Shoplifting Spikes in the US During First Half of 2024

Many serious and violent crimes have been trending downward in the U.S.—but retail thefts have spiked during the first half of 2024.

California's $1.7M Smash-and-Grab Thieves Sentenced

The first six months of the year saw the average rate of shoplifting balloon by 24 percent over the same period in 2023, according to recently released data from the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ). A report on crime trends in dozens of U.S. cities released this month showed a marked increase from rates of shoplifting seen last year, especially in February and March (up 30 percent) and May (up 37 percent).

Shoplifting declined substantially during the pandemic, dropping 15 percent between 2019 and 2020 and decreasing again by 10 percent between 2020 and 2021. However, the pilfering of products from store shelves grew by 12 percent between 2022 and 2023.

Notably, shoplifting began to contract in the back half of last year, and the last six months of 2023 saw a country-wide average 10 percent lower than pre-Covid. But between January and June of 2024, trends grew to exceed 2019 averages by 10 percent.

CCJ analyzed insights from the online portals of city police departments that provided monthly incident-level data from January 2018 through June 2024. Thirty-nine cities in total provided data for the report, selected based on the availability of data at the time of CCJ’s collection in early July. They include sizable metropolitan hubs like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Chicago, Denver, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle, along with smaller cities like Austin, Tex., Charlotte, N.C., and Buffalo, N.Y.

Twelve types of crime—homicide, aggravated assault, gun assault, domestic violence, robbery, carjacking, residential burglary, nonresidential burglary, larceny, shoplifting, motor vehicle theft, and drug offenses—were analyzed, and offense counts were converted to monthly crime rates per 100,000 city residents in order to arrive at the analysis for monthly and half-year trends.

“Overall, the findings show an encouraging trend, with levels of 11 of the 12 crimes covered in the report lower in the first half of 2024 than in 2023,” report writers Ernesto Lopez, CCJ senior research specialist, and Bobby Boxerman, graduate research assistant at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, wrote. “Looking over a longer period, the analysis suggests that most offenses in the sample cities are returning to 2019 levels, though some are not.”

Violent crimes like homicide, aggravated assault and gun assault have dropped, but “[a]s for property crimes, patterns are shifting for two offenses that have drawn considerable attention from the media and policymakers: motor vehicle theft and shoplifting,” the report said. “Shoplifting, especially ‘smash-and-grab’ episodes caught on video, has reshaped the look and feel of retail outlets and prompted a wave of initiatives—some with multi-million dollar budgets—in multiple jurisdictions in the past year.”

While the mid-year data shows a concerning increase from 2023, “more investigation is needed to untangle what’s driving the trend and discern how much it may be due to a rise in actual shoplifting or a rise in the rates at which retailers are reporting incidents to law enforcement,” the writers added.

Washington, D.C.-Area Lululemon Stores Struck Repeatedly by Thieves

Concrete reporting surrounding the rate of crimes like shoplifting is notoriously lacking in the U.S. Indeed, some retailers have historically been less than willing to report retail crimes or coordinate with law enforcement on prevention measures and sting operations. Some stores have even been criticized by law enforcement for seemingly prioritizing optics over consumer and staff safety .

But the issue extends to the way insights are gathered and synthesized. Magnus Loftstrom, policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California , said earlier this year that the state’s retail crime data is both limited, extending back only to December 2022, and confusing, as agencies across the state differ in how they report and categorize offenses. This impedes the standardization of data on a statewide level, and when taking into account shoplifting trends across the country, the task becomes even more formidable.

The uptick in shoplifting over the past six months, which follows vacillations trending upward over the past two years, is at least somewhat attributable to macroeconomic factors, according to a study released by LendingTree last week.

Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of Americans admit to having shoplifted in the past, and 90 percent of those who did it recently said they felt squeezed by inflation and the state of the economy . More than one-third of those who copped to stealing from stores said they did so because prices have become otherwise unaffordable.

The group referenced U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey that showed financial insecurity—defined as difficulty paying for necessities like food, housing and medicine—has increased by 6.7 percent since 2022. Among Americans between the ages of 18 and 24, that figure nearly quadrupled to 25 percent over the two-year period.

In April, when the data was collected, 36.4 percent of Americans expressed experiencing significant challenges in paying for household expenses.

“It’s troubling that one in three American households are financially insecure, but it shouldn’t be terribly surprising,” LendingTree chief credit analyst Matt Schulz wrote. “The perfect storm of record debt, sky-high interest rates and stubborn inflation has resulted in many Americans’ financial margin of error shrinking to virtually zero.”

Crime-Plagued CA Target's 'Outrageous' Public Nuisance Warning a Hoax?