Property isn't theft

'Petty crime' isn't petty

Rye Lane, Peckham, where a dispute over alleged shoplifting revealed underlying racial tensions between black and Asian Londoners

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In the late 1990s I found myself in rural Texas. The local sheriff sauntered into the bar where I was drinking, a Sam Elliott lookalike wearing a plaid shirt, faded jeans and a ten-gallon hat. There was a .45 on his hip and a silver star on his chest. One of the (many) reasons I love the Lone Star State is reality often lives up to fiction.

I got talking to the sheriff - Texans are a friendly bunch. We compared our beats - London was 50-odd miles across, with a seasonally adjusted population of around 11 million people. His jurisdiction was 5000 square miles with a population of just over 10 thousand. ‘How many cops do you have?’ I asked him.

‘Six,’ he replied. ‘Seven if you include my dog.’

I bought the sheriff a drink. He was on duty, but that didn’t seem to matter. For the record, it was a ‘boilermaker’, a domestic beer with a whisky chaser dropped in the top. ‘Six cops? How’s that possible?’ I asked.

The sheriff contemplated his drink. Then he smiled, his face creasing like an old saddlebag. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘in these parts? Folks kinda figure out their own problems.’

That was a quarter of a century ago. Now, Americans from California’s once-gilded coastal cities are heading east. To states like Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Florida - places with lower taxes and crime and higher levels of social cohesion and law enforcement. I daresay the sheriff’s Texan jurisdiction now has significantly larger population density, as middle-class Americans vote with their feet and decamp from crime-ridden cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Cities with crumbling infrastructure, urban decay and plagued with homelessness and fentanyl addiction.

The West Coast is also overwhelmingly run, it has to be said, by the progressive left. Activist-politicians, big on defunding the police, identity politics and decriminalising petty crime. Of course, the irony is progressively-minded liberal Americans who move east might vote for the kind of policies which made them relocate in the first place. As the American geographer and social commentator Joel Kotkin writes;

The damage has been remarkably self-inflicted, reflecting the reckless growth of a set of progressive dogmas, tough on police and permissive toward criminals and vagrants while imposing ever more burdens on what is left of the middle class.

The results of these policies are particularly evident in tech-rich San Francisco, where decades of tolerance for even extreme deviant behaviour has helped create a city with more drug addicts than high school students… in Southern California’s far more proletarian city of Los Angeles, a UN official last year compared conditions on downtown’s Skid Row to those in Syrian refugee camps. Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Oakland, Portland and Seattle show some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the country.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to shoplifting, organised crime, Peckham and the 19th Century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Los Angeles, 2023. Shoplifters loot a department store after the city decriminalised theft of property under the value of $950 (a law called ‘Proposition 47’)

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It was Proudhon who famously posited ‘Property is Theft’ (often incorrectly attributed to Karl Marx). The left’s traditional disdain for property rights - the idea that there’s an existential unfairness in one person being wealthier than another - has traditionally been a stone in the shoe of progressives when it comes to law enforcement. Sure, there are other shibboleths around race, gender, sexuality and all the rest of it (indeed, for many on the left, this new iteration of progressive politics is an unwelcome distraction from economic inequality).

Nonetheless Proudhon’s battle-cry has rung down the ages. One doesn’t have to look far to find fashionable theories of theft-as-justified-social-protest, especially in the increasingly bonkers United States. Smashing up shops. Rioting. Stealing trainers and television sets. All of these are ‘powerful tools for dismantling white supremacy.’

You can hear me sighing as I write, can’t you? Because it’s working-class communities and the disadvantaged who suffer most from police defunding and, yes, the dismantling of property rights. Not that the progressive (and overwhelmingly privileged) elites running American cities - whose ideas are spreading like knotweed in the UK - care. They’re lost in a wilderness of mirrors, a place where they only see theoretical versions of reality reflected back at them. Their disdain for effective policing reminds me of a joke originating in the French civil service - that might work in practice, but it’ll never work in theory.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, presumably planning on snaffling the camera for the wider benefit of his commune.

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As a young policeman, I saw common-or-garden shoplifters as an occasional inconvenience, a by-the-numbers arrest for probationers. They were, at best, handy for getting out of the rain for a few hours. Shoplifting was usually what was known as a GIC offence (‘given into custody’), i.e. a more or less oven-ready ‘body’. Then, gaining more experience, I realised some shoplifters were part of the wider criminal ecosystem I policed.

You’d turn up at a supermarket to find the suspect (it could be anyone, by the way, from an old lady, to a schoolkid, to some random bloke spoiling for a fight) sitting in the security room. The security guard would make the allegation of theft as the suspect stared glumly at the goods they’d stolen. You’d take the shoplifter back to the station, book them in and interview them. Then a charge (which police were allowed to do without asking the CP-bloody-S) and bail. If they were a minor, you’d fill out a Form 78 (I think), ‘Child coming to notice of Police’ for the local authority.

There could be a surprising amount of problem-solving. For example, in 1993 I arrested a Somali woman with three kids in tow. She’d stolen enough joints of meat to make a Damien Hurst sculpture. The woman needed a lawyer, a translator and some babysitters. ‘Over to you,’ said the custody sergeant.

Shoplifters were usually, for the value of the property concerned, a lot of hard work. Which was when the time-and-motion people realised it was more cost-effective to downgrade the whole palaver, rather than tackling the bureaucracy plaguing the criminal justice system. Instead, police were freed to wander around wearing dayglo jackets for ‘community reassurance’ instead, like pieces of mobile street furniture. Smoke and mirrors.

Nonetheless, property rights are… rights. They’re a principle. You either uphold them, or you don’t. It doesn’t matter if you’re the bloke who owns Sainsbury’s or the guy running a convenience store.

Anyhow, the time-and-motion people won. Shoplifting (and low-value theft in general) was instead ‘managed’ via fines, cautions, private prosecutions, security companies and coppers shrugging their shoulders. Police would only intervene if things got violent. And, yes, there was an erosion of property rights (dressed up as a ‘proportionality test’) where thefts involving anything less than ‘X’ amount were effectively decriminalised (but God help a member of the public laying a hand on a thief). This approach spread to other offences, including criminal damage and vehicle crime. Then, it seemed, to virtually anything else except for bank robberies, riots and terrorist attacks.

This, in the UK, was despite the success of ‘Zero Tolerance’ policing models, inspired by Zimbardo’s ‘broken windows’ theory. These were famously trialled in New York during the 1990s. Tolerating small crimes, Zimbardo argued, leads to a permissive environment for larger crimes. Anyone who fails to see the logic in this theory has clearly never followed the goings-on in the Houses of Parliament. Or, indeed, the Metropolitan Police.

Of course, the success of Zero Tolerance policing is deeply disputed by most academics and criminologists (most of who swing left politically). Indeed, click on the links above and you’ll see our own esteemed College of Policing has disavowed Zero Tolerance, which goes to show quite how hopeless the place is.

Over the years I’ve spoken with operational NYPD officers, all of who strongly believed the tactic works. And, most importantly, it provides respite for people living in the most crime-ridden communities plagued by recidivists. This, again, runs contrary to the narrative that Zero Tolerance unfairly targets minorities. But what do cops know? They’re low-status. Running dogs of capitalism. Plebs.

Remember, these academics influence the activist-politicians running San Francisco and LA. The Mayor of London, a leftish former human rights lawyer with a mixed track record on policing, might well agree with them too. He’s more interested in fining the law-abiding for reasons of ecological virtue, though, something I moaned about last week.

Academics, lost in their wilderness of mirrors, are loath to listen to non-experts (especially from the police), preferring conferences where they can virtue-signal, plunder the plant-based buffet and hoover up research money to perpetuate the endless circle-jerk of theorising. These are also places where overly ambitious police officers lurk, the ‘Vichy Cops’ (as the peerless police blogger Richard Horton memorably called them) who’ll agree to anything if it gets them promoted to the next rank.

Although, it should be said, Richard’s a man of the principled left. He might disagree with some of my views. Nonetheless, I happily accept the principled left respects property rights. It understands the disproportionate impact of crime on poorer communities. I am assured, for example, Labour’s deputy Angela Rayner is agreeably old-school on law and order. Sadly, the Boomer-ish principled left has been increasingly shouldered out of the way by their shoutier Millennial and Gen Z cousins. People whose perception of ‘reality’ comes, too often, from a screen.

