Off Target

Despite appearances, the man at the bus stop is not the intended subject of this photograph. Instead, it's the Target store behind him, on the other side of the intersection. It's one of nine, nationwide, being closed for "theft and organized retail crime." It also sits along my commute.

I don't live in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, and so don't know much about it. I am aware that it has a fairly significant homeless population. (After all, I've only posted about them five times in the past few years.) But people I know who live in the area were well aware of constant shoplifting that took place in this particular store.

When the news hit LinkedIn, the response was intense. It was far and away the most commented-on story in LinkedIn News for the day. And a lot of the comments were the standard: calls for more police, partisan attacks on Democrats in municipal government and general aspersions directed at the sort of people the commenter guessed must be behind all it it.

It is, however, worth noting that no level of law enforcement will compel people to endure poverty with stoicism and equanimity. Some number of them are going to feel that they are deserving of more than they have, and, accordingly will have no compunction against taking from others who they see as having either more than they deserve, or enough that sharing will not injure them. And while it is true that not all poor people turn to crime to improve their material circumstances, there is a reason why poverty is considered something of a predictor for crime. And one of the things about the Seattle area is that it's very easy to become poor around here. With homes that definitely qualify for the moniker "fixer-upper" going for several hundred thousand, if not more than a million dollars in much of the metro area, low income people have the unpleasant choice between living quite some distance away from where they work or needing to spend a significant percentage of their paychecks on keeping a roof over their heads. And it's easily possible that, if they don't go far enough away from the city, they'll be stuck doing both.

The nice thing about making crimes like retail theft into matters of character, as opposed to resourcing, is that it creates a justification for not doing anything. After all, bad character is bad character. Simply giving people access to resources won't change them for the better. In case you hadn't guessed, I'm a bit dubious about that line of reasoning, if for no other reason than I tend to hear it from a) laypeople and b) blowhards. Sure, better access to resources doesn't remove all of the incentives to criminal behavior. But it can give people less desire to take the risks involved.

In my opinion, the United States is too fragmented to solve problems like street crime well. The social distance between the various constituencies that make up the nation tend to allow for people to be on board with remarkably draconian punishments, secure in the understanding that they will be meted out only to those who are not like themselves.

As for stores like Target, their problems are only going to become worse if there isn't a better solution to poverty. As they close more stores, problems will migrate to follow them into the places where they still do business. After all, this is how one winds up with the Target in Redmond having a shoplifting problem of its own. And that can lead to much worse outcomes than are evident in Ballard. There are neighborhoods where bars on the windows of stores are common, and establishments refuse to take cash due to the difficulties in keeping it secure. The people who live in those neighborhoods of necessity suffer for it, if for no other reason than they're subsidizing the costs of the security measures that lend the places the air of a prison colony.

Sooner or later, something will have to give, even if a lot of people are betting that it won't. One hopes that when they turn out to be wrong, it won't be catastrophically so.