Last Tuesday Target announced that it will be closing nine stores across four states because theft at those locations was harming its business and threatening the safety of employees and customers points. In a very real sense it points to the failure of the woke-inspired leniency in law enforcement including anti-police ferment and emasculation of the criminal laws all of which has resulted in turnstile justice and a deterioration of any notion of deterrence in so-called “blue” jurisdictions. Indeed, one wonders what the woke crowd thought was going to result from policies that converted crime prevention into one vast social rehabilitation project.
The New York Times reports that in recent months Target has been vocal on the topic of theft within its stores, particularly about organized retail crime, in which large amounts of merchandise are stolen with the aim of its being sold on the black market. It quotes Target’s chief executive that in the first months of this year, thefts in its stores that involved violence rose 120 percent!
Similarly, executives at other retailers like Macy’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods told The Times that theft is having a major impact on their businesses as well.
Target told The Times that before making its decision it had invested heavily in strategies to prevent and stop theft such as adding more security team workers and installing theft deterrent tools like locking up merchandise. It has also trained employees to better protect themselves and de-escalate potential safety issues. But it noted that despite these efforts, Target continued to face “fundamental challenges” to operating the stores safely, and the business performance at these locations was unsustainable.
One wonders why anyone could think that things would turn out differently.
When several large banks went under a few months ago, horror stories began surfacing as to how they and other sectors in the economy had been held hostage to the woke agenda. As it was later discovered, there had been widespread pressure from the Biden Administration in one form or another for the banks to make financial decisions not with a view to maximize profits and productivity, but to promote such things as racial diversity in the workplace, economic advancement of minorities, climate control, elimination of reliance on fossil fuels and turning our criminal justice system away from a focus on law enforcement to a primary concern for the welfare of the accused.
Yet just because we decided not to pay full attention to our problems didn’t mean that they somehow miraculously disappeared. The banks’ investments still tanked, loans still went unpaid, crime spiraled out of control, and while we played our little games about the primacy of climate control, our competitors like China went about their business to competitive disadvantage.
Hopefully we will all pay attention to this most recent evidence that when it comes to public policy, ideology is no substitute for logic and analysis.
