It’s Petty When It Happens To Someone Else
Currently, 17 percent of American homeowners have a smart video surveillance device, and unit sales are expected to double by 2023… The popularity of these devices has led to the “porch pirate gotcha” film genre, a sort of America’s Funniest Home Videos of petty crime.
In the pages of The Atlantic, our sympathies are solicited. Though not for the people being robbed, of course:
The first time Ganave Fairley got busted for stealing a neighbour’s Amazon package, she was just another porch thief unlucky to be caught on tape.
The words first time and unlucky should perhaps be borne in mind.
The deliveries that were dropped daily on her neighbours’ porches caught her attention. At that point, she didn’t know about the cameras or [neighbourhood watch app] Nextdoor. In the months that followed, the police would find a cache of the neighbours’ belongings and mail in her possession… Her sister told me that Fairley generally sold the packages “for a little bit of nothing, just to get high.”
I sense that some of you may not be feeling overly sympathetic.
Ms Fairley – who invokes racism as a cause of her local notoriety, and whose extensive cache of stolen belongings included other people’s credit cards – is described to us at length and in the softest possible light. We learn of her dysfunctional upbringing, her struggles with a mouldy apartment, and her various drug habits, including “trekking daily to a methadone clinic” – a heroic feat, apparently. Ms Fairley’s failure to attend numerous court dates – for petty theft, mail theft, receiving stolen property, possession of heroin, and child endangerment – is, we learn, due to her having “a lot going on” in her life. In at least one instance, it turns out that what was going on was stealing from a resident she’d previously targeted and who, while being robbed again, was waiting to see Ms Fairley appear in court.
The fact that Ms Fairley is gay is mentioned too, as if that were somehow relevant or an explanation for credit card fraud and chronic thieving. We’re also told, touchingly, that she has “family members’ names tattooed on her neck.”
The author of the piece, Ms Lauren Smiley, informs us that these are crimes “committed by the poorest,” “the Artful Dodgers of the Amazon age” – yes, those charming rascals – before inviting us to feel bad for thieves caught in the act for the umpteenth time:
Stings and porch-pirate footage attract media attention—but what comes next for the thieves rarely gets the same limelight… Offenders may be routed to drug treatment and housing… Those with previous convictions could be eligible for jail time… One [suspect] pleaded guilty to stealing $170.42 worth of goods, including camouflage crew socks and a Call of Duty video game from Amazon, and was sentenced to 14 months of probation.
Readers will note Ms Smiley’s attempt to trivialise habitual thievery by selectively mentioning the contents of packages that were stolen, as if the thieves hadn’t just swiped someone else’s property regardless of the contents, which were, presumably, only discovered later. Not caring what it is you’re stealing and doing it anyway isn’t, I’d suggest, the strongest excuse for habitual criminal behaviour. [As illustrated via Schuler in the comments, here, here and here.] We’re then, inevitably, reminded of “wealth and race disparities,” again with the implication that not being well-off, or having brown skin, is a mitigating circumstance, at least for Ms Smiley and her elevated peers.
Fairley was correct in thinking that, in many cases, Amazon will replace pilfered packages. Her major miscalculation was in thinking that her neighbours would, therefore, just shrug and move on.
Alas, Ms Smiley doesn’t share her home address, along with times at which she would be out or distracted – disclosure of which might have allowed some testing of her own, first-hand reactions.
Update, via the comments:
The direction of Ms Smiley’s sympathies is fairly obvious in the piece, and equally so on Twitter, where she mocks the theft of “Montessori books and dog probiotics,” as if only unimportant possessions were stolen, which is untrue. And as if law-abiding people weren’t being targeted repeatedly – to the extent that they were actually being robbed by Ms Fairley while they were in court waiting to see the woman answer for her previous crimes. This quip about dog probiotics is immediately followed with ostentatious agonising about how our chronic thief and credit card fraudster “lost darn-near everything.” As if Ms Fairley somehow wasn’t the author of her own miseries, determinedly so, and somehow hadn’t wrecked or rejected endless opportunities to improve her situation.
Ms Smiley also seems offended by the fact that Amazon’s Loss Prevention Manager was “cheering arrests” of the people robbing his company and its customers. And, of course, there’s the obligatory minimising waffle about “the root problems” – which are never quite specified or causally explained, but which apparently don’t include bewilderingly bad choices, pathological selfishness, and choosing to rob your neighbours again and again and again.
