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Organized journalistic crime Judd Legum

Published

1 year ago

December 11, 2023

On July 19, the Washington Post Editorial Board published an impassioned column calling for an aggressive national response to organized retail crime (ORC). The Editorial Board described ORC as “the term security specialists use to distinguish planned, large-scale stealing to supply the black market from individual cases of the ‘five-fingered discount.'” It stressed that evidence that ORC was a growing problem “comes not only from viral videos depicting masked people smashing display cases and dumping the contents into large bags” but also “data.”

Specifically, the Editorial Board claimed, “ORC accounted for half of the $94.5 billion in losses due to theft that companies reported in 2021.” The Editorial Board argued that the data revealed how much “damage has been done to the economy and to the public’s basic feeling of safety in retail spaces.” The Editorial Board said the scope of the problem justified the creation of “a federal ORC coordination center, staffed by officials from federal law enforcement agencies and housed in the Department of Homeland Security.”

There is just one problem: The “data” cited by the Washington Post Editorial Board is a complete fabrication.

First, retailers did not report $94.5 billion in losses “due to theft” in 2021. A survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF) reported that “shrink” — an industry term for missing inventory — amounted to $94.5 billion in 2021. More than one-quarter of all shrink comes from internal control failures. This includes losses due to damaged or spoiled merchandise.

Another 28.5% of shrink comes from employee theft. External theft, according to the NRF, accounts for just 37% of all shrink. So how does ORC, a subcategory of external theft, account for more than half of all shrink?

The answer is it doesn’t. And it’s not even close.

The Washington Post Editorial Board cited an April 2023 report published by the NRF and K2 Security, a risk management firm. The report included the following claim:

Total annual retail shrink — the reduction in physical inventory caused by theft or various other causes — was $94.5 billion in 2021, nearly half of which was attributable to ORC, according to NRF survey data and research by the National Coalition of Law Enforcement [and Retail].

The citation for the “research” by the National Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR) was actually a 2021 Congressional testimony by Brendan Dugan, then-President of CLEAR. Dugan testified that “CLEAR estimates that organized retail crime accounts for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers.” But in a recent interview with RetailDive, Dugan admitted that CLEAR did not conduct any research on ORC. Instead, Dugan was referring to the NRF’s estimate for total shrink from 2016.

So, there is absolutely no basis for the claim that ORC was responsible for $45 billion in losses in 2021. It’s a figure of shrink from all sources from five years earlier.

That is why, on December 4, the NRF formally withdrew its claim that ORC was responsible for half of all shrink in 2021. It issued a revised version of its April report that omits the false information. “The lack of conclusive data to capture the scale of retail theft is a problem that virtually everyone involved readily acknowledges,” a spokesperson for the NRF said. Of course, the issue was not just a lack of “conclusive data” but the NRF’s publication of false data. The group invented the idea that CLEAR conducted “research” and then used it to push a self-serving narrative in the national media.

As recently as 2020, the NRF provided its own estimates about the scope of organized retail crime. The NRF estimated organized retail theft “costs retailers an average of $719,548 per $1 billion dollars in sales.” That means about 0.07% of sales, or 5% of total retail shrink, is attributable to organized retail crime. If that figure has held, it suggests that ORC is responsible for about $4.7 billion in losses, not $47 billion. For context, total retail sales in the United States were about $6.5 trillion in 2021.

The NRF previously told Popular Information that it stopped providing estimates of ORC because it believed that the numbers being reported by retailers were too low. “One of the reasons for moving away from reporting dollar figures is that the reported dollar value of [organized retail crime] probably represents the tip of the iceberg and may greatly understate the problem,” an NRF spokesperson said.

The inaccurate claim about the scope of ORC was also included in a news article published by the Washington Post on September 2, 2023. But, despite repeatedly publishing the false claim, the Washington Post did not publish its own story on the NRF’s retraction. Instead, it posted an Associated Press article on its website. News of the retraction was not printed in the physical paper.

A week after the NRF’s retraction, the Washington Post Editorial Board has not corrected its column. Popular Information contacted the Editorial Board for comment on Sunday morning. A member of the Editorial Board responded that the issue “bears looking into” but said it was infeasible to respond before publication.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”

The false claim about the scope of ORC did not only appear in the Washington Post. It was published in numerous national media outlets:

CNN: “The NRF said total annual shrink reached $94.5 billion in 2021, up from $90.8 billion from 2020. Nearly half was attributed to large-scale theft of products.”

Fortune: “[O]rganized retail theft was responsible for nearly half of the record $94.5 billion in retailer “shrink” that year.”

NY Post: “[O]rganized retail crime…according to a National Retail Federation study… accounts for roughly half of the $94.5 billion lost that year to “shrinkage,” or product loss from something other than sales.”

These stories have not been updated or corrected.

Other outlets routinely go beyond the NRF’s false claims and conflate ORC with total shrink. Business Insider published an article in December 2022 with this headline: “It’s organized retail crime, and it’s a nearly $100 billion problem for the industry.”

Politicians can be just as sloppy. In an October 16, 2023 press release, San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan said, “organized retail theft reached $94.5 billion in 2021.” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) issued a press release on October 23, 2023, claiming that “organized retail theft…cost nationwide retailers an estimated $112.1 billion in 2022.”

