The Council on Criminal Justice has released two new reports digging into shoplifting trends in several American cities.
One report, Between the Aisles: A Closer Looks at Shoplifting Trends, which looks at 2024 data in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, suggests that “shoplifting levels remain higher than pre-2020 rates, ” and are likely to rise between 2023 and 2024. It also warns that shoplifting tends to increase over the holidays, coinciding with increased in-person retail shopping.
“Bigger crowds are a welcome sight for retailers, but they also amplify concerns about shoplifting and the safety of the shopping experience for consumers and employees alike,” the report notes.
Here are the main takeaways from the 2024 shoplifting trends in the three cities.
In Chicago, the rate of reported shoplifting remained below pre-2020 levels throughout 2023. However, from January to October 2024, reported shoplifting in the city is 46% higher than during those same months in 2023. In fact, reported shoplifting in the first 10 months of 2024 was higher than in all 12 months of each of the preceding six years.
For Los Angeles, shoplifting was 87% higher by the end of 2023 than in 2019. Though reported shoplifting has been lower from January to October 2024 than during those same months in 2023, shoplifting is likely undercounted due to the city’s adoption of a new reporting system in March 2024 (see above for note on Los Angeles data).
New York follows a different trend, with reported shoplifting increasing 48% from 2021 to 2022 before falling slightly in 2023. Despite that dip, shoplifting was 55% higher in 2023 than in 2019, before the pandemic began. This year, the shoplifting rate in New York from January to September was slightly higher (3%) than during the same period in 2023.
The Council also released another report, Shoplifting Trends in Time and Space: A Study of Two American Cities, that takes a granular look at shoplifting data in Chicago and New York between 2018 and 2023, to determine where its prevalence, concentration, and how it was impacted by the pandemic.
Here are some of the takeaways from that report:
In 2023, the shoplifting rate in Los Angeles had skyrocketed, and slightly decreased in Chicago since 2020. Prior to the pandemic, the shoplifting rate in Los Angeles was less than half that of Chicago. By the end of 2023, the difference between the two cities had narrowed and the Los Angeles rate was 17.7% lower than that of Chicago.
Much of the shoplifting in both cities occurs in distinct locations. In Chicago, the top 5% of all reported shoplifting locations by address had 68.5% of all reported shoplifting from 2018 to 2023. In Los Angeles, the top 5% of addresses had 62.8% of all reported shoplifting during this period.
But shoplifting patterns between the cities differed greatly. Chicago shoplifting clustered in two geographically close areas, while shoplifting in Los Angeles was distributed across multiple smaller areas that were less concentrated than in Chicago.
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