City of Issaquah proposes emergency ordinances targeting inaction by stores on shoplifting

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Brian Lutz
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City of Issaquah proposes emergency ordinances targeting inaction by stores on shoplifting

Post by Brian Lutz »

https://komonews.com/news/local/new-eme ... n-issaquah

In a bit of an odd reversal from what we normally hear about retail crime, the City of Issaquah(WA) is proposing two ordinances in response to what they see as inaction by retailers (mostly in the form of refusal to press charges against shoplifters) against a major spike in shoplifting that the city says is causing a major increase in more severe criminal activity in the city. Two ordinances are being proposed:

- Levying fines against businesses that do not keep track of their shopping carts (saying that criminals will often load up a shopping cart, walk out the door without paying, then ditch the empty cart at the transit center or in some other location);
- Threatening to pull business licenses from stores that do not adequately report and prosecute crimes that happen on their property.

Issaquah is a rather affluent suburb in the Seattle\Bellevue area with a number of big box stores which is easily accessible by transit from Downtown Seattle, which seems to suggest that this seems to be spillover from Downtown Seattle where such crimes mostly go unpunished. What is particularly odd is that Target (which seems to have a pretty good reputation for loss prevention) is cited as being possibly the worst offender when it comes to failure to prosecute shoplifters in this case.
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