Look online, and you might notice more stories about retail theft — and particularly, a type of theft dubbed “smash and grab,” in which groups of people run through stores, taking as much merchandise as possible in a short amount of time. 

In response to this perceived rise in store robberies, retailers are demanding harsher punishments for retail theft, and some have even threatened to close stores if theft continues to rise. So far this year, nine states have passed legislation cracking down on organized retail crime. 

But is theft really rising? 

After seeing then-Walgreens executive James Kehoe admit that “maybe we cried too much” over shoplifting at some now-closed San Francisco locations, Nicole Lewis, an editor at The Marshall Project, took a deeper look and found that the story of retail crime is not as simple as retailers might have you think. 

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal talked to Lewis about her reporting on retail crime. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Kai Ryssdal: Do we know, and how do we know, whether retail crime is actually going up or not? 

Nicole Lewis: Yeah, that is the question here, really. So when I started looking into this, I was looking to see if there was any data collected by police departments about retail crime, just to get a sense of the numbers. And what I found was that the main information that we have about retail theft ostensibly increasing actually comes from a lobbyist company — a retail lobbying firm that says, “Retail crime is up, it costs us $90 billion a year, it’s a big issue, and we need stiffer sentences in order to deal with it.” But when I dug deep into their report, what I found was that retail theft, by their own accounting, has remained stable from 2016 to about 2022. So even their own numbers don’t give us a sense that the problem is increasing. But retailers are finding what’s happening in their stores more worrisome. 

Ryssdal: Why do you suppose they’re finding it more worrisome? 

Lewis: I think it’s partially because we’ve all probably seen videos on social media about what are called “smash and grabs.” So, this is when a team of people come into a store and they’re frantically stealing things off the shelves as a group. These kinds of experiences seem to be escalating and really giving retailers a huge concern for how they deal with something like this. 

Ryssdal: And it also gives the public concern because it’s troubling to see those kinds of videos. So that’s sort of the public-facing part. What about the business and finance journalism part of this? Because there are CEOs who on earnings calls are talking about shrinkage and retail theft, and it affecting their bottom lines in the future. What do we do with that? 

Lewis: So actually, this is exactly what first got me to looking into retail theft and what was going on. I heard a Walgreens executive walk back the company’s claims that shoplifting had gotten out of hand. And if folks remember, just a few years prior, Walgreens tried to use shoplifting as the reason behind their decision to close five stores in San Francisco in 2021. And they were called out basically to say, “Hey, we know that these stores were planned closures, and you can’t actually use shoplifting as a narrative cover for this.” 

Ryssdal: What do we know about the reporting on this? I mean, police officers and police departments and the FBI are extremely heavily papered. They have reports on everything. Do they break out retail theft from regular robbery and larceny? What do we know about that? 

Lewis: That’s a great question. So, even the notion that they have reports on everything, I’d sort of push back on that. 

Ryssdal: I guess it just seems like they do, you know?

Lewis: Exactly, exactly. They’re expected to report, you know, even more serious crimes like homicide or murder. But a large share of law enforcement agencies actually don’t report their crime data to the FBI. That’s the place where we’d get a sense nationally of what’s happening across the country. And then the other thing is that when I went poking around, I sort of said, “Well, does anybody break out shoplifting as a specific category of crime within general theft?” And so far I couldn’t find an agency that was doing that. 

Ryssdal: So where do we go from here? Because as you and I and listeners all know, the headlines get grabbed by a rise in crime, or percentage increases, or what have you. And your reporting, and this conversation, lets us believe that that’s not necessarily the case. So where do we go from here? 

Lewis: The first thing that comes to mind is when CEOs and executives go on these shows and just sort of say, “Shoplifting is out of control. We need help. We need stiffer sentences” — I would challenge and ask the host to question, “Well, where are you getting this data?” And then the second part is once we do have a clearer picture, there are many strategies that we could take to think about how to address retail crime. If we really had a better picture of how this works, we could make better arguments for the tools that we use to combat them. 

Ryssdal: You know, it’s funny, the thing I’m getting from this conversation is we really don’t know. 

Lewis: Yeah. To me, that was the headline.