Defund The Police + Decriminalize Shoplifting = “Food Deserts”

Chicago was one of the first cities to embrace decriminalizing shoplifting and defunding the police, and now they’re reaping the consequences of their actions, good and hard.

  • “Crime has become so crazy in Chicago that the city now has to take over supermarkets.”
  • Organized gangs of looters now strip shelves while store employees watch helplessly. The video shows a crew of 14 stripping a Louis Vuitton store bare.
  • One clothing shop: “There have been knives, there has been girls spitting on us, there has been men throwing drinks at us, taking my female sales associates and throwing them into tables. She’s recorded 28 incidents in just the past 60 days.”
  • One shoplifting ring stole over $7 million worth of goods, much of it over-the-counter medicine stolen from the likes of Target, Walgreens
    and CVS and then shipped off to California and New York to be sold.

  • No wonder major retailers are fleeing Chicago.
  • Four Wal-Marts closed because the thefts made them no longer profitable, losing tens of millions of dollars.
  • Whole Foods closed six stores.
  • Needless to say, Chicago’s Democratic mayor Brandon Johnson was a big fan of defunding the police back in 2020.
  • “Thus the very people allegedly helped by the progressive policies get hurt the worst: The poor black and brown communities in Chicago are now food deserts. There’s nowhere to buy groceries.”
  • “Private retailers couldn’t afford to keep stores open and let people just steal their merchandise for free. So the mayor plans to open, quote, city-run supermarkets. This is to fill the void left by the Walmarts and the Whole Foods who obviously were losing millions of dollars trying to stay open.”
  • I imagine putting the Democratic Party in charge of a supermarket will probably work just as well as letting the mob run your restaurant.

    “We’re talking about state and federal tax dollars being used to essentially run state-run supermarkets. That’s socialism 101. That’s what happened in Venezuela. That would happen in the Soviet Union: The state ran the supermarkets.”

    Democrats make a food desert and call it social justice.

    Tags: , , , , , , , ,

    19 Responses to “Defund The Police + Decriminalize Shoplifting = “Food Deserts””

    1. Lemuel Vargas says:

      IMHO, it will be same o same o, they will shoplift these so called city supermart. Seems like they are doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results each time.

    2. Bucky says:

      The news today is that CVS will close 900 stores nation wide by 2024 because of loses due to shop lifting. Soon we will hear complaints of poor people not being able to get prescription meds because of a “pharmacy desert”.

    3. Seawriter says:

      CVS is not closing stores solely because of losses due to shoplifting. The CVS at FM 518 and Hwy 3 in League City, TX closed recently I don’t know why, but it wasn’t because of shoplifting. Organized gangs of looters are not a thing in League City. The police here would not allow it, and the residents of the town back them.

      Another factor at play is the city had the highest per capita rate of carry-conceal permits issued in Texas. I suspect if you had a looting gang hit a League City store there would be a lot of citizens there who would decide they were in fear for their lives. Galveston County prosecutors (who are *not* Soros types) and grand juries would agree with that assessment when dealing the consequences of those decisions.

    4. D Liddle says:

      I don’t see what the problem is. Let them starve.

    5. ed in texas says:

      CVS and Walgreen’s are also in the real estate business. They’ll close a store and open a new one a half a block away if they perceive it’s a ‘sweet spot’, a slightly better location. Bear in mind, their stores are essentially convienience stores with a pharmacy attached. I watched Walgreen’s close a store and build a new location diagonally across an intersection. The new location allowed them to be line of sight for people coming out of a hospital emergency room. The previous location had been line of sight, but new buildings had been put up. So they moved 500 feet.

    6. […] Defund The Police + Decriminalize Shoplifting = “Food Deserts.” “We’re talking about state and federal tax dollars being used to essentially run state-run […]

    7. Garrett Stasse says:

      Uh, the folks griping about this are the same ones who elected the pols who let it happen. Why anyone’s worried about “food deserts” ought to be the taxpayers who pay for this.

    8. Don says:

      They will get unlimited access to government food stamps. See? Problem solved ………..

    9. Kirk says:

      At some point, the ferals will have to be brought under control. Or, alternatively, simply eliminated.

      It’ll happen. It’s just a question of when enough of “the rest of us” suffer compassion burnout, and just quit caring about the consequences these creatures bring on themselves.

      See the murder of that Fortune 30 under 30 CEO in Baltimore? The guy that did it? Enough of that crap becomes prevalent, and you’re going to see the DA and the judges who released him dangling from lamp posts, and everyone looking the other way while the actual criminal is set on fire beneath their dangling feet.

      People in general have only allowed this crap to happen because they’ve been shamed into feeling bad for the criminals. Enough of them get victimized, the guilt is going to evaporate, and so too will the “compassion”. Look for draconian enforcement and punishment to follow, for several generations while everyone gradually forgets, and the cycle begins again.

      The thing that just irritates the hell out of me is that the things like that murderer in Baltimore did are entirely predictable; with his criminal record? He should have never, ever been released. He also shouldn’t have been incarcerated, either–He should be dead. And, no doubt will be, eventually.

      The bleeding-heart liberal types that enable all this crap should be saving their care and compassion for the average law-abiding citizen, because the only reason that their cherished fellow criminals are treated with any due process at all stems from the essential decency of the average person. They’re eroding that decency with all of this, and they’re not going to like where it goes once all of it is gone.

