A small area of retail shopping inside less than half a square mile of the North Side emerged last year as a hot spot for shoplifting in Chicago, according to a new study.
A report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan policy group in Washington, says the city’s annual shoplifting rate per 100,000 people fell significantly in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the city’s retail theft rate in 2023 was lower than in 2018, the report says.
But that rate skyrocketed 46% in Chicago this year through October compared with the same period of 2023, the report says. This year’s shoplifting rate is also higher than the same period of any of the past six years in the city.
Researchers, who also focused on shoplifting trends in Los Angeles, found that new hot spots developed for shoplifting in both cities since the pandemic.
In Chicago, an area including parts of Lake View and Lincoln Park became a new hot spot for retail theft in 2023, the Council on Criminal Justice found. Downtown, including the Gold Coast and the Loop, remained the No. 1 place where shoplifting was concentrated. Those two areas had the highest rates of shoplifting in the city, by far.
Unlike Los Angeles, where shoplifting hot spots are spread throughout the city, Chicago’s other big retail centers in neighborhoods away from the lakefront have seen a far lower rate of shoplifting than downtown or the Near North Side since 2018.
Business groups see shoplifting as a costly problem in Chicago and the state. The Illinois Retail Merchants Association cites a Capital One report that said Illinois merchants lost more than $2.9 billion in revenue in 2022 due to retail theft.
Earlier this year, the Illinois Organized Retail Crime Association was formed to provide a free computer platform for retailers, law enforcement agencies and loss prevention specialists to share intelligence about the criminal enterprises behind organized retail thefts.
State officials have said organized theft crews are a big factor in the recent shoplifting trends.
Some say a change in how shoplifting is prosecuted may have also contributed to a rise in shoplifting by emboldening thieves. In 2016, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx instructed her attorneys not to charge people with felony shoplifting unless it involves a loss of more than $1,000 or the defendant has at least 10 felony convictions. Foxx’s office has said that change had allowed prosecutors to focus more on gun crimes.
In a 2024 report, the Illinois Retail Merchants Association said it opposes any efforts in the General Assembly to raise the felony threshold for charging someone with shoplifting above the state’s current $300 level. But the association does support keeping people out of jail until trial when they’re charged with misdemeanor retail theft of less than $300.
The Council on Criminal Justice cautioned its study was based largely on monthly incident totals from cities’ online data portals.
“Because these data rely on incidents reported to law enforcement, they almost certainly under count total shoplifting,” the report said. “Potential factors influencing counts include changes in retailers’ anti-theft measures and changes in how retailers report shoplifting to law enforcement, which could reflect their perceptions of the extent to which local police or prosecutors will apprehend suspects and pursue criminal charges.”
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