Police and Theives: Shoplifting, the Market and Decommodification

• In Event: 30662 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Crime Prevention/ Economics, Crime, Desistance

Abstract

Shoplifting is at the center of a moral panic in the United States, with corporate retailers, law enforcement, and media promoting the idea of an "organized retail crime" epidemic. This narrative fuels calls for harsher penalties and intensified policing despite official data showing a decline in shoplifting. My research critically examines these claims, investigating the role of private policing networks and situating the issue within broader struggles over labor, property, and criminalization.
I analyze documents from 22 organized retail crime alliances (ORCAs) leaked in the BlueLeaks archive, trade publications of the loss prevention industry, and ethnographic fieldwork at trade shows and interviews with security professionals. These sources reveal how corporate retailers collaborate with law enforcement to shape crime narratives and justify expanding surveillance infrastructure.
Theoretically, I engage with abolitionist thought and the anti-security critique to historicize contemporary retail policing. Recuperating the work of Patrick Colquhoun, I demonstrate how modern loss prevention strategies continue his vision of proactive property crime policing to maintain market order. Policing has long served to regulate labor and enforce economic discipline, a function that remains central to corporate security practices today.
I introduce decommodification as a necessary complement to abolitionist critiques of policing, highlighting the need to move beyond punitive responses to economic precarity. Decommodification challenges market dependency and envisions a future where essential goods and services are public rights rather than commodities. By rethinking shoplifting in this light, I argue for an abolitionist approach that links struggles against policing with broader fights for economic justice, exposing the carceral logic embedded in capitalist market enforcement.

Author

• Brendan Innis McQuade, University of Southern Maine