By Dan Murphy
In my travels around Yonkers, as I dropped off 500 copies of Yonkers Rising at the ACME on McLean Avenue, I noticed a Yonkers Police officer standing at the exit. I aksed if he was working off duty and he replied yes, explaining that ACME had hired some of Yonkers finest to work to try and stem the tide of shop lifting, which has gotten out of control in some neighborhoods in New York’s third largest City.
On Nov. 23, Yonkers Police Commissioner John Mueller told the Yonkers City Council at their meeting on Nov. 23 that shoplifting in the major retail drug stores in the southwest portion of the City, (Walgreens, Rite Aid, CVS) has become “a considerable problem and a big time, repeat offender, recidivist crime,” and that because of bail reform, Judges cannot keep repeat offenders behind bars and they are released, only to commit the same shoplifting crime at the same drug store, the next day and week and month.
“The vast majority of shoplifters in Yonkers are repeat offenders, and in our three area pharmacies the bi product is the shelves are becoming empty and the elderly can’t find the items they need to purchase to live,” said Mueller, who said that overall, shoplifting arrests are the same as last year, but that repeat offender arrests are on the rise,.
“We believe that a multi-faceted solution is required that would include changes to the existing bail reform and how we can hard target some of the affected areas. The vast majority of shoplifters are a small subset of the criminal population. The same person goes into a pharmacy, steals, gets arrested and then is released, and the judge has no latitude to hold them. And when we have to repeatedly arrest the same person for shoplifting, we have limited resources and can’t be spending time somewhere else,” said Mueller, who also asked the retail pharmacies to step up their security and enforcement in their stores.
Commissioner Mueller recently made a trip to Albany to ask for the elimination of cash bail in exchange for giving Judges the power to place repeat offenders in jail.
Doug Horsting, head of Rite Aid’s Asset Protection Program, called the problem “organized retail crime”, he said “I have never seen this amount of shoplifting in my career. Customers are asking are you going out of business because there are no items on the shelves. Employees are afraid to go to work because they are assaulted and spit on. Shoplifters are coming in with large bags and the items are re-sold at a lower cost. We now have to hire additional security and lock up many items and install more cameras, but shoplifting is still rampant in Yonkers, and across the country. The support we have received from the Yonkers Police is second to none.”
The officer that I spoke to at ACME said that “cash bail isn’t needed,” and agreed with Commissioner Mueller that what was needed was an effort to put repeat offenders in jail, “for even one night,”
I left him saying, “we appreciate what you are doing.”
