During a campaign rally last night in Erie, Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump went on a tangent about crimes like retail theft. He began by describing thieves at department stores “walking out with air conditioners, with refrigerators on their back,” and lamenting the ways law enforcement officers are apparently stifled in their efforts to stop it: “they’re told ‘if you do anything, you’re gonna lose your pension, you’re gonna lose your family, your house, your car.”
He continued by claiming that laws in San Francisco were such that a person was “allowed to steal” anything valued at under $950, and that thieves were browsing stores with calculators and making sure they don’t go over the limit. California passed Prop. 47 in 2014, classifying theft of items valued at under $950 as misdemeanors, however that still carries a penalty of up to 6 months in prison and fines up to $1,000.
Misinformation aside, the part of Trump’s tangent that has caused a stir is the solution he proposed for this supposed problem: “If you had one really violent day. One rough hour – and I mean real rough – the word would get out and it would end immediately.” Clips of this quote have been going viral on social media, with many troubled by its implications. Politico reporter Adam Wren posted a transcription of this section of Trump’s speech on X (formerly Twitter), commenting “this is roughly the plot of the movie The Purge,” a connection that was drawn by many other users on social media. The Purge is a dystopian action-horror film in which society legalizes all crime, including murder, for one night a year.
Another cohort of users drew a connection to Kristallnacht, a night of violent rioting in Nazi Germany on November 9th, 1938, with attacks against Jewish people, their places of worship, and their businesses that left scores dead and tens of thousands of Jews sent to concentration camps. Scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarian leaders, reacted to the speech: “I study dictators and this chills me. Given all his comments in the past about executing people & shooting looters and his admiration for leaders specialized in mass repression, it’s not hard to imagine what ‘one really violent day’ would mean.” In May 2020, Donald Trump tweeted out the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” in reference to the civil unrest that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police.
Trump’s characterization of retail theft gone rampant flies in the face of available data. Crime across the board – from murder to rape to larceny – spiked in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but has been trending downward ever since, according to statistics released last week by the FBI. Data concerning rates of shoplifting has been uneven, with cities like Los Angeles and New York showing long-running trends of shoplifting on the rise against a falling national average, but according to the Council on Criminal Justice, the trends in those two cities appear to be plateauing and falling slightly, respectively.