It’s an odd thing, being expected to identify with, and sympathise with, someone who repeatedly demonstrates that she isn’t at all inclined to return the favour. And who, when faced with the consequences of her own antisocial predation, promptly invokes racism as a diversion and excuse. Someone so profoundly selfish that she endangers her own children and steals from her own neighbours, who are treated only with contempt. As people from whom things can be taken. 
It is the height of privilege to assume that you can have a package delivered to your porch when you are not at home and NOT have it claimed by a person of poverty. Any sympathy for the “victim” is misplaced as it marginalizes the historic and ongoing systemic oppression of people of color and various dispreferred intersectionalities.
Reminds me of the line “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”
In other words, the circumstances of why the crime was committed – and the perpetrators can always find a reason, or in this case reasons can be found for them – do not vitiate the necessity of a patently just law.
dispreferred intersectionalities.
I may have to borrow that one.
“Fairley told me that she was surprised by how angry the neighbors seemed”
How dare they object to being robbed over and over again!
“the perpetrators can always find a reason”
I recall an interview with a narc, in which he was recounting some of the amazing excuses perps will come-up with on being caught in the act. One teenager caught with the needle still hanging out of his arm, swore on all-that-was-holy that despite it being attached to him, that wasn’t his arm.
“Fairley told me that she was surprised by how angry the neighbors seemed”
I imagine there’s no end to the list of things which would surprise Ms\x\? Fairley, personal responsibility and delayed gratification most likely coming in near the top.
I sense that some of you may not be feeling overly sympathetic.
Which is why idiot San Franciscans (BIRM) and other nearly equally idiotic west of I-5 types voted in Proposition 47 which essentially decriminalzed property and drug crimes, “Supporters referred to it as The Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act” (because having teenagers hanging out with spikes in their veins is totes safe).
Meanwhile, because of that, “petty” crime is up across the state.
Unexpectedly.
The Atlantic article is by no means the worst example of its kind – the name Clive Stafford Smith springs to mind – but it does, I think, imply some similar conceits, not least regarding agency, or the presumed lack thereof. Ms Fairley is depicted chiefly as an inert victim of circumstance, a tragic figure, despite her making endless bewilderingly bad choices, and despite her evident selfishness and disregard for other people, including her own daughter-cum-accomplice.
Normal, bourgeois morality tales – from literary classics to Marvel superhero films – often involve someone suffering hardship and facing a choice – of becoming resentful and pathological, a criminal with a grudge against the world, or choosing a different path and escaping pathology. This is often what distinguishes villains from heroes. It’s curious, then, just how often leftist piety entails making excuses for those who choose the former, not the latter.
Counterpoint. Porch thieves should be shot on sight:
https://www.newschannel10.com/2018/10/11/thieves-steal-worth-year-olds-medicine-off-lubbock-porch/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/porch-thieves-steal-boys-5000-kidney-medication_2394655.html
https://www.ktnv.com/news/crime/mother-says-video-shows-thief-stealing-sons-cancer-medication-off-porch-of-summerlin-home
Looks like The Atlantic is slowly turning into Slate/Salon in order to hang to a few readers. Some current stories on their front page: ‘Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids’, ‘Should Britain Abolish Private Schools?’ and ‘Can Warren Actually Avoid Taxing the Middle Class?’. And the three ‘Latest Stories’ are: ‘No One Is Left to Restrain Trump’, ‘Trump Is Running Out of Defenses’, and ‘Trump Was Never a New Yorker’.
Counterpoint.
Thanks for those. I’ve added the links to the post.
The words first time and unlucky should perhaps be borne in mind.
Pro tip: a good way not to get caught nicking stuff is not to actually nick stuff.
Looks like The Atlantic is slowly turning into Slate/Salon…
Not so slowly, I think.
Somehow, I had thought of the Atlantic as a conservative magazine. Amazing how wrong one can be.
We’re also told, touchingly, that she has “family members’ names tattooed on her neck.”
LOL. Your tip jar has been hit, David.
Your tip jar has been hit, David.
Bless you, sir. May your enemies have neighbours who use incredibly loud leaf-blowers at every opportunity.
It’s curious, then, just how often leftist piety entails making excuses for those who choose the former, not the latter.
