Last Friday’s meeting of the House Judiciary Committee was, to the casual observer, devoted to beating the drum for a crackdown on retail theft, the crime formerly known as shoplifting. (Does “retail theft” sound less, I don’t know, recreational than shoplifting? Probably.)

Anyway. There’s precious little evidence to support claims that retail theft is on the rise. The main propagator of this assertion is the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group for the industry that’s been making it easier and easier to steal stuff by cutting staff and instituting self-checkout. The NRF spent years flogging a bogus study that allegedly showed a tsunami of “organized retail crime,” only to retract it last month. Actual crime statistics indicate that “organized” theft accounts for a small fraction of shoplifting. And outside of a handful of major cities, there’s no evidence that retail theft is on the rise at all.

So now the tactics have shifted. We hear much less talk about rampant crime in our malls and downtowns, and more about the “perception” of a problem. People “feel” as though shoplifting is a crisis. Therefore, the argument goes, we must treat it like a crisis.

As a result, House Judiciary is considering an array of crime bills, and it began a scheduled series of hearings on Friday. But if you watched closely, you could detect a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on. The hearing seemed designed to meet the perception of disorder with the counter-perception of a crackdown than with an actual “tough on crime” offensive.

We’ll focus mainly on the testimony of Shawn Burke, chief of the South Burlington Police Department. You might expect him to come off the top rope with a snarling tough-guy routine. Indeed, his opening gambit was a carefully chosen statistic: his department received 490 reports of retail theft in 2023, compared to only about 260 in 2020.

Which was Year One of the Covid epidemic, when shutdowns were common and many were avoiding retail spaces entirely. It’s well established that 2020 and 2021 are real outliers when it comes to retail theft. Anyone with half a brain, hopefully including members of the Judiciary Committee, would know that.

Otherwise, Burke’s presentation was… remarkably progressive. He did advocate for the mildest of the bills on offer: H.381, which would allow authorities to aggregate charges for frequent offenders. Burke testified that a small number of repeat offenders account for a large number of thefts. But he didn’t seem all that hot on the idea. “Absent new ideas about how to hold offenders accountable for chronic misdemeanor offenses, it may leave the felony option as the best one,” he said. Burke did not try to argue for a broad crackdown, and he emphasized that his department tries to get offenders into diversion programs instead of the courts.

Burke also pointed to Vermont’s massive court backlogs as severing the link between crime and consequences. Due to lengthy delays and charges never going to trial, he said, there are “no consequences,” even for repeat offenders.

Burke repeatedly invoked the word “perception” in various forms, and focused the committee’s attention on the societal causes of petty crime. “We have a substance use disorder crisis in Vermont, a mental health crisis in Vermont and a housing crisis in Vermont,” he said. “All of this is playing out in the public sphere, and is being perceived as a public safety problem.”

Will you look at that. A top cop going all squishy left on crime.

He’s right, of course. But it’s a real surprise. And it does make me wonder about the intent of committee chair, Democratic Rep. Martin LaLonde, in inviting Burke to more or less represent law enforcement on this issue.

For all my ranting about perception versus reality on crime, I get that LaLonde’s job is to respond to public perception. He does represent the people, not criminologists or statisticians or sociologists or, thank the Lord, bloggers. LaLonde is, not coincidentally, the lead sponsor of H.381. It’s almost as if he aims to head off a real crackdown by focusing Judiciary’s attention on a bill that targets a small number of high-volume offenders.

And it’s almost as if he’s proactively fending off criticism of justice reform efforts by tossing a morsel to the red-meat crowd. Gov. Phil Scott is making a big push on public safety, and this is an election year. A prudent Democrat might want to have a counter-argument against Republicans likely to claim that the legislative majority is soft on crime. Who knows, he might even arrange for a prominent veteran Man In Blue to offer support for a measured approach to crime.

If this is the morality play in repertory at House Judiciary, then I understand it. Heck, I’d even applaud it. I’m not saying this is what’s going on, but I do see the signs and they point to a comprehensive, intelligent response to the perception that retail crime is out of control.

Postscript. One passage in Burke’s testimony piqued my interest. He talked about the high burden that retail theft places on his department. The typical duty shift in SoBu includes three patrol officers. Responding to a shoplifting complaint and processing an offender can take two officers off the street for 90 minutes or more, which leaves one single cop to take care of anything else that goes on during that time. (Like, say, fender benders on Shelburne or Williston Roads.)

He noted that the top five locations for retail theft are, not surprisingly, the University Mall, two Hannafords, a Lowe’s, and Harbor Freight. The major mall and four big retailers of the kind that have cut back on staffing and emphasized self-checkout. To the extent that retail theft is a problem for them, I’d extend a courteous invitation to look in a goddamn mirror.

What they’ve done, in effect, is offloaded their own responsibility for store security onto our taxpayer-funded police departments. I don’t know what’s to be done about it, but it is worth keeping in mind when we hear the howls of complaint from retailers and their lobbyists.