On October 4, a conference was held in Winnipeg called the Retail Secure Manitoba Summit, which according to the website, brought together “business leaders, officials, police, retailers, and community members”—essentially, capitalists, state violence, prosecution, private security, and businesses—with the ostensible objective of combating retail theft. Present at the conference was the NDP leader of Manitoba Wab Kinew, the province’s first Indigenous premier, as well as the Winnipeg mayor Scott Willingham.
The main initiative being proposed at the event was, you guessed it, more police roaming the streets of exploited neighbourhoods and the expansion of Winnipeg safety patrols, i.e. law enforcement working with social agencies to surveil, criminalize and force vulnerable populations into the shadow carceral state of shelters and involuntary treatment facilities. This ulterior motive of containing surplus populations displaced by organized abandonment is then hidden behind a recycled, worn out veil of delusion that the summit attendees purport as “progress.”
CBC journalist Darren Bernhardt, the same journalist who wrote on how hundreds of thousands of workers are making less than a living wage only a week before, decided to write about this “first of its kind” summit with an article entitled, “As hundreds gather to tackle retail theft in Winnipeg, a local thrift store readies to closes its doors.” There is plenty to unpack about this atrocious piece of journalism, but a good first step is the title.
Why do businesses close?
Two heavy assumptions are made before the reader opens Bernhardt’s article: first, that a local thrift store is closing because of retail theft; second, that the hundreds of people gathering care about the closure of local thrift stores.
To address the former, it is important to emphasize that it may very well be true that theft, which exists because of structural inequality, contributed to the closing of the store. Theft is without a doubt a factor when it comes to making business decisions. What is deliberately left out from the outset of the article however is that shoplifting is not only not the sole contributing factor to businesses shutting down, but often used as a catch-all mask to conceal corporate mismanagement, nefarious intentions and the outcomes of capitalist monopolization.
In his analysis on why Walgreens closed stores in San Francisco after citing “crime” as the reason, journalist Adam Johnson documented how the closures happened prior to the alleged crime strike that happened in the city. To compare, more stores had been shut down in New York during the same time period, despite the lack of a similar shoplifting narrative.
Johnson also investigated the closing of sixteen Starbucks locations in Seattle, who allegedly closed due to retail theft. What he discovered was that the closures had much more to do with the increasing threat of unionization than any reason relating to shoplifting.
Johnson went further down this line of thinking, noting that urban retail markets are still significantly down when compared to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, when considering higher rents together with competition from Amazon, UBS predicted that 50,000 retail stores will be closed in the next five years in the United States.
While there has been an alleged 44% increase in retail theft incidents in Winnipeg from last year, the number of incidents is still below pre-pandemic levels, indicating that the same underlying conditions that have affected American businesses can be applied to Canada. Rather than mentioning any of these possible alternatives, Bernhardt chooses to take capitalists’ vague gestures at violence and crime at face value to explain why their businesses are shutting down.
Anecdotes are powerful
This leads to the second point, the choice of centering a local thrift store in the article. Personal stories, while having the potential to serve a vital purpose in documenting humanity, can be used to obscure the interpretation of events and divert the readers’ understanding of what policy direction serves their best interest.
Alec Karakatsanis has written extensively on the discourse of the anecdote in the mainstream media, and notes how many stories attempt to “persuade news consumers by quoting seemingly random ordinary people to get their views.” But, he adds, “because you can find essentially anyone to say anything in our society, this provides a lot of discretion for reporters to select which views are shared and which are ignored.”
From the very beginning of the article, the reader is manipulated in empathizing with the manager of the local thrift store and to interpret her experience as an all-encompassing encapsulation of what all businesses, big and small, are equally facing. Bernhardt even points out that the store raises funds for Winnipeg shelters. A tragic irony, considering that the entire point of Bernhardt’s article is to criminalize the existence of the very people who use such spaces.
The manager is then quoted saying that, “People would maybe try and hide something. Not anymore: They grab an armful and walk out.” This vague, nostalgic appeal to the supposed crime-controlled glory days is echoed in the last sentence of the article, where the manager states, without contention from Bernhardt, that “it’s not like it used to be, you know. And that’s a problem.”As noted before, while shoplifting has increased in Winnipeg from a year ago, it is still below pre-pandemic levels. Bernhardt, whether inadvertently or not, does not acknowledge this contradiction in the logic of his own article. Because the all powerful anecdote is superior in the social imagination.
Because the anecdote takes precedence over facts. Using a local thrift store to appeal to the reader’s emotions is a deliberate ploy that puts a human, local face on provincial policies designed to further poverty and inequality. The trope of the struggling small business owner is simply a reiteration of the “mom and pop landlord” sob story curated by capitalist conglomerates to convince the common reader that owners of property are underdogs against the omnipotent force of shoplifters, who can only be stopped by increasing human caging. Business owners are deserving of empathy, while the poor are othered. Business owners’ perspectives are shared, while the voices of the working class are silenced.
Moral panic
The current Canadian moral panic of retail theft echoes the American counterpart, in which corporate rhetoric around shoplifting has been proven to be highly manufactured. For instance, while much fear is spread about organized groups who commit retail theft, less than 7% of cases involve three or more people.
What all moral panics have in common is the diversion of people’s frustration developed from the consequences of late-stage capitalism towards society’s most vulnerable. Meanwhile, larger systemic issues that are the main cause of our desolation remain exempt from criticism.
Never in these punitive advocating articles, nor at these carceral summits claiming to be concerned for public safety, will you see a concern for substantial harm that is caused by the likes of wealth inequality, homelessness, wage theft, the ongoing violence of colonialism or policing, all of which objectively cause more harm to the working class than retail theft ever will. Instead, their attention is solely aimed towards the faceless on the other side of the thin blue line. This is a choice. Whether it is shoplifters, welfare recipients, the unhoused or the accused out on bail, it is manufactured outrage intended to punch down and take advantage of the fear generated from the conditions of late-stage capitalism: fear that, in the words of Rinaldo Walcott, “is exploited by modern policing and prisons to prevent us from seeking other ways of dealing with conflict. The idea or concept of crime is ideologically deployed to stall us from figuring out how to live differently together.”
The truth is that carceral logic will always operate within the confines of the centuries-old ideology of racial and environmental determinism, in which racialized and poor populations are pathologized as inherently prone to criminality. The CBC, like the New York Times, exists to serve the interests of the neo-liberal ruling class, who intend to siphon the working person’s imagination away from real solutions and instead towards carceral logic.
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