49 Replies to "WEST SEATTLE. CRIME WATCH: Police targeting shoplifters at Westwood Village"

• Wsresident March 27, 2025 (2:27 pm)

  I was at target with my daughter the other day and we watched a crazy situation. A person was walking through the store, filling up their cart. When we excited the store, the cops and employees weee hiding on the interior wall and said guy who was clearly loading a cart to steal, was very surprised to see the cops he made it ALMOST outside. The cop had a physical altercation with the perp, the guys was beating up on the cop and they were rolling around in the floor fighting. Somehow the guy just got to walk freely back to his U-Haul truck with the cop following him. Should’nt this have been called as assault on an officer and the guys gets arrested? 

• Burgerman March 27, 2025 (3:01 pm)

  Get ’em!! Good job SPD! Now let’s see some accountability for her in the justice system. And oh by the way, don’t come at me, either. I managed to not steal when I was poor for 10 or so years. 

• spooled March 27, 2025 (3:03 pm)

  Excellent work SPD!  Lots more of these operations please.  Prosecutors and judges, it’s time to make a few examples.   I haven’t been to that mall or the Roxbury Safeway in years because of the blatant crime.

• Lauren March 27, 2025 (3:24 pm)

  This is really, really not where I want my taxpayer money going. Each officer is probably making at least a $100k salary. (Which I don’t begrudge them, cost of living is super high.) All of those resources to get $90 back for a billion-dollar corporation. How else could our community invest those resources? How can we reimagine that spending in a way that actually deters crime?

  • Anne March 27, 2025 (5:32 pm)

    This is EXACTLY where I want MY taxpayer money going. This is the deterrent of which you speak-no need to reimagine it. So glad you don’t “begrudge “ the salary you “ probably” think officers make. 

  • Adam March 27, 2025 (5:57 pm)

    “Reimagining” out justice system is why this place is what it is. We’re overspending because we let it get out of hand to the point that criminals feel emboldened to do anything because there’s usually no response, and when there is, usually no repercussions. If you have a better way, put it in the comments please. I’m all for more effective policing, when it’s feasible. This cop could easily stop enough shoplifters in a year to make up that $100k+ salary, let alone the bigger crimes they can be stopping. 

  • WestSeattleDad March 27, 2025 (6:41 pm)

    This is called deterrence. If done enough and examples are made, the trash will move away from the community. No more handouts and freebies. Time for severe legal measures

  • Neighbor March 27, 2025 (7:14 pm)

    The billion dollar company doesn’t pay a dime for shoplifting.  The honest customers pay for stolen goods through increased prices.

    • Lauren March 28, 2025 (7:43 am)

      You’re right, the billion-dollar company doesn’t pay for shoplifting. Instead, they say crime is forcing them to raise prices, and they continue to rake in record profits while “honest customers” have a harder and harder time making ends meet.They literally want you to be fighting each other, not seeing what they’re doing. You’re playing into their handbook. 

      • Orb March 28, 2025 (11:39 am)

        Well, shoplifting is illegal. Break the law, face the consequences. Regardless of if it’s a major corporation or a small mom and pop, don’t steal. It ruins it for everyone.

        • k March 28, 2025 (1:01 pm)

          Wage theft is illegal.  Telling employees they have to clock out for meals but can’t leave the store even though they’re clocked out is illegal.  Firing someone for a medical condition that doesn’t prevent them from doing their job is illegal.  Basing scheduled hours on one’s ability to perform a task quicker than someone else without consideration given for disabilities is a violation of the ADA.  No one at Target is going to jail for any of these things, despite them having a bigger impact on every day people than $90 worth of merchandise.  (And, yes, I’ve personally witnessed all of those things working at Target).  Target steals from people all the time.  You reap what you sow.

  • KT March 28, 2025 (4:11 am)

    This is why corporations need to be taxed more to pay for services like police.  And the roads they use to transport their goods, etc.  Back when America was great (post world War 2),the corporate tax rate was 40 to 45%.  That is when we did great things like go to the moon, build out the national highway system, etc.  

    • Ts March 29, 2025 (9:31 pm)

      And we can all stop rounding up at the register so those same corporations can use them to donate as a tax deduction 

  • Keith Forde March 28, 2025 (6:17 am)

    shoplifting affects the price of goods for everyone, higher prices, store closings are inevitable if shoplifting goes unchecked. There are many places to receive help in Seattle if destitute, and in need of food and shelter. 