Really? Haven’t these people seen ‘The Purge’? Sometimes I think a week-long police strike would be like an icy bath for Gen Z.

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The police retreat from petty crime had other unwelcome consequences. At a micro level, dealing with a shoplifter might be time-consuming, but all the building blocks of criminal investigation are there; witnesses. Victims. Statements. Exhibits. Case law. Interviews. Charging. And if you get it wrong? Okay, it’s not the end of the world if someone’s found ‘not guilty’ of stealing eight cans of cider.

Dealing with petty crimes maketh the cop.

I’m sure the skills atrophy among many officers - and issues with file preparation - are partly due to young, inexperienced coppers being thrown in at the deep end.

Furthermore, shoplifters aren’t just… shoplifters. Is the young girl stealing cosmetics selling them to fund a drug habit? Is there a safeguarding opportunity being missed? Is the guy bulk-stealing razor blades or steaks to flog down the pub an addict? Who’s his dealer? What other crimes is he committing? Where does he sell the stolen gear? Is the fifteen year old bunking off school and pilfering from a corner shop vulnerable? If he’s dealt with now (yes, that might involve a caution or even the old-fashioned walk of shame home), will it divert him from more serious crime?

Community policing is policing. Ironically, the more specialist work I did, the more I realised the importance of what we coldly described as ‘NIM Level One’ crime. Every penny stolen from corner shops or supermarkets subsequently spent on crack or heroin is, eventually, going into the pocket of a crime lord. It follows making the street a hostile place for low-tier criminals to do business makes life more difficult for the bosses. Close down the crack houses and the moody money-laundering nail bars and the pubs where the stolen goods are flogged.

Any police officer interested in this stuff should read Freakonomics, the only book on economics they’ll ever need to trouble themselves with.

I can’t believe I’m having to explain this shit to academics, but he we are. I’m not suggesting my way of looking at crime is a panacea, because there’ll always be weak links. But the less weak links there are, the more difficult it is for criminal enterprises to prosper. It’s what law enforcement and government, at the strategic level, should be looking to achieve. Organised crime is a societal cancer. It taints everything it touches, a necrosis-carrying monster. I’d treat organised crime bosses like terrorists, personally, but I’m a kinetic-minded person when it comes to this stuff. Too kinetic, I suspect, for the average criminology conference.

It follows that organised crime - at every level - couldn’t exist without local criminal activity. Zero tolerance is a tool (not the only one, but it’s a starter for ten) for mitigating it.

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Which brings us to other unintended consequences of our retreat from local policing. A cosmetics store in Peckham, a part of London with a predominantly black community, is run by an Asian family. They say its become common for people to demand ‘refunds’ as a way to justify stealing products.

A young woman, who was black, became involved in a dispute over a refund and tried to leave the shop with hair products (total value = £24). The shopkeeper, who was Asian (and a big bloke, as it happens) restrained her. It looks ugly, as restraining people often does.

The video, of course, went viral.

It’s important to reiterate I don’t know exactly what happened. I wasn’t there. Video is situational. What I do think is likely is the shop undoubtedly experienced thefts, some committed by criminals emboldened by knowing the police (a) aren’t interested in shoplifting and (b) are extremely sensitive when it comes to community relations.

The result? A crowd gathered, protesting about racism by the shop owner. Then the store was closed down. Ironically, some of the language used about (Asian) shop owners in Peckham struck me as pretty prejudiced too. Now there’s a flashpoint in the area which will everyone’s lives more difficult - the wider community, business owners and police. The only people benefitting from this sad incident are shoplifters and activists who subscribe to defunding the police. A cynic might even wonder what their motives are.

Personally? I think they’d get on quite well with our old friend Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

The UK isn’t Texas. It’s a small country, full of video cameras and people looking to monetise anger via their smartphones. Going back to my sheriff friend, the British can’t ‘figure their problems out for themselves’, less it end up on YouTube and sparks a riot. In our atomised society, ‘small’ crimes are like discarded cigarettes in a firework factory. And if the police don’t stub them out, they’ll eventually have to deal with the inferno.

And there’s the problem, dear reader, with petty crime - it isn’t petty.

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Thanks for reading, subscribing and sharing. I genuinely appreciate it. I’ll be back the week after next.