With an increasing number of businesses across the country growing desperate to take retail theft prevention measures into their own hands, Harris Teeter grocery stores at Washington, D.C., are the latest to take steps to crack down on shoplifting.

“Ensuring a safe shopping environment for both our customers and our valued associates is critical,” a representative of Harris Teeter tells the Sun, adding that in D.C. stores, the chain is implementing “improved safety measures,” including receipt-checking as customers exit and “a new policy prohibiting suitcases, duffel bags, oversized backpacks and roller bags.”

Harris Teeter, a North Carolina-based high-end supermarket chain owned by grocery giant Kroger, operates more than 250 stores across the East Coast, but its targeted crackdown at D.C. suggests growing desperation of businesses based there — despite the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, recently telling an Axios reporter who asked about crime to not “be so down on D.C.”

Ms. Bowser — whose office did not respond to a request for comment from the Sun — has been praising a sweeping public safety package that she signed in March, aimed in part toward retail theft. A spree of shoplifting incidents in February forced several big chain grocery stores at the nation’s capital, including Giant and Safeway, to lock up items and even implement security gates requiring customers to scan receipts at the store exits.

The capital isn’t alone in facing a retail theft epidemic: Last week, Governor Hochul touted more than $40 million in funding toward new initiatives including retail theft teams and law enforcement — as well as new felony penalties for assaulting retail employees — to combat the “chaos” unfolding in New York. 

“Larceny offenses in New York City have spiked by 51 percent between 2017 and 2023. Robberies, grand larceny, and petit larceny in New York City are up by 86 percent during that same time period,” the governor’s office said in a statement.

A report last fall indicated that New York City saw the biggest increase in shoplifting among cities since the beginning of the Covid pandemic — as reported shoplifting incidents rose by 64 percent since mid-2019. In a study of 61,184 incidents in 24 cities, nearly half took place within New York City, as the Sun reported, and even factoring in the city’s large population, analysts said the statistics were “disproportionate to its size.”

Acknowledging the steps many businesses have taken to protect themselves, Ms. Hochul’s latest initiatives include a $5 million tax credit “to help small businesses invest in added security measures.”

On the Coast, stores have taken increasingly desperate measures to quell retail theft, including one Beverly Hills shop that created a mugshot “Wall of Shame” to deter shoplifters. 

“We feel as a small business we have to take matters into our own hands; we’re not being supported really by the mayor, we’re not being supported by the district attorney,” a stylist at the Kitson clothing mini-chain, Lisa Goodman, told FOX 11, noting that the store’s four locations lose tens of thousands of dollars to shoplifting. 

Many California business owners and residents blame the state’s voter-enacted Proposition 47, passed in 2014, which — in the name of criminal justice — has reduced penalties for petty theft and commercial burglary. 

A group leading a ballot effort to overhaul Prop 47, the Californians for Safer Communities Coalition, recently announced that it is submitting more than 900,000 voter signatures to qualify its ballot initiative for the November general election. 

Prop 47 led to “unintended consequences over the past decade,” including repeat and organized retail theft and businesses shutting their doors, the group notes. It says that can “only be corrected by the voters at the ballot box with commonsense changes to Prop 47.”