  • PG March 28, 2025 (7:09 am)

    I don’t really see the correlation between an officer’s salary and catching a shoplifter.  The amount of shoplifting at Westwood is astounding.  Stores are locking up items, which makes shopping for the rest of us time-consuming and inconvenient.  Stores are raising prices and closing doors (and sometimes stores) to prevent shoplifting.  I am very happy to see attempts to reverse this trend.

  • SLJ March 28, 2025 (7:19 am)

    If shoplifters are caught by the police periodically, it serves as a deterrent. Good job SPD.

  • Wsresident March 28, 2025 (8:12 am)

    I personally disagree, first target pays the officers for the overtime they’re want to work, not taxpayers. Second, once the regular shoplifters realize they will now be stopped, they will all be less inclined to waste their time.At least someone is doing something! Would you like to continue with a permissive response that keeps the losses happening? What exactly is your recommendation or solution to fix these issues? 

    • Lauren March 28, 2025 (9:19 am)

      WSResident, I highly recommend the book “The End of Policing” by Alex S. Vitale if you’re truly interested in learning about alternate solutions that have good track records.

    • Resident March 28, 2025 (9:54 am)

      100% — I’ve been there and seen the cops following the kids around clearly trying to cause a disturbance.  Time and place does not seem to be taught anymore.  You want to run around, throw balls, push and shove each other – there’s a park for that! Not a store full of people.  This on top of all the stealing.

  • Concerned Neighbor March 28, 2025 (10:09 am)

    Would you feel differently if it was a small, BIPOC-owned business being subject to constant shoplifting?All of the social disorder we experience is interconnected. You can’t go after it piecemeal. The goal here isn’t to signal virtue but make our community a better place to live. 

  • Alana March 28, 2025 (6:26 pm)

    I have no cares about Target’s property being protected (I think they’ll raise their prices if they can no matter what, blame it on loss or simply bc they want to. And I think they’re a terrible company, anti-Union, and cut their DEI program, VOLUNTARILY in Nov/Dec). I see the point about not using public resources to protect companies’ product. But I don’t see that as the only value of this – I think it is valuable to do this.
    .
    Status quo is private security at stores can’t do much. And I don’t want that changing too much, private security having the right to do much, that could get scary quickly. But I also think there’s not much enforcement so far/for years and people shoplift with a lot of impunity and I’m not ok with that trend just continuing. Ex: Marshall’s at Westwood Village feels like there’s one person casing for every two shoppers. Ross gives you a speech about “metered traffic” before you can even enter the store – and the amount of security is overwhelming it seems like a bank. These might seem like “minor inconveniences,” but it’s really beginning to shape the way a lot of brick and mortar interactions go and for what? It doesn’t things feel safer when I need to go to a store with my 2 year old – it just seems like everything is being shaped, impacting everyone but the people shoplifting who continue with relative impunity while everyone else has to deal with the increasingly stringent impacts to “deal” with it.
    .
    Again for what? So people can shoplift to get more fentanyl? I stand by that generalization. Times are tough, for my family too, and will probably get tougher, but I genuinely don’t think the average person struggling financially is shoplifting. Steal needed formula for your family, I do not care at all. All I have ever seen (many times over and over, same thing) is people who look currently high stealing things to quite likely sell. With genuine compassion for struggles with addiction use, that compassion does not extend to everyone else being impacted on a regular basis in little, but constant and increasing ways, so that people can shoplift. No. That’s not compassion that’s just a martyrdom complex. Enforce the law for repeat offenders please.

  • Law or free for all March 29, 2025 (8:50 am)

    Would you also say the same if these shoplifters moved on to becoming squatters in your home? Would you like if I said cops shouldn’t spend their $100k effort on something that’s $2k of rent theft? 

• Curtis March 27, 2025 (3:51 pm)

  This is great.  Lock them  all up until they learn.  We fully support SPD.  Thank you.

• Marcus March 27, 2025 (3:53 pm)

  Good!

• Flounder March 27, 2025 (4:20 pm)

  Everytime I go to ANY of the supermarkets in West Seattle I often watch people walking out with booze and occasionally food. I was in WholeFoods the other afternoon and saw a 15-year old pick-up a case of Modelo and head towards the door. I pointed him out to the armed security, he looked at the kid and his accomplice and basically shrugged his shoulders as they excited. I asked him why he didn’t do anything and he said it’s not his responsibility to stop shoplifters…it was someone else’s. So…purchasing is now an option?

