundantly clear here,
almost 60% of their revenue just goes to salaries, just goes to salaries.
This is how these people make their living.
So if you start arguing, hey, there's a crime spike.
And maybe some of these reforms are actually not helping
but hurting communities.
Well then that puts their livelihood at jeopardy on At risk.
Let me give you the other graphic.
Let's take a look, because it'll show you how much some
of these executives are making.
This is again from their 2021 filing. So Mark Levin, who's the chief policy
counsel, base salary of $163,726 and then
another $10,463 in other compensation.
And if you look closely, I mean, a few of them make close to $200,000 a year
at a nonprofit, which, of course, doesn't get taxed and promotes policies
that are devastating for some communities.
So, like, what are we doing here, you guys, if people are going
to send me a study about how no, actually retail theft is low, please look
into the methodology before doing that.
That's all I'm saying.
Okay. Let me.
So first, I'm not overly concerned about this, Alex,
I get what you're saying about, they want to keep their livelihood going.
Those are not giant numbers. I've seen much worse.
But having said that, I work for a nonprofit.
You're supposed to spend the bulk of your money doing the thing that you're doing.
That's good in the world, right? So?
So spending it, most of it, or a lot of it on executive compensation
is is is a little problematic.
Okay.
But I think that the the numbers that they're putting out into the world
is much more problematic.
And and the direction is to.
So first off like whenever you see crime numbers,
guys, you got to be super careful because they play a thousand tricks with them.
And so they're like, oh, the last six months have gone down dramatically.
Yeah. But why?
It's because before that crime had spiked so high that it dips a little bit,
and then you brag about how it dipped a little bit.
No, the whole point is everybody's saying things have changed since 2019.
So you've got to go back to that time and say, okay, what did we change
and what were the results?
Which leads me to the most important substantive part of this, which is, guys,
we've been asking for criminal justice reform on this show for as long
as the show has been around over 20 years.
Right.
What do we mean by criminal justice reform?
Things like marijuana possession, white people, black people smoke marijuana
about the same rate, but black people are put in jail at 3.7 times the rate.
That's 370%. Why that's so unfair.
We need criminal justice reform.
Stop putting people in jail for marijuana possession, especially when the elites
do it all the time and never go to jail.
Right?
So, stop beating up on black people in the streets, stop, kneeling on their neck
and killing them, etc..
All the police abuse that we've been talking about.
- Reform the prison. - Hold on, hold on.
Reform the prisons, reform the prisons, reform the prisons.
Please, for the love of God, reform the prisons to rehabilitate people so they
don't go back to prison after they're let out, you know, like common sense things
that actually improve people's lives.
- But we've done none of that. - Okay, okay.
So yes, like we've said a hundred times on this show, why is rape in prison okay?
Everybody's like, oh yeah, that's funny. It's not funny.
It's we.
Norway has much better prisons and their recidivism rate is much lower.
That means there is less crime. That's what we want to get to.
So we protect the citizens, right? And we protect people's rights.
So how did we go from there?
From those good intentions to protecting shoplifters?
I don't ever remember arguing for.
Oh, my God, we got to let the shoplifters go.
No one that I know of until some portions of the left lost their minds,
had ever thought that criminal justice reform was let the criminals out.
And by the way, no, that's not a thing.
Why some of these people that are charged, that are released, without bail,
without etc. is like domestic abuse.
What part of criminal justice reform was let's allow for more domestic abuse.
- So let's get. - To that junk.
Let's get to that, okay?
Because I want to actually revisit the incident that happened in Philly
where, a guy in his 20s, unarmed security guard, stabbed to death.
Okay, he was stabbed in the groin, stabbed in the neck, stabbed in the back.
Gone.
Young man lost his life as a result of this.
Okay, now, police said that retail thefts on the 1300 block of Market Street
where Macy's is located nearly doubled between 2019 to the present,
from 133 incidents to 247 incidents.
Luckily, police arrested the suspect.
He was seen on surveillance, so they're pretty certain this is the guy.
He's a 30 year old guy who has a long rap sheet.
We'll get to that in just a moment. His name is Tyrone.
Tunnel or tunnel?
He has a super long criminal record that shows that he's been arrested
at least a dozen times since 2010.
Arrests include, robbery, more retail theft, drug related crimes.
They didn't get detailed about what those crimes were.
And I want to talk a little bit about the prosecutor in Philadelphia, right.
Larry Krasner, who I previously was supportive of and totally regret it.
Both arrests and charges for retail theft cases have fallen by about 75% since 2017,
when Krasner assumed office.
He has generally pursued policies seeking less jail time for retail offenses,
which he says saves taxpayer dollars and frees prosecutors to pursue
more serious criminal offenders.
Have you?
No, he hasn't, but which some merchants say has increased shoplifting.
And, guys, I want to be clear about something.
Shoplifting, I feel like, is not the right word
to describe what we're concerned about.
I am not concerned about prosecuting someone who steals a shirt
or steals like some small thing.
I don't care about that.
I'm specifically referring to the individuals who have taken these
soft on crime policies as an opportunity.
They have taken advantage and they have no problem.
This this stabbing happened at like 1030 in the morning
on a Monday in a busy city center.
Okay. It is brazen.
The message that we're sending to these people is do whatever you want.
There will be no punishment.
Go ahead. Enjoy.
Have fun, wreak havoc on these neighborhoods, on these communities.
And I don't want to sign on to that. I'm totally against that.
Anyone who does sign on to that, I want to ask,
do you not care about these communities?
The guy who got stabbed to death was a black guy.
Do you not care about that guy? It's insane.
And the reason you even have to point out his race is because now everything
is identity politics.
Oh, they attacked a white guy in the subway.
That's okay. No, it's not okay.
They attacked a white woman, so that's okay.
That's not. Oh, she was a Karen.
No. She wasn't. What are you talking about?
Stop! Come on.
So, guys, the number one problem is repeat offenders.
So that long rap sheet that Anna just read you is the new logic
of some portions of the left.
Oh, he's just doing it because he's poor.
And if he was, we, you know, ameliorated that situation that he wouldn't know.
- Guys that is what they tell them. - True.
For one time offenders sometimes and oftentimes in in macro situations.
But for the repeat offenders they're not it's not like oh golly gee I was poor.
And that's why I committed crime after crime.
And I stabbed that guy and hit that lady in the face with a brick.
You're supposed to care about everyone, including the citizens.
Well, rooting for injustice against the citizens
is crazy and nowhere near progressive.
We're for justice for everyone.
We don't want people who are innocent being put away, and we don't want people
who are guilty walking around the streets committing more injustice
against the average American.
Yep. Thanks for watching.
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