      You can read the history books, and marvel at the way that they used to execute people for what we’d consider misdemeanors today. The idjit class is apparently hell-bent on bringing those days back, and seem to think that they will somehow escape the consequences, themselves. Not seeing that, honestly… I think a bunch of these weasel judges and prosecutors are storing up a vast amount of hatred for their actions, and will pay the price. I’m not going to feel one bit sorry for them, either.

      Value system in this country is skewed; nobody seems to care about the victims of crimes. It’s almost like it’s their fault, and the criminals are the actual victims. That’s going to change, because if it doesn’t? Don’t expect a lot of people to be calling the cops for things; they’ll do what they need to themselves, and it won’t be pretty.

      I’ve heard rumors of housebreakers and burglars just… Vanishing. Lots of old mineshafts, lots of hungry wildlife. Something to think about, if you’re criminally inclined.

    10. MarkM says:

      The interesting thing is that BLM had less traction in Chicago than it did in many other cities. BLM got chased out of Englewood, for example, and never got real traction in various Latino neighborhoods. The looting in Chicago was less BLM/antifa and far more the local gangs coordinating attacks over social media.

      Even the current mayor announced in his campaign that “I’m not going to defund the police.” Our prior Mayor, Lightfoot, tried cutting the CPD budget initially (by $80M on a $1.9B budget) but later retracted that position and called for additional resources to support police (and increased budget as well). In reality, many of the proposed $80M in cuts were eliminating already vacant positions. So, the narrative that Chicago actually has defunded it police is incorrect.

    11. Chris says:

      Gumming Food Store — Riiiight.

      Reminiscent of the sage observation that if you put the Government in charge of the Sahara desert, in no time you’d be facing a shortage of sand.

      “Welcome to Windy City Grocery. We’re from the Government and we’re here to– HEY! Stop, thief! Where’d all our stuff go?”

    12. jabrwok says:

      the folks griping about this are the same ones who elected the pols who let it happen

      Cause and Effect are tools of the White Supremacist Patriarchy to keep down women and People of Color!

    13. Eric says:

      Oh the ferals will be brought under control. But not until the government has full control of the normals.

      The strategy is working perfectly. The criminals are being released to destroy capitalism, entrepreneurialism, and normal society in general. The government is stepping in to “save the day.“ Gas stations will be next (because their profit centers are the associated convenience stores that can be shoplifted out of existence), and turned into government managed electric recharging stations to boot. Lather-rinse-repeat until so many segments of the free economy have been brought under government control that the rest cannot survive and collapse on their own. Then you will see a crack down like nobody’s business.

    14. Kirk says:

      Eric, your theory is predicated on rather more competence and organization than our leadership class and government has managed to demonstrate at any point over the last century.

      What’s way more likely is that they’re going to break everything, attempting to do as you suggest, and then find that their ideas about “fixing it” to their own benefit ain’t workable. Likely because the average US citizen really isn’t all that likely to fall in line.

      Where these idjits keep messing up is that they take the vast reservoir of “trust in institutions” that they’ve been pissing away is indicative of how people really think. Which it ain’t; they’re very unlikely to get the compliance they imagine possible, once people see how it’s all working out. They pulled off COVID, and expended a whole lot of public trust to make it happen. They’re not getting that back, this generation.

      I don’t know where this is going to end, but I think people are reaching that inflection point, and that the “powers-that-be” are in for a huge shock when that point is reached. Nikolai Ceaucescu and his wife thought they had Romania “under control”, right up until that morning in Timisoara. After that? What was it, like two days before their own secret police were putting the two of them up against the wall…?

      Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the general public is cowed, or complaisant. They went along with what has been done because they trusted; watch what happens once they figure out that the powers-that-are can’t be trusted…

      Won’t be pretty, in any way, shape, or form. There’s a “Timisoara Moment” somewhere in the near- or mid-term future for all our wannabe control-freak idjits that think they know how to run the world. They don’t, and the fact that they don’t is going to be what kills them. Along with a healthy chunk of our fellow citizens, I fear.

    15. Subotai Bahadur says:

      MarkM says:
      September 27, 2023 at 12:55 PM

      Looking at cop blogs in Chicago, the funding for Chicago police line staff and staff numbers are both way down. Of course, there is always money in the police budget there for more staff weenies. Just in end-of-career retirements and new hires there have been net losses of hundreds of street cops every year for the last few years. And they are coming up on a demographic bump in retirements in the next few years and cannot recruit replacements. Even when I was wearing a badge [a couple of decades ago not in Illinois], there was no way I would have been willing to become a Chicago cop. Note that the above figures are just for full retirements -v- new hires. There is a not small contingent of cops [mostly the good, honest ones] who will not put up with it anymore and just leave either for another department to start over or to change career fields.

      Now as far as “food deserts” etc.; to be honest I do not care. Those who are or were perceptive enough to see things going irretrievably TANGO UNIFORM are gone or getting ready to leave. Those who have chosen to stay are the ones who let things get this bad and deserve what happens. If it gets hungry out, consider it to be reality therapy.

      Subotai Bahadur

    16. Jorg X McKie says:

      Think of Chicago, SF, Minneapolis, etc as giant experiments in Darwinism. We’re about to see if virtue signaling leads to improvements in humans.

    17. […] million tourists visited Cuba in past 8 months, but numbers remain lower than expected BattleSwarm: Defund The Police + Decriminalize Shoplifting = “Food Deserts”, also, Meta Rips Off The Author And Passes The Savings On To Skynet Behind The Black: Red China […]

    18. […] Lawrence Person noted last month: Defund The Police + Decriminalize Shoplifting = “Food Deserts.”  And “pharmacy deserts” as well. And where the drugstore is still open in an urban […]

    Leave a Reply