• citizen March 27, 2025 (6:01 pm)

  I hope SPD can expedite the ouster of the illegal activity that has returned to SW Trenton St in not only the tent encampment area on the vacant property on the NE corner of  25th Ave SW & SW Trenton St. But also occurring involving people in vehicles in the same general area along SW Trenton St. Of note as a result of find it fix it submission the screened in enclosure that returned to SW Barton Pl near 22nd Ave SW is “being monitored” . That is on the Seattle public utilities property with a bldg and Sewer detention tank that has been a camping location with related vehicles parked along SW Barton Pl. Will the mayhem ever come to an end. The exploitation continues of the troubled individuals that are easy  to locate because they are allowed   to occupy the area. The bad actors know right where to find them  to manipulate and take advantage of them. 

• Peter S. March 27, 2025 (6:25 pm)

  Some of us remember a time when you only saw armed guards inside banks.  And even there,  it was a rarity.

  I think it’s pretty safe to assume that expense is built into the product price. And then some of us wonder why the cost of food keeps going up.

• Libra March 27, 2025 (6:42 pm)

  Lauren, it may not be where you want your taxpayer money going but the majority of us think differently.   Unchecked shoplifting results in higher prices for everyone…..at least for those of us who actually pay!  We need more SPD support so my thanks to them!

• Target no more March 27, 2025 (7:24 pm)

  I for one am shocked that locking up the toothpaste didn’t solve Target’s shoplifting problem instantly.Take all those people you’ve got running around the store unlocking things for customers and put them in the checkouts and at the door instead of relying almost completely on self-checkout might help. 

  • Toothpaste Shopper March 27, 2025 (9:47 pm)

    In my experience there have been very few staff around unlocking anything and they definitely aren’t running. 

• In the mean time March 27, 2025 (8:10 pm)

  Shop lifting – not great. But you know what else isn’t great and is going to screw every wa state resident? Losing $160 million in federal health funding today. 90 dollar shop lift by an impoverished person or 160 million cut by the worlds richest person. Tell me. What’s going to hurt more.

  • bolo March 27, 2025 (11:55 pm)

    Yes agreed. Need to clamp down strongly on theft, from the bottom all the way up to the tippity-top! To The Top!

    But:::::::::::::::::::: How?

  • KT March 28, 2025 (4:13 am)

    And sadly John Robert’s supreme court told Trump anything he does is lawful…so there you have it.  No longer a democracy.  Trump will just ignore any court orders and the GOP Congress will not hold him accountable.

  • Mark32 March 28, 2025 (7:42 am)

    It’s not $90 by one shoplifter; It’s $90 by multiple shoplifters every day in almost every business. If it does not stop, these businesses will leave.

  • Lauren March 28, 2025 (7:43 am)

    💯 this right here 

• Shadowtripper March 28, 2025 (7:14 am)

  We all know that shoplifting is against the law.  Or most of us do.  So instead of publishing pros and cons of arrests shouldn’t people start suggesting common sense ways of changing the behavior of those that continue to disrupt society?   We should be debating ways to make these changes, then enforce them demanding the courts make those changes.  West Seattle Blog is an excellent source to establish that .

• Admiral-2009 March 28, 2025 (9:09 am)

  Lauren – shoplifting costs every one more money as retailer’s increase the price of products to cover the cost of the theft.  I for one am glad that the SPD is finally taking this issue more seriously!   And I hope the Court’s also start to make the thieves accountable.

  • Lauren March 28, 2025 (9:21 am)

    Correction: Shoplifting provides corporations with the justification to raise their prices as they continue to rake in record profits.

    • Byron James March 28, 2025 (9:18 pm)

      This is pretty simple. If a particular store is losing too much money, that store gets closed. The fact that other locations are profitable is irrelevant. 

  • k March 28, 2025 (10:17 am)

    Retailers have, for years, been cutting and cutting staff to make money for their shareholders and CEOs.  Then when there’s no one left to stop people from walking out with stuff, they want to cry “poor me” and have the taxpayer-funded police to do the work their employees used to do, because god forbid they hire a second person to man the sales floor and reduce the payout for a shareholder by a couple bucks.  The cost is still being passed on to you via taxes, because Target is never going to acknowledge that their own policies contribute to the problem, and they’re not going to take money from shareholders to put back into your pocket.  

    • Another One March 28, 2025 (6:56 pm)

      Bingo, this is it. Cut staffing to the bone, the ones left are overwhelmed and can’t deal with the shoplifters and they know it. Remember when you’d go into a drug store and there would be multiple employees at the registers or stocking the shelves or cleaning? Now when I go into a drug store there’s maybe two people. More people walking around is more eyes and that actually can deter shoplifting. 

