Kathy Hochul’s Copy-and-Paste Crime-Fighting Formula

That joint operation would be “anchored” around the state’s Crime Analysis Center Network, a series of local police headquarters modeled after so-called “fusion centers,” the secretive intelligence hubs created during the post-September 11, 2001, expansion in domestic surveillance.

Hochul has invested heavily in that model. In 2022, she created an entirely new network of intelligence hubs dedicated to “crime guns” and boosted funding to both the Crime Analysis Center Network and the State Police’s own fusion center. The following year, she established a new crime analysis center and ramped up the state fusion center’s social media surveillance efforts. Building on those efforts this year, she has proposed creating a clearinghouse within the Crime Analysis Center Network to gather and sift through information from retailers and disseminate it among the newly shoplifting-focused cops.

Hochul has argued that the intense surveillance is necessary because retail crime is increasingly “driven by organized retail theft networks.” But experts have placed the total percentage of retail loss they can attribute to organized operations in the single digits. (Asked for evidence for her assertion, Hochul’s office only said that the administration met with industry organizations and retail theft prevention experts.)

New York City did see a 64 percent increase in reported shoplifting between 2019 and 2023, even as most major cities saw retail theft go down. Statewide, incidents have risen at about a third of that pace.

Beyond surveillance for organized crime, Hochul’s anti-retail theft efforts focus on the same street policing initiatives she used to tackle gun violence. In 2022 and 2023, Hochul won millions in increased funding for Community Stabilization Units, New York State Police patrols she deployed to dozens of new communities across the state. This year, she wants to spend $25 million to create and deploy a new State Police team dedicated to building cases against shoplifting rings, as well as a new “Smash and Grab Enforcement Unit.” She also wants to increase the use of so-called “trespass affidavits,” or agreements between law enforcement and businesses that allow police to arrest people who return to a store after the business accuses them of stealing.

Over the past two years, Hochul has funneled tens of millions of dollars in grants to local police departments engaged in similar aggressive, “hot spot” policing initiatives; this year, she wants $5 million to help local law enforcement build out their retail theft policing initiatives.

Once the cops wrangle shoplifters, Hochul wants district attorneys ready to prosecute them. Last year, she disseminated tens of millions to hire “hundreds of new prosecutors.” This year, she wants to send DAs $10 million specifically to prosecute property crime cases. And like the previous two budget cycles, which saw the governor push through harsher penalties for certain types of gun possession, Hochul wants the court system to crack down on retail theft: She’s proposing legislation to increase sentences for assaulting a retail worker and establish criminal penalties for facilitating the sale of stolen goods online.

“We used this approach with illegal guns,” Hochul said last week, “and it worked.”

It’s true that gun violence in New York, including in the jurisdictions Hochul has targeted, is on the downswing. But whether her approach has contributed to that is hard to assess. New York’s recently declining gun violence is part of a nationwide pattern. Crime statistics are notoriously fungible, and researchers routinely warn against extrapolating causes or trends from year-over-year numbers.