Conservatives, don't sit near me while I'm enjoying my coffee

     I go to the same coffee shop almost everyday. Café Amadeus in Indiana Pennsylvania is cozy, sophisticated, and a great place to work if you're a freelance journalist like myself. This particular day I walked in to write an article about the Biden administration considering another pause student loan repayment, but as soon as I sat down with my gingerbread latte, I couldn’t help but overhear two old white men sitting next to me talking about crime in Philadelphia (word of the wise for anyone not from Pennsylvania, when you hear any conservative talk about Philadelphia, you can bet that they are blowing a huge dog whistle for people of color).

“You see all these shoplifters just walking out of stores! The police can’t even go after them.”

“I know, well that’s what happens when you let criminals get away with anything.”

“And you know what’s crazy, they're out there robbing Louis Vuitton, not trying to feed their families like you’d think.”

At this point in the conversation I opened a new good doc, shelved the student loan article for later, and began writing what you're reading now. Little did our new conservative friends know, but I was fact checking them. That’s right, two geriatric republicans have better fact checking than the presidential debates.

So is grand larceny out of control? Are mobs of people walking into their friendly neighborhood prada store and just walking out with the newest runway look? In short, No.

If you turn on Fox news, or even worse, conservative talk radio, you will notice that a couple months ago, they started publishing insane reports of shoplifting. Sensational tales of five, ten, twenty people walking into a store, grabbing what they want, and dashing out. Like most conservative arguments, this was a lie with a thin coating of racism. (Don’t get too happy liberals, New York Times has published these types of reports as well. Just with bigger words, and less blatant racism.)

The Los Angeles Times published an article in December stating “National crime statistics from the FBI show shoplifting decreasing steadily every year from 2015 through 2020, the most recent data available.” A further examination of the FBI crime statistics shows that not only has shoplifting decreased 16% between 2010 to 2019, it dipped even lower in 2020.

Then when we go to look at who is committing the crimes, large groups of masked “urban” individuals are not prancing store to store with a garbage bag filled with stolen goods. A large chunk, 43% according to Global Retail Theft Barometer, of lost revenue is from employee theft. All of these sensational stories that are becoming common in conservative outlets just don’t hold up. So what’s the change? It is true that there has been an uptick in videos of people committing grand larceny, but obviously the evidence just doesn't back it up. What is changing is the amount of video recording devices. Everyone has a camera on their phone, and more and more stores, especially luxury ones, have cameras. What we are seeing isn’t increased crime, it’s people recording these rare instances on their phone or obtaining security footage of sensational crimes that rarely happen, your local conservative outlet compiles five or six of these together from across the country and boom. What has been an actual decrease in crime has now become waves of retail theft sweeping the country leading up to the 2021 holiday season. 

I don’t walk into my coffee shop screaming about the need to pass the PRO act, or how much I can’t stand Joe “Maserati” Manchin, and I’m fucking right! Conservatives are so damn emboldened that not only do they bother everyone within a two mile vicinity, the shit they say isn’t even correct. So please conservatives, don’t fucking talk near me at my coffee shop.