There’s not much to it, really. While any of you rabble can sympathize with the hero, only those of exceptional intellect and superior morality can sympathize with the villain instead. Doing so shows the quality of the person doing the empathizing.
And it actually does. Although to the great annoyance of the empathizer, the unwashed masses don’t respond with the anticipated congratulations and adulation. Instead, they respond with indifference, or worse, actual scorn (cf: any posting in this thread).
This is why many of these moralizers feel compelled to lecture the unwashed on why the moralizer is right, and superior to them. It’s very annoying to them to have their superiority questioned, and it tends to make them act rather peevish, actually.
She’s saying this as if it’s a bad thing.
See also: “Exempting favoured identity groups from the normal consequences of predatory and antisocial behaviour is the Hot New Fairness, apparently, at least among the enlightened.”
See also:
I started reading the quoted sentence and thought, “Oh, that’s nicely put.” I then, almost immediately, realised whose it was.
What?
I’ll thank you not to judge me.
only those of exceptional intellect and superior morality can sympathize with the villain instead
It’s becoming quite, quite obvious to me, after giving these “intellectual” douche bags every benefit of the doubt for their (presumed) stupidity, that the real goal is the destruction of capitalism via chaos. They think that they can bring it down with laws such as Proposition 47 and general opposition to all social norms, up to and including sex in all of its definitions. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll even make new definitions. Any sort of excuse making for criminal scum will do. They want to bring chaos on society such that they then can justify coming in with the heavy hammer of the state to put all things in “order”. I once thought such an idea was crazy conspiracy thinking. Many years ago I used to joke that conspiracy theories were perpetrated by the government to cover up the real conspiracy that was going on such that if someone were to stumble upon the real conspiracy, they’d be easily discredited as some conspiracy crackpot. Joke’s on us I suppose.
Meanwhile, because of that, “petty” crime is up across the state.
I’ve related more than once what California’s woke socialist legislature has done – from Jerry Brown’s AB109(Prison realignment), to props 47 & 57. I saw it on the front lines. I retired a couple of weeks ago from the county of San Bernardino’s DA office – I was chief clerk of the West Valley (covering all cities from Rialto on the east to Chino Hills on the west – my office processed about half the cases in the county).
From AB109 that was instituted in 2011 to Prop 47 in 2014, it was mere months to see the “unintended consequences”. But each time anyone say anything – say police chiefs or elected district attorneys – that indicated that crime was up, our betters in the Ruling Class would wave their hands to say we were seeing things …and media covered for them.
Now it has gotten so bad a few people are finally going “Oh gosh, look at this! How ever did that happen?”
And don’t think CA is going to reverse anything soon. As I was walking out the door they were told to start setting up procedures of how to process criminal reports as cash-bail is being banned. Cuz bail is “unfair to the poor.”
San Francisco & Los Angeles pretty much control what happens in this state – you have the very rich in well-guarded enclaves, the very poor who fight, steal and get high in the streets and the middle class driven out of the urban areas – and being driven out of the state.
“yes, those charming rascals”
They prefer “puckish rogues”.
(“1984 was a warning, not a how-to guide” is so last year. We’ve moved on to Saints Row now, apparently. Try to keep up.)
“While wealth and race disparities were obvious in the courtroom, they weren’t on trial. Nor was the citizen surveillance facilitated by porch cams and Nextdoor to the benefit of corporations and venture capitalists.”
And, y’know… to the people who were having their stuff half-inched. But screw those suckers, right?
I realise that it’s tangential to the point Our Host is making, but did anyone else blink at the line in the original article reading:
At 19, Fairley came out as gay and, more shocking to both her and her family, pregnant.
Now that’s the sort of intersectionality one doesn’t see every day.
If she were processed into soylent green, it would be the highest achievement of her existence.
Caught as a teen stealing money from the till when she worked as a cashier. Comes out as gay and pregnant at 19. Hooked on painkillers, heroin, and meth after the birth of her son when she was 20. Caught again at age 25 stealing gift cards from her employer. Knocked up again a few years after that.
Forgive me if my analysis is flawed, but I’m seeing a lot of theft and other impulse control issues here that predate the “citizen surveillance” which seems to be the source of most of the writer’s handwringing.
