By E. Lopez
With the holiday season upon us, shopping at store locations throughout the nation will increase. 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.
This report builds on a previous Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) shoplifting report and CCJ’s ongoing crime trends reports by exploring recent trends in shoplifting for the nation’s three largest cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. It also examines seasonal trends for a sample of 23 cities and takes a closer look at shoplifting data available from the FBI.
Key Takeaways
Data collected through the fall of 2024 for Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York suggest that shoplifting levels remain higher than pre-2020 rates. Chicago, in particular, experienced notably elevated rates of reported shoplifting through the first 10 months of this year. In 2023, rates were 10% lower in Chicago, 87% higher in Los Angeles, and 55% higher in New York than in 2019.
Over the past several years, shoplifting rates were higher in November and December than they were during earlier months of the year, coinciding with increased in-person retail activity. Because shoplifting rates in a 23-city sample for the first half of 2024 are higher than in 2023, it is likely that the reported shoplifting rate for the full year will rise from 2023 to 2024.
Two national sources of law enforcement data on reported shoplifting—both available from the FBI—show different trends. Statistics from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) suggest that reported shoplifting in 2023 was the same level as in 2019. However, rates from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), show that shoplifting was 93% higher in 2023 than it was in 2019.
It is unclear why there is a sizable difference between these two sources. One possibility is that law enforcement agencies recently added to the group providing data through NIBRS reported disproportionally higher levels of shoplifting, even after adjusting for an increase in population coverage. Clear guidance from the FBI on the limitations of the data and the implications of using certain sources of FBI crime data is needed
Washington, DC: Council on Criminal Justice. 2024. 9p.