No more five-finger discounts.
The NYPD is beating back shoplifting — taking repeat offenders out of commission to help bring retail theft down by 20% so far this year, police officials told The Post this week.
NYPD Chief of Department Michael LiPetri credited the so-far successful citywide crackdown in part to changes in state law pushed by Gov. Kathy Hochul that allowed authorities to more effectively go after serial crooks.
“Throughout the city, we are closing – which means making an arrest – just a few years ago, it was 40%.Now it’s on 50% [of cases]. So every shoplifting complaint that we take, we’ve made arrests on half of them,” LiPetri told The Post.
“That has really been a total game changer when it comes to recidivism, and also the businesses have gotten so much better by reporting.”
He said the action from Albany in 2024 — which permitted authorities to combine the values of goods stolen from multiple stores to slap on heavier charges and seek bail — has been a “total game changer.”
“Just a couple of years ago, 20% of individuals who committed a shoplifting offense got arrested with a new felony within 30 days or less,” he explained.
Now, just 13% of repeat offenders get re-arrested for a new felony in that same timeframe, LiPetri said.
“We’re not looking to arrest individuals who are down on their luck and just went into a store randomly and left. We’re looking fully for recidivism to be dealt with,” he said.
But the department’s tactic is “multi-layered,” the chief noted.
“It’s not just one strategy. We implemented multiple strategies” — including beefed up street patrols in shoplifting hotspots that have cut retail thefts by more than 40% when cops are walking the beat.
“The community, the cops and the courts are all working together, and that has resulted in these dramatic increases,” Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance told The Post.
“I used to get calls every day, every second day. [Now], I can’t remember the last call I got complaining about something from retailers,” Harris said Monday.
“That, to me, is the definition of success.”
The city has seen nearly 3,000 fewer reported shoplifting incidents in the first quarter of 2026, with double digit declines in every single borough compared to the same timeframe in 2025, according to NYPD data.
As of Wednesday, a total of 12,607 retail theft incidents were reported to the NYPD, meaning the city is on pace for fewer than 44,000 total this year — compared to the 52,696 retail theft reports tallied in 2025.
It comes after retail theft surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, jumping a massive 64% from 2019 to 2023.
The pandemic-era surge ravaged stores statewide, including in New York City — leading to $4.4 billion in losses during 2022 alone, when shoplifting complaints surged to 63,000, a 45% leap from the previous year.
During the city’s shoplifting peak, the department investigated 17,112 retail theft cases in the first quarter of 2022, meaning the numbers so far this year mark a 26% decline.
“Our retail theft initiative really started back in 2023, where we took a look at things and we just were not getting prosecutions that we were looking for when it came to recidivism,” LiPetri said.
But thanks to the reforms passed as part of the 2024 state budget, the NYPD and Big Apple district attorneys have been able to collaborate on a winning strategy.
Authorities have taken advantage of changes in the law that allow cops to aggregate shoplifting incidents, so that thieves who used to get a slap on the wrist for stealing less than $1,000 worth of merchandise — a misdemeanor — can have the totals added up from different heists and face more serious grand larceny charges.
Cops are also now keeping better track of individual suspects, and also working with prosecutors to issue trespassing notices so accused thieves are barred from stores such as CVS and Duane Reade — and face additional charges if they run afoul of the court orders.
Those strengthened policies, as well as other changes that provided beefed-up protections for retail workers who get assaulted by shoplifters, have been helping keep career criminals behind bars, cops said.
For instance, a suspect with more than 200 busts on his rap sheet, Laron Mack, was released after a petit larceny bust in 2023 — because the charge doesn’t qualify for bail under the state’s controversial 2019 criminal justice reforms — despite allegedly pinching from the same Manhattan Duane Reade at least a half dozen times.
Cops pointed to another accused recidivist thief, Raeed Clark, 41 – who has 85 arrests under his belt, 40 of them over the past two years – who is now staring down a potential jail sentence, authorities said.
Clark, who is homeless, allegedly assaulted a worker at the Herald Square H&M store on Oct. 5, 2025 before making off with $75 in merchandise, police said.
He’d previously been issued a trespass affidavit for repeated entries to the store – and he was slapped with robbery and assault charges under the strengthened protections for retail workers, police said.
Some of the success also comes from good old-fashioned policing, like having cops walk the streets during the holiday season.
“We saw a 41% reduction in retail thefts … during the holiday seasons by putting officers on foot in large commercial strips,” LiPetri said, noting the effort stretched across the boroughs.
Target areas included Fordham Road in The Bronx, Main Street in Flushing, Queens and a stretch of 125th Street in Harlem — neighborhoods plagued by thieves in the past, the chief said.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch praised the results of the new approach.
“From everyday items like toothpaste and deodorant locked behind cases to small businesses struggling to stay open, last year, we applied a data-driven precision approach, identifying patterns, concentrating resources at high-propensity locations, and shifting from pass-through enforcement to sustained investigations,” Tisch said in a statement.
“The result was a 14 percent reduction in 2025,” the commissioner said. “And this year, we have doubled down and retail theft is down 20 percent citywide in the first quarter compared to last year, with double-digit declines in all five boroughs.”
