New York’s leftwing Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have spent $35 million to create a new task force. The job of that task force would have been to crack down on the organized shoplifting rings that have been taking the state’s retailers to the cleaners. Hochul’s excuse was that there is no room in the budget for $35 million. The retailers are aghast at this response since they lost $4.4 billion in stolen goods and property last year.
The retailers want these organized shoplifting gangs to be shut down. Unfortunately for the taxpayers and business owners, the Democrat Party is no longer interested in law and order. In the Age of George Floyd, gangs of mostly black teenagers know that they’re free to loot any store as long as they don’t take more than several hundred dollars in merchandise (the number varies from blue state to blue state).
A Home Depot employee was killed for resisting one of these gangs earlier this year. His son is now one of the main people advocating for task forces to shut these gangs down, just as the police did with the Crips and Bloods in the 1990s in California.
Everyone knows that Governor Hochul is lying, obviously. There’s plenty of money to spend $35 million to crack down on these gangs. Once the cops bust a few heads and the gangs know they no longer have a risk-free shoplifting amnesty, the problem will go away. New York has plenty of money to solve this problem, just like when Gavin Newsom swooped into San Francisco and cleaned the city up in 24 hours for a visit from Xi Jinping.
The issue is that Kathy Hochul doesn’t want to solve the problem. She’s serving the interests of someone else and not the taxpayers of New York. Someone should ask Kathy Hochul she’s really serving, and what that person’s agenda is for America.
Here’s a report from a few months ago on this growing phenomenon of organized shoplifting gangs in liberal-controlled cities and states:
