Chattanooga has the highest rate of reported shoplifting incidents per capita in the United States, a study from a national think tank found.
Shoplifting rates in the three largest U.S. cities — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — remain higher than they were before the pandemic, according to a report last month from the nonpartisan research group Council on Criminal Justice.
The sharp rise in retail theft in recent years has made shoplifting a hot-button issue, especially for politicians looking to address public safety concerns in their communities.
Since 2020, when viral videos of smash-and-grab robberies flooded social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans have expressed fears that crime is out of control. Polls show that perceptions have improved recently, but a majority of Americans still say crime is worse than in previous years.
"There is this sense of brazenness that people have — they can just walk in and steal stuff. ... That hurts the consumer, and it hurts the company," said Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Miami and former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, in an interview.
"That's just the world we live in," he said. "We need to get people to realize that you have to obey the law."
At least eight states — Arizona, California, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, New York and Vermont — passed a total of 14 bills in 2024 aimed at tackling retail theft, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The measures range from redefining retail crimes and adjusting penalties to allowing cross-county aggregation of theft charges and protecting retail workers.
Major retailers have responded to rising theft since 2020 by locking up merchandise, upgrading security cameras, hiring private security firms and even closing stores.
Still, the report indicates that shoplifting remains a stubborn problem.
In Chicago, the rate of reported shoplifting incidents remained below pre-pandemic levels throughout 2023 — but surged by 46% from January to October 2024 compared with the same period a year ago.
Shoplifting in Los Angeles was 87% higher in 2023 than in 2019. Police reports of shoplifting from January to October 2024 were lower than in 2023. Los Angeles adopted a new crime reporting system in March 2024, which has likely led to an undercount, according to the report.
In New York, shoplifting rose 48% from 2021 to 2022, then dipped slightly last year. Still, the shoplifting rate was 55% higher in 2023 than in 2019. This year, the shoplifting rate increased by 3% from January to September compared with the same period last year.
While shoplifting rates tend to rise in November and December, which coincides with in-person holiday shopping, data from the Council on Criminal Justice's sample of 23 U.S. cities shows higher rates in the first half of 2024 compared with 2023.
Researchers found it surprising that rates went up despite retailers doing more to fight shoplifting. Experts say the spike might reflect improved reporting efforts rather than a spike in theft.
"As retailers have been paying more attention to shoplifting, we would not expect the numbers to increase," said Ernesto Lopez, the report's author and a senior research specialist with the council. "It makes it a challenge to understand the trends of shoplifting."
Nationally, retailers are worried about organized theft. The National Retail Federation's latest report attributed 36% of the $112.1 billion in lost merchandise in 2022 to "external theft," which includes organized retail crime.
