by Don Surber
The New York Times story did not say what its editors and their flying monkeys thought it said.
The headline said, “A Tiny Number of Shoplifters Commit Thousands of New York City Thefts.”
OK, you don’t need a J-school degree to figure out the message sent. Not everyone in NYC is boosting $4,500 Louis Vuitton purses. It is just a few people. Whew. What a relief to know this.
The subheadline said, “Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Businesses say they have little defense.”
You see? The looting is by just a few people.
The story said, “Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.”
You see? They are just crazy or on drugs.
That was the message NYT meant to send.
The story, however, is you can rob stores dozens of times and get away with it. My question is why don’t more people in NYC just rob stores blind every day? I mean, come on people. If 327 people can get caught 6,000 times and get away with it, what is stopping 8 million people from looting Tiffany’s every morning and Macy’s every afternoon.
Maybe they are. Who knows how many New Yorkers steal and how many times they get away with it because the 327 people were just the ones the police caught. And the 6,000 arrests are just the times the 327 got caught.
Once again, NYT staffers throw a bunch of numbers around at random. You really cannot say, “A Tiny Number of Shoplifters Commit Thousands of New York City Thefts,” because the numbers reflect arrests, not crimes. And of course, there is the whole innocent-until-proven guilty thing that NYT conveniently forgets from time to time. So you cannot say commit.
NYT argued that stealing $4,500 Louis Vuitton purses is a crime of necessity. Its report said, “Criminal justice reform advocates have said that petty thefts are a crime of necessity, and that many down-on-their-luck New Yorkers are stealing what they need to survive in one of the world’s most expensive cities.”
And NYT also argued, “Retailers have pointed to shoplifting as a drag on profits for decades.”
Once again, the criminal is the victim. How dare the stores make profits!
That 327 people apparently are permitted by New York police and prosecutors to rob at will is the real story.
In response to the story, Byron York tweeted, “Hey — this is something the Manhattan district attorney could look into! He’s dedicating to showing that no man is above the law, and here are 327 people who appear to be above the law.”
For reasons undisclosed — but well known — groups of people are above the law.
The Christian Science Monitor reported, “Flash mob attacks: Rising concern over black teen involvement.
“From Milwaukee to Philadelphia to Chicago, officials are enforcing curfews and requiring chaperones for teens, after several flash mob attacks allegedly involving black youths.”
But that was 12 years ago. The story quoted J. Whyatt Mondesire, head of the NAACP in Philadelphia. He said, “These are majority African-American youths and they need to be called on it.”
That was then. Liberals now call enforcing the law racist.
On June 18, 2020, NYT ran a column by Robin D. G. Kelley, a black man with a PhD in history, “What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?
“The hackneyed emphasis on ‘Why loot?’ obscures the question, which black people have asked for centuries.”
He argued that looting and ransacking stores is a form or reparations — money for people who were never slaves from people who never owned slaves.
Kelley wrote, “Our country was built on looting — the looting of Indigenous lands and African labor. African-Americans, in fact, have much more experience being looted than looting. The long history of ‘race riots’ in America — in Cincinnati; Philadelphia; Detroit; New York; Memphis; Wilmington, N.C.; Atlanta; New Orleans; Springfield, Ill.; East St. Louis; Chicago; and Tulsa, Okla. — more closely resembled anti-black pogroms than ghetto rebellions. White mobs, often backed by the police, not only looted and burned black homes and businesses but also maimed and killed black people.”
(Note to self: do a column for the Hough riot’s 67th anniversary in July.)
Kelley went on and on: “Our bodies were loot. The forced extraction of our labor was loot. A system of governance that suppressed our wages, relieved us of property and excluded black people from equal schools and public accommodations is a form of looting. We can speak of the looting of black property through redlining, slum clearance and more recently predatory lending.”
This is a man who was born 8 years after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation and who came of age in the Era of Affirmative Action.
But those thieves are not important. Simple math has each one of the thieves arrested on average 18+ times annually.
For fat ass alvin, it is Trump who is the most egregious villain. And he must be convicted of a nothing crime so that all of America can be safe.
That is the state of play the democrat America.
Not only is Trump such a dangerous criminal, but he is SO dangerous that the charges against him have to be contrived and invented. Funny, as President, he was a fascist, anti-Constitutional and an existential threat to democracy, but he has never been accused of any specific crime related to his presidency. Though impeached twice, all his “crimes” were committed before and after his term. Ain’t that kind of weird?
Another point missed, but all too obvious, is that if you keep releasing criminals after they commit crimes, they will continue committing crimes. Too bad the NYT didn’t cover how many were arrested for assault that, after being released, went on to commit another assault… until they ultimately murdered someone.
This is how Democrats keep the public safe. Every one of their “common sense gun laws” are aimed at everyone but the actual criminal.