re: Boston DA lists crimes she won’t prosecute

It is a shitty policy W/R/T petty property crime, though. That’s the problem.

Jurisdictions need to be tough as hell on it, and both the economics and recent public policy scholarship back me up on that. Dollars invested in making a hard line on property crime tend to positively correlate to growth.

Think of it this way:

Persistent petty property crime at, say, a grocery store or retail store only nabs, at most, a couple hundred dollars worth of property at a time, right? Well, persistent property crime creates an incentive for the store to spend, say, $5,000 to $10,000 per month in an advanced security system + extra security. That’s a first persistent, embedded cost to investment. The store has to recoup lost inventory; that’s a second persistent, embedded cost to investment. The store’s insurance rates just went up again: that’s a third persistent, embedded cost to investment. The opportunity cost of getting a 2.5% return on a store in an area with chronic petty property crime as opposed to a store in a decent area with a 6% return is a fourth persistent, embedded cost to investment. All of the sudden because of those rates of return, lots of peer stores pull out, pulling tax revenue and all sorts of knock-on downstream municipal revenue out of coffers; making up that difference is a fifth persistent, embedded cost of investment. You probably already have high turnover, so that’s a sixth persistent, embedded cost of investment.

The economic cost of that one Alexa or couple dozen candy bars persistent and writ large over a whole neighborhood ends up costing that community immense amounts of investment (to the tune of tens of millions) in a fairly short amount of time - it’s what makes the petty property crime materially different from some of the other stuff on which the DA is, rightfully, willing to take it easy. It’s a deadweight loss to the community in a way a lot of other petty crime isn’t.