Why the truth matters

The grossly distorted data about ORC is being used to drive policy decisions. Grassley, along with Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), have used the faulty statistics to promote the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. The bill seeks to create an “Organized Retail Crime Coordination Center” under the Department of Homeland Security. The center, the bill says, will oversee “federal law enforcement efforts related to organized retail crime” and align these activities with state and local investigations. Its director would be appointed by the head of ICE. This is the policy advocated by the Washington Post Editorial Board.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced in September the state would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to combat ORC. “Enough with these brazen smash-and-grabs,” Newsom said. “With an unprecedented $267 million investment, Californians will soon see more takedowns, more police, more arrests, and more felony prosecutions. When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they’ll walk straight into jail cells.”

Former President Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, has taken things even further. “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” Trump said in October.

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Matti Friedman: Israel’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Matti Friedman

Published

33 minutes ago

January 17, 2025

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JERUSALEM — In Israel, news of an imminent hostage deal with Hamas grips the country. Fifteen months after the attack of October 7, 2023, when Palestinian terrorists seized 250 civilians and soldiers from Israeli territory, nearly 100 hostages remain in Gaza. The oldest is 86. The youngest is 2. Most seem to be dead, murdered by their captors, or killed inadvertently by Israeli forces, but Hamas refuses to divulge how many. The hostages’ faces have become familiar to everyone in Israel. They’re on posters in bus stops, on telephone poles, hanging from highway bridges. We all feel we know them.

Even though not all details of the deal are clear, Israelis are broadly behind it—a poll on January 15 put the number at 69 percent, with 21 percent unsure and only 10 percent opposed. The mainstream Israeli position is that the government must make every reasonable effort to save the lives of captives, whether that means military operations if possible, or freeing jailed terrorists in exchange for hostages if necessary. Opponents of the deal, even if they’re tortured by the suffering of their fellow citizens in brutal conditions in tunnels under Gaza, see the deal as a form of surrender that rewards the tactic of hostage-taking and invites future attacks, saving people in the present while sacrificing people in the future. In my experience, most people actually hold parts of both positions, but when forced to choose, they tend to choose the first.

For external observers trying to understand the current debate here in Israel, the key is to realize that this is an argument that didn’t start with the current deal—or even with the current war. It’s impossible to understand the debate of 2025 without going back 40 years, to 1985. The debate is less about the details of this deal than about a basic question forced on us by the tactics of our enemies, namely: Does our willingness to assume grave risk to save individuals constitute an Israeli strength or weakness?

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WATCH: H.R. McMaster on Trump—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Michael Moynihan

Published

3 hours ago

January 17, 2025

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Very few people have worked closely with Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him.

But Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Trump, is an exception.

In his book At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he gives an honest account of working in Trump’s first administration: the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

Last week, McMaster, 62, sat down with Michael Moynihan at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for a live Free Press Book Club event to discuss it all. They talk about his moments of tension with Trump, his understanding of Trump’s foreign policy, and how Trump’s rhetoric toward adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press.

They also get into Trump’s current cabinet picks—ones who McMaster sees as good, like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, but how good picks do not ensure a harmonious administration. They discuss Trump’s options for handling Russia, Iran, and Hamas in his second term, and why McMaster is surprisingly and cautiously optimistic about Trump 2.0. —BW

Dynamics within the first Trump White House:

Michael Moynihan: It’s very clear in your book that you see your job as somebody who has to implement the president’s agenda. But it’s also clear that you see people around you who have their own agenda that they’re trying to foist upon the president.

H.R. McMaster: Absolutely. The first group are people who don’t want to give the president options. They want to manipulate decisions based on their own agenda, not the president’s agenda. Then there were the people in Donald Trump’s administration who defined the president as an emergency or a danger to the country or the world, who had to be contained. And so the problem with those groups of people is that nobody elected them.

MM: There are a couple of people in the book that say, We’re afraid that Donald Trump is dangerous, right?

HRM: Absolutely. It just made everything harder. But at least for my 30 months, we transcended it. We got things done anyway. But every element of that friction just wore us down a little bit—and the other tactics they employed undercut us.

Nobody was as surprised as Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election. So there wasn’t a whole lot of preparation in terms of who’s going to come into many of these positions. He didn’t have any kind of trust built up with a lot of the people. Now it’s going to be somewhat different. He’s had a lot more time to prepare deliberately for this, and he’s selected his people. It was easy to kneecap me, because I didn’t have a history with him. Now it’s going to be harder to do that with Michael Waltz and Marco Rubio. Although they will come under attack because there are still going to be different camps in the new administration based on different motivations.

The president is the most powerful person in the world, so people are going to try to ingratiate themselves to him and try to use him to advance their agenda. People know how to push his buttons. I’ve described my first meeting in the Oval Office as an environment of competitive sycophancy. It was unbelievable. Things were said like, “Your instincts are always so good, Mr. President” and “You’re so wise.” I was like, “My gosh, are these people serious?”

MM: Does he fall for that?

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

8 hours ago

January 17, 2025

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Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.