Map Shows Cities With Highest Rates Of Shoplifting

Shoplifting has increased by an average of 10 per cent between 2018 and 2024, according to data released by the Council for Criminal Justice in July.
The rate of shoplifting, defined as the theft of an item displayed for sale by someone other than an employee, was measured across 23 different U.S. cities by the council between January 2018 and June 2024.
The data showed a 24 percent increase in the rate of shoplifting over the first half of 2024, compared to the first half of 2023, although experts say it’s possible this is down to an increase in reporting.
Chattanooga in Tennessee was the city with the highest rate of shoplifting at 89.83 incidents per 100,000 people, followed closely by Fayetteville in North Carolina with 83.43, while Minneapolis in Minnesota had the lowest rate of the 23 cities at 11.06.
The cities included in the data were: Austin (Texas), Boston (Massachusetts), Cary (North Carolina), Chandler (Arizona), Charlotte (North Carolina), Chattanooga (Tennessee), Chicago (Illinois), Dallas (Texas), Denver (Colorado), Detroit (Michigan), Durham (North Carolina), Fayetteville (North Carolina), Lincoln (Nebraska), Little Rock (Arkansas), Minneapolis (Minnesota), Nashville-Davidson (Tennessee), Norfolk (Virginia), Omaha (Nebraska), Raleigh (North Carolina), San Francisco (California), Seattle (Washington), St Louis (Missouri), and St Paul (Minnesota).
The map of U.S. states below shows the rates of shoplifting per 100,000 people in each of the cities listed above.
The report said, “Shoplifting, especially ‘smash-and-grab’ episodes caught on video, has reshaped the look and feel of retail outlets and prompted a wave of initiatives—some with multi-million dollar budgets — in multiple jurisdictions in the past year.”
It added that “more investigation is needed to untangle what’s driving the trend and discern how much it may be due to a rise in actual shoplifting or a rise in the rates at which retailers are reporting incidents to law enforcement.”
Professor John Eck, a crime expert who helped reform police for 17 years as research director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told Newsweek that shoplifting is often underreported.
He said that “nearly three-quarters of property crime victimization do not get reported,” and this can be because of “poor inventory control systems,” or in some cases, if the store cannot identify who took from them, if the person escapes, or even if they do catch the person themselves, “they may not report the theft.”
He said: “With this in mind, actual shoplifting can go up and down from year to year and city to city, and we may never know. We only know what the stores report.”
Eck explained that it is “extremely difficult to say why some cities have more crime than others,” but noted one factor may be due to certain cities having more large national chain outlets with inadequate staffing or theft-prone displays, which can encourage shoplifting.
The Council for Justice’s research found that most offenses in the sample cities are returning to 2019 levels, although in the case of homicide, “many cities continue to lose lives at rates that exceed 2019 levels.”
In total, there were 39 cities included in this study, ranging from Syracuse, in New York, with only about 142,000 residents, to New York City, with more than 8.4 million residents. The report assessed changes between 2018 and June 2024 for 12 crimes: homicide, aggravated assault, gun assault, domestic violence, robbery, carjacking, residential burglary, nonresidential burglary, larceny, shoplifting, motor vehicle theft, and drug offenses.
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