ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Have your Trader Joe’s and eat it too: Nikole Hannah Jones criticizes Rev. Al for admitting shoplifting is out of hand.

And that brings us to Morning Joe which talked about the Hamburglar story yesterday morning. As you’ll see, even Rev. Al Sharpton thinks things have gotten out of hand. “There are those, including me, who are concerned about overloading the system and the jails with petty crime,” Sharpton said. He continued, “But at the same time you cannot have a culture where people are just— at random— just robbing and stealing and it’s out of control and it’s put on the covers of newspapers which only encourages others to do it.”

For saying something fairly obvious about the need to bring down petty crime when it is up more than 23%, Nikole Hannah Jones lashed out at Sharpton and accused him of legitimizing “the carceral state.”

A couple of obvious points here. First, it may be a given on the left that putting people in prison for crimes caught on camera is illegitimate but I think if you look around you’ll find that’s increasingly a minority view. Most people think this brazen theft is outrageous.

Second, what alternative is Hannah Jones proposing to make people stop boosting merchandise? She doesn’t say. We’re right back to the foolishness of the defund the police movement, i.e. demanding cities tear down the existing system without any real plan for what comes next. And no, I’m not talking about specific programs like body cameras for police or sending out special teams to respond to mental health situations. Those ideas never required defunding the police. I’m talking about people who wanted funding cut and wanted to abolish prisons as well without any explanation of how to deal with either serious crime (shootings and murder) or low-level but persistent crime (shoplifting). There’s no plan, just a vague belief that it will all work out in the end. Except it isn’t working out as a review of recent violent crime and robbery figures will show.

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One guy stealing 10 steaks isn’t national news, but thousands of guys just like him stealing millions from retailers in cities on both coasts is a national story which deserves some national attention. Anyone who says the problem should be ignored is just asking for more of the same. That’s not smart, it’s not ethical and it’s not sustainable. The stores will close and then the same progressives winking at shoplifting will move on to whining about “food deserts.” But it turns out you can’t have your Trader Joe’s and eat it too. Until someone has a better idea, putting the army of petty thieves in jail should be an option.

Nicole Hannah-Jones’ job here is simple: convince the management of the New York Times to remove the security guard(s) in the lobby of the Times’ building on Eighth Avenue, and then she can lecture the rest of us on urban crime and police policies.