Former Chicago police head: Retail theft should be a felony
CHICAGO, IL – SEPTEMBER 20: Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy speaks during a news conference about a shooting on September 20, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. Thirteen people, including a three-year-old, were shot during the evening of September 19, at a basketball court in the city’s Ninth District. Photo by John Gress/Getty Images)
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CHICAGO (NewsNation Now) — Garry McCarthy, former superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, said cities are not being tough enough amid a rise in smash-and-grab robberies this holiday season.
“This really feeds off of everything that’s been going on for about a decade now between politics and policing,” he said. “And at the end of the day, politicians are setting policies like that … where the prosecutor [in Chicago], Kim Foxx, will not prosecute these crimes.”
Organized retail crime now costs retailers an average of $700,000 per $1 billion in sales, and three-fourths of retailers saw an increase in organized retail crime in 2020, according to the NRF.
McCarthy believes it is only a matter of time before someone is injured during a smash-and-grab robbery.
“Mark my words, somebody is going to get seriously hurt during one of these events,” he said. “And then everybody’s going to say, ‘Oh, my God, we should have done something about it.’”
According to McCarthy, politicians should stick to politics, and police should stick to policing.
“We know how to prevent crime, we know how to reduce crime. But politicians refuse to do it for some reason because it’s somehow good for their constituents — which I don’t understand. I don’t know how this is good for anybody,” he said.
When asked if McCarthy believes there is a city in America that is handling smash-and-grab robberies well, he said he hasn’t seen an example.
“I’m still in touch with all my colleagues across the country. I was a member of the Major City Chiefs Association for 10 years. Everybody’s suffering the same fate. I talked to my friends in New York, and they told me the same thing about gun arrests … where they’re getting people with DNA on guns, video, and confession — and they’re getting three months in jail where it’s a mandatory minimum of three years in jail,” he said.
McCarthy left the NYPD in 2006 when he took over the police department in Newark, New Jersey. He was hired to take over the Chicago Police Department by then-mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2011. He was fired by the mayor in 2015 following the coverup of the police killing of Laquan McDonald, a Black 17-year-old boy who was shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke.
