Scott Alexander

in Los Angeles, and has, quote, gotten worse in San Francisco.

Plausibly, this is the same pattern as crime, which was declining for decades until COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests caused it to rebound in 2020.

A contrary data point is Britain, where graffiti reports almost doubled between 2013 to 2017.

I don't know enough about the British context to have an opinion.

Shoplifting.

According to FBI crime statistics, shoplifting remains well below historic highs, although still somewhat higher than the local minimum in 2005.

Here's a graph shoplifting in the United States from 1960 to 2020.

It shows a peak around 1990.

It had been climbing steadily since 1960, then it decreased and reached its local minimum in the early 2000s, and it's climbed slightly since.

Scott writes, even if we worry about the increase over the 2005 low, it seems to be only about 33% over 15 years, which should be hard to notice.

Strange.

The FBI runs a different shoplifting reporting program, NIBRS.

This does show a large increase since 2018, but is considered less reliable because new cities keep joining and so year-to-year reports aren't comparable.

Maybe the problem is limited to a few big cities.

What about San Francisco in particular?

Here's a graph, shoplifting in San Francisco versus national average, from 1960 to 2023.

It shows a peak around 1990 and a steady decrease since.

Scott writes, "...at least in these data, it's, if anything, less."

Okay, so could stores be failing to report to police?

Some stores say they're doing this, and there was an embarrassing incident, it might be the 2021 spike on the graph above, where two stores briefly changed their reporting policy and nearly doubled the total report number.