Leaders from several local and national retail stores convened for a retail theft meeting Monday, discussing various ways they are responding to a rise in theft and other crime across the District.
At-large Council member Kenyan McDuffie, who chairs the D.C. Council’s Committee on Business and Economic Development, listened as representatives considered ways to collaborate.
Representatives from stores such as Lowe’s, Target, CVS and Walmart, and businesses such as Right Proper Brewing Company and Georgetown Events for Surfside, attended Monday’s meeting.
It came about a week after a public safety meeting that featured elected officials such as D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb and experts such as Eduardo Ferrer, policy director of the juvenile justice initiative at Georgetown University.
In recent months, store shelves have been bare in some D.C. shops, and others have considered moving locations or closing entirely. Certain items have also been locked behind cabinets in an effort to prevent theft.
Pointing to recent incidents such as one at the Chanel store in City Center, McDuffie said the city is experiencing more “of these high-profile, flash-mob style thefts.”
“Frankly, it is unacceptable,” McDuffie told WTOP. “We’ve got to combat this before it becomes more of a trend, and frankly, does even more damage to the business climate in the District of Columbia.”
During this week’s meeting, some local and national stores discussed “how brazen individuals and groups are with entering the store with no plans to pay and walking out with merchandise,” McDuffie said.
To protect their employees, shops across the city are telling workers not to engage with shoplifters, McDuffie said. The businesses do report the incidents to law enforcement, he said, but are seeking better collaboration with police, public officials and prosecutors.
That could help in instances where the same people commit similar crimes in different states across the Northeast, according to McDuffie. Other areas are enhancing coordination between stores to help prevent that.
“They’re sort of at their wit’s end when it comes to what more they can do about it,” McDuffie said of the business leaders’ perspective on crime.
Retailers attribute the rise in theft to multiple factors. Some suspect the pandemic significantly impacted families and communities, and “some folks never really recovered from the pandemic,” he said.
And in some cases, McDuffie said, “the consequences aren’t occurring swiftly and certainly.”
Police are responsive in many cases, McDuffie said the business leaders explained, but then sometimes “the prosecutors are haphazard, in terms of how they use discretion as to whether or not to prosecute, to charge, to enforce certain laws.”
Monday’s conversation was one of several planned discussions about crime.
“Everybody is seeing it,” McDuffie said. “They’re feeling it, and it is seemingly impacting operations of a number of establishments in and around our downtown.”
