Johnny Wactor, bartending in-between gigs in his high-prestige, low-pay work as an actor, died over the weekend in downtown Los Angeles when he interrupted the low-prestige work of catalytic-converter thieves laboring underneath his jacked-up vehicle.
Joe Friday does not work the streets of Los Angeles anymore. George Gascón does. Therein lies a problem.
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“These criminals can’t keep being on the street,” Wactor’s former fiancée, Tessa Farrell, reacted, “and they can’t keep being sent back and have no repercussions for their actions.”
We knew this before 3 a.m. Saturday. Yet, they keep being sent back and face no repercussions for their actions.
Repercussions, here and there, come for prosecutors averse to prosecutions. In Portland, challenger Nathan Vasquez unseated District Attorney Mike Schmidt after Schmidt deprioritized pursuing non-violent criminals. The primary vote follows the recall of left-wing district attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francsico two years ago. (READ MORE: Even Portland Is Fed Up with Progressive Policies)
If progressive prosecutors cannot make it in Portland and San Francisco, can they make it anywhere?
In New York and Atlanta, local prosecutors devote resources to stomping out the crime of Republicanism through the expensive pursuit of Donald Trump and many of his associates. Elsewhere, Illinois eliminated cash bail, and Philadelphia barely pursues shoplifters, a group whose prosecutions there dropped to about one-sixth their 2012 levels. Progressive prosecutors fixate on the wrong things.
By not inconveniencing the criminals, district attorneys inconvenience the rest of us. Their inaction forces action by storeowners.
Safeway supermarkets in the Bay Area removed self-checkout kiosks, which ensures longer lines and higher prices for customers.
“Operational changes have been made at select stores throughout the Bay Area given the increasing amount of theft,” read a statement released by Safeway. “Self-checkout kiosks have been removed at a few stores. Like other local businesses, we are working on ways to curtail escalating theft so we can ensure the well-being of our employees and foster a welcoming environment for our customers.”
In Washington, D.C., the Giant supermarket chain imposed a ban on customers bringing large bags into the store due to “unprecedented levels of product theft.”
A visit to the DSW in Millbury, Massachusetts, on Tuesday revealed sneaker boxes minus a shoe and containing a plastic anti-theft device on the one that remained.
Target, Walgreens, and other large retailers routinely lock up detergent and other theft-magnets. Sephora now similarly keeps its perfume bottles from the public. Pricey products increasingly sit behind plexiglass or counters at CVS.
None of this happened a quarter-century ago. Something changed.
As evidenced by two of the 10 Commandments, stealing predates us by many centuries. The declining respect for the Decalogue suggests one possible reason for the rise in pilfering and the who-cares attitude toward theft from civic authorities in certain locales.
“Shoplifting is a crime in name only, like how hopping a turnstile and jaywalking are crimes,” a Hofstra University freshman recently wrote in a column in the student newspaper. “They’re technically crimes, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from doing it…. The right and wrong of shoplifting doesn’t come from what you’re stealing or how much you’re stealing but who you’re stealing from.”
A whole generation, like this youngster, encounters many teachers in their educational journey who impart that profits amount to the real theft, we should abolish private property, relativism rather than absolutes govern ethics, and shoplifting works as a kind of karmic-justice expropriation against large corporations. In short, we teach immorality as morality.
Steal the iPhones or bicycles from the preachers of such doctrines to find out if they really believe what they say. In San Francisco and Portland where they threw out mush-head district attorneys, this acid test occurred not theoretically but actually. Nobody supports robbery when it happens to them.
