Shoplifting Is Down 12%. The Panic Was Bigger Than the Data, and the Crime Is Changing Shape.

Remember the videos? Crowds rushing through a department store. Shelves swept clean. Everything locked behind plastic. For a while it felt like the whole country was being looted, and every news cycle said it was getting worse.

Here is what the data says now. In its July 2026 report, the National Retail Federation, the industry’s own trade group, found retailers reported shoplifting incidents fell 12.4% in 2025 compared with 2024, and overall merchandise theft incidents fell 8.1%. NRF, 2026 Impact of Theft & Violence report.

The police data points the same way. The Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks crime in large American cities, reported that shoplifting in 2025 was 10% lower than in 2024 and about 4% below 2019 levels among the cities that report it. Council on Criminal Justice, Year-End 2025 Update.

So the retail crime wave is over? Not so fast. This story has three parts, and the honest version needs all three.

Part one: the panic outran the evidence

Theft is real. Workers have been threatened and hurt. Store owners have lost livelihoods. None of that is in dispute. But the national story Americans were told was bigger than the national data could support.

The Brennan Center for Justice examined retail theft in March 2024. It found that national larceny rates had declined about 10% from 2019 to 2022, and that average shoplifting across 24 cities dropped from roughly 45 to 40 reported offenses per 100,000 residents between January 2019 and June 2023. Brennan Center, “Myth vs. Reality: Trends in Retail Theft”.

The most famous number in the whole debate collapsed. The NRF had put out a claim that organized retail crime was responsible for nearly half of about $94.5 billion in store losses. The Brennan Center notes that the trade group withdrew it after it turned out to rest on misrepresented older data. Industry “shrink” estimates also lump together very different sources of loss: customer theft, employee theft, supplier errors, damaged goods and simple bookkeeping mistakes. In the survey Brennan examined, respondents attributed only about 36% of shrink to external theft.

When a number that drove laws, headlines and store closures turns out to be wrong, that is not a small correction. It is a lesson about how fear gets manufactured.

Part two: some cities really did get hit hard

Here is the part the “it was all a myth” crowd skips. National averages can hide real local spikes. The Council on Criminal Justice found reported shoplifting in New York was 55% higher in 2023 than in 2019. In Los Angeles it was 87% higher in 2023 than in 2019, though the council warns more recent LA data may be undercounted because of a records-system change. Chicago saw a 46% jump comparing January through October 2024 with the same months of 2023. Council on Criminal Justice, “Between the Aisles: A Closer Look at Shoplifting Trends”.

The data itself disagrees depending on how it is collected. The same council found that the FBI’s older Summary Reporting System suggested 2023 shoplifting was roughly at 2019 levels, while the newer incident-based system showed it 93% higher. Both are official federal data. They cannot both describe the whole country accurately, and anyone who quotes only the one that fits their argument is not being straight with you.

So both sides of this debate have been caught cherry-picking. One side took real spikes in a few big cities and sold them as a national collapse. The other took national averages and used them to wave away what workers in those cities were actually living through.

Part three: the crime is changing shape

The most important finding in the NRF’s 2026 report is not the decline. It is what is replacing traditional shoplifting. Retailers reported widespread exposure to fraud schemes:

69% reported phone scams.
51% reported loyalty program fraud.
42% reported gift card theft or fraud.

Organized and repeat theft has not vanished either. Half of retailers reported problems with repeat offenders, 40% reported incidents tied to organized retail crime, and 37% reported walkout or pushout theft, where someone leaves with a full cart without paying.

Keep the source in mind. The NRF survey covered 66 retail companies representing 143 brands, surveyed from February to April 2026. Those companies are large, accounting for about $1.7 trillion in annual sales, but it is a survey of participating retailers, not a census of American crime. It tells you what big retailers are experiencing. It does not prove that the same people who used to shoplift switched to phone scams.

What it does suggest is that theft follows opportunity. As stores add cameras, locked cases and staff training, some losses move to places where the criminal never has to walk through the door.

Retailers are responding with money, not just press releases. In the same NRF survey, 72% said they were investing in management training, 65% in employee training and 61% in risk-intelligence technology. The trade group is also pressing the Senate to pass the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, which it says would strengthen federal coordination against theft rings that operate across state lines. Whether that bill is the right answer is a fair debate. But it is a better debate to have with accurate numbers on the table than with viral videos and a withdrawn statistic.

The moral question underneath

This is why retail theft belongs in the Moral Decay Index, and why we insist on getting the numbers right.

Stealing is wrong. That is not complicated. When someone walks out with merchandise, the cost does not vanish. It lands on other shoppers through higher prices, on workers through danger and stress, and on neighborhoods when stores close. A store clerk who gets shoved or threatened over a few hundred dollars of goods has been victimized, full stop. Calling that “just property crime” is its own kind of moral failure.

But lying about how much stealing is happening is also wrong. Inflated numbers drove real decisions: laws, sentencing debates, corporate messaging and a general sense that ordinary life was falling apart. When fear is manufactured, it gets spent on the wrong solutions.

The honest position holds both at once. Theft deserves enforcement and consequences. Workers deserve protection. And the public deserves numbers it can trust, from retailers, police and politicians alike.

What should happen next

Retailers should publish their methods. If a company blames theft for closing a store, it should show what share of its losses came from theft versus other causes.
Cities should report shoplifting consistently so residents can see whether local policies are working.
Protect workers first. Clear policies, training and management backing matter more than asking a clerk to confront someone over merchandise.
Follow the fraud. As theft moves to phone scams, gift cards and loyalty accounts, consumers are the next target. Treat any unexpected request for gift cards as a scam until proven otherwise.

The verdict

Shoplifting is down, according to both the industry and city police data. Some cities genuinely suffered big spikes. The national panic outran the evidence, and one of its signature numbers was withdrawn. And the crime itself is moving from the aisle to the phone line.

The lesson is not that theft does not matter. It is that truth matters more, because you cannot fix a problem you have lied about.

Sources

If this made you angry, good. Now turn it inward. The Moral Consistency Journal is a 30-day audit of the places where your own standards bend. More Case Files and data breakdowns live at themoraldecayindex.com. Books that go deeper are in our Bookshop.org store, which supports independent bookstores.

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