Crimes Are Crimes, No Matter How Petty

There's nothing petty about petty crime. Tolerate it, and society descends into disorder.

You're standing in line at Starbucks and watch a freeloader go to the front, pick out a sandwich and walk out without paying. No one says a word.

Or you pay your bills, then find out thieves have robbed the blue USPS box to abscond with your checking information and empty your account. That happened to me last week.

The thieves fish mail out of the box or use stolen USPS keys sold on the internet. This crime is surging, but the police and banks shrug their shoulders and advise going directly to the post office or using electronic banking.

Walk into a drug store to buy deodorant and toothpaste. They're locked up behind glass. A distraught Duane Reade employee explained why. Shoplifters waltz in, fill bags with merchandise and walk out. Management prohibits employees from stopping them.

Banks and retailers are forced to accept these crimes as a cost of doing business. Law enforcement officials are downgrading the penalties for many petty crimes. But the public is rattled and rightly so.

Allowing petty crime—shoplifting, carjacking, turnstile hopping, check forging and vandalism—is a choice. California led the way, adopting Proposition 47 in 2014 to reduce penalties for these crimes. Many other states followed and no surprise, crimes increased.

Prosecutors are too ready to assign victimhood to perpetrators instead of to the rest of us, who are disgusted by the lawlessness.

You'd think that Jean Lugo-Romero, caught after robbing five Walgreens stores in San Francisco last May and June, would be in jail now. Absolutely not. The San Francisco Public Defender's office states that "as an indigent individual suffering from housing instability," Lugo-Romero "needed services and he's now getting them."

Manhattan's previous District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced in 2017 he would stop prosecuting fare beaters. Now, a steady stream of them walks right by cops, while the rest of us patsies pay to ride.

Vance's successor, Alvin Bragg, is ceding even more to the criminals, refusing to jail armed shoplifters.

Wielding a pocket knife, 43-year-old William Rolon was arrested two weeks ago for stealing $2,000 worth of cold medicine from a Duane Reade in Manhattan, his 39^th arrest overall and the second time he hit that store. But he was charged only with misdemeanor shoplifting, not first-degree robbery, the charge he would have faced before Bragg's new policy.

Worried about locking your car at a stop light? There's good reason. Carjackings have doubled and even tripled since last year in major cities. It's making it harder to get an Uber or Lyft because gig drivers are quitting. More than one-third feel unsafe, according to Pew Research.

But apparently municipal leaders don't believe prosecuting carjackers is the answer. In Chicago, only 4.5 percent of offenses result in charges. In Minneapolis, it's a discouraging 2 percent. Several Minneapolis aldermen blame Hyundai and Kia manufacturers because the cars can be broken into without an alarm sounding.

Anything to avoid blaming the criminal.

https://www.creators.com/read/betsy-mccaughey/01/22/crimes-are-crimes-no-matter-how-petty

[TBC: More important, sin is still sin. The eternal consequence is what happens to the individual standing before the Lord who has not received the provision of God deal with sin, “…which he hath purchased with his own blood” (Acts:20:28Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.
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