• Jay March 28, 2025 (9:31 am)

  Shoplifting is actually a pretty small part of Target’s losses. Target actually makes more profit from wage theft than they lose from shoplifting (which was even more dramatic in the case of Walgreens which was at the center of the organized retail theft story during the pandemic). They steal an absurd amount of money from employees. The national losses from theft and vandalism is $500 million. Wage theft is $15 billion with a B, thirty times higher other forms of loss. Target is losing ground to online shopping and failing hard on the pivot. They’re using shoplifting as an issue to hide this from shareholders. Look at where they shut down stores due to crime – it’s always in a relatively safe suburbs while the Downtown Seattle and Westwood Village locations are thriving. Now we have people cheering on the fact that Seattle spend thousands of dollars to catch a shoplifter with $90 of merchandise and save the corporation some money on security. We have seriously misplaced priorities.

  • Orb March 28, 2025 (11:44 am)

    Where are you pulling your data? In 2024 Target lost 1.2 billion to shoplifting. Only 9 million to wage theft. 

    • k March 28, 2025 (12:54 pm)

      Company reports on how much they lose are notoriously unreliable.  Also shoplifting is not the same as shrink.  https://www.npr.org/2024/03/11/1236075589/retail-theft-crime-target-stores  Wage theft is always an estimate, as most goes unreported, so you’ll see different numbers depending on who you ask.  As someone who used to work at Target, yes, the company is definitely stealing more from employees than shoplifters are stealing from the company, and they are going to charge what they want to anyway and find whatever justification they think you’ll swallow, which right now seems to be theft.

• BobKat March 28, 2025 (9:54 am)

  I left Target shortly after noon on Wednesday. As I left, I noticed two people in safety vests pressed against the wall in the vestibule out of the corner of my eye. As soon as I was out of the door, they positioned themselves directly in front of the first set of interior doors and approached a woman. I wondered what was going on and assumed it was theft. Shopping is so frustrating anymore, having to get an associate in order to buy things as basic as toothpaste, I’m glad to see something finally being done to address all of the theft. I’m also grateful for the police presence to help quell the dodgy behavior happening throughout Westwood Village.

• Alana March 28, 2025 (6:44 pm)

  Same applies to things like the park at 35th and Alaska. Yesterday I drove by with my 2 year and approx 9 guys were standing around the picnic table clearly doing drugs, pipe out, with tents nearby. Obviously, there are approved encampment sites and that is not one. There are safety issues at the encampments and nobody should have to live outside. But I have also spoken with many people who claim they prefer to just stake their own claim and sleep on public land vs seek (an albeit WAY too limited) shelter bed or supportive housing or approved encampment. No. An entire community can’t use a park safely because 9 guys want to take it over (drugs smoke and paraphernalia, no bathroom available, garbage everywhere and all)? No.
  .
  I am staunchly progressive but by my fellow Seattleites and progressives really piss me off sometimes when they seem willing to give our community and safety up in the name of “compassion” (literally safety, assaults by people high on drugs/in psychosis induced by things like fentanyl and meth are not uncommon). That is not compassion. Again, that’s just a martydom complex, “saviorism” aka ego, not actually helping people or making anything better, all a the cost of things getting worse for everyone. Actually taking time to advocate for increased funding, that is used efficiently and increased access for people who want to seek treatment to do so or establish housing, etc. are compassion. Normalizing and just accepting people’s shoplifting and drug use affecting the entire community and normalizing people sleeping on the street is not compassion.

  • TAnderson March 29, 2025 (11:59 am)

    Yes. Thanks Alana

• wscommuter March 28, 2025 (9:46 pm)

  I shake my head at the people here who argue that stealing is okay/not worthy of police enforcement because of their subjective judgment about which businesses deserve to be stolen from … such a sad perspective and utterly misguided.  Stealing is wrong.  It isn’t justified by stealing from an “evil” corporation.  People who steal with impunity are tearing at the social fabric.  That’s why they need to be caught, prosecuted and punished.  This isn’t complicated.  

  • Lauren March 29, 2025 (11:05 am)

    No one here is saying “stealing is ok.” What many of us are saying is that these “deterrents” do not work to actually reduce crime and lift up our communities. The current system is designed to protect property and corporations, period. It’s time to rethink and reimagine. 

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