And I can’t help but notice that for all the attention given to the petty contents of the parcels she stole ($24 sloppy joe sauce!), we’re just supposed to overlook that Mr. Arnold’s campaign started in earnest after this woman ran up $700 in charges against a bank card she stole from his letter box. Tell me again how her little thefts are understandable, victimless crimes?
It’s also absurd that we’re supposed to feel sorry because she lost her apartment and her possessions when she was locked up. If you don’t have a single loved one that you can ask to keep your photo albums safe, maybe you’re not the ideal candidate for a role as a sympathetic victim of gentrification.
She’s been a compulsive thief since her early teens, and a drug addict for almost as long. She’s flamed out of every program intended to help her. What exactly do the trustees of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, sponsors of this series of articles about the problems with mass incarceration, suggest that we do with this 21st-century Artful Dodger? What exactly haven’t we tried already?
Here’s a basic bait box set up… (2 minutes video)
I’m surprised that nobody has detonated a box of excrement in a car with the “rascals” in it.
Hopefully, with technology’s advance, someone is working on this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmlUAIbcXA
Somehow, I had thought of the Atlantic as a conservative magazine.
I take it that it’s been a long time since you last read it.
Exempting favoured identity groups from the normal consequences of predatory and antisocial behaviour is the Hot New Fairness
The currently favored slogan is “equity”.
I’m surprised that nobody has detonated a box of excrement in a car with the “rascals” in it.
Anything involving a detonation would, I believe, be a felony.
“She thought the packages would be replaced by Amazon and other senders, so her gain wouldn’t be her neighbors’ loss.”
So she really wasn’t stealing from her neighbours, just from “Amazon and other senders”. It won’t matter to them; just a cost of doing business, one that never ever gets passed on to the consumer. Rather like those intensely engaged police forces that only send a cop to a burglary in order to fill out forms the householder can use to prove loss to his insurer — an insurer that apparently doesn’t live off premiums paid by the policy holder.
Amazon will replace it; insurance will cover it; it will all be paid for out of the infinite wealth of that faceless creature, The Man, who richly deserves to be stolen from anyway. This has a name: moral hazard.
Apart from which, it’s the act of stealing, not whom you steal from, that makes it a theft.
I have a question: how did the Democrats ever pass over her as a Presidential candidate? She’s right in their wheelhouse: black, race baiter, homosexual, drug addict, thief, utterly bereft of any shred of character … she’s a natural!
So she really wasn’t stealing from her neighbours, just from “Amazon and other senders”. It won’t matter to them; just a cost of doing business, one that never ever gets passed on to the consumer.
Agree. It’s attitudes like that that infuriate me. It’s as if stuff just drops out of the ether and then evil corporations charge us for it, thus stealing only hurts the evil corporations. But you do know that even without Prop 47 or whatever, that as far as big box stores and such go, thieving (aka shrinkage) is just a cost of doing business. You can walk into any of these major retailers and walk out with whatever you can carry and the employees are trained to NOT do anything to stop you. Because it’s too complicated, legally. Because…lawyers. Sure, there’s surveillance cameras and such and supposedly the perps will get prosecuted when a police report is filed. Which depending on your location is hahahahahahahaha, right. Then (and perhaps this Atlantic article is a part of the plan) they will go after surveillance cameras as an intrusion on our privacy.
This has a name: moral hazard.
Let’s not forget that she was also convicted of a misdemeanor for stealing from her employer when she was a teenager. And that she was convicted of a felony from stealing from her employer as a twentysomething. I believe we would call this “biting the hand that feeds you,” though our Moral Superiors are certain that the reason nobody will hire this lovely woman as a cashier today is Homoracisexiphobism.
I’m surprised that nobody has detonated a box of excrement in a car with the “rascals” in it.
Loved this immediate consequence.
Loved this immediate consequence.
Sweet.
Readers will note Ms Smiley’s attempt to trivialise habitual thievery
I hope the editors at the Atlantic all lose items at the hands of package thieves–irreplaceable items of immense personal meaning whose loss causes them lasting grief.
If one does have expensive medication stolen, who would pay to replace it? Neither the medical insurer nor the shipping pharmacy, presumably. Homeowner’s or renter’s insurance?
Homeowner’s or renter’s insurance?
Neither one of those would cover it and, in addition, the deductible for stuff like theft from a burglary is usually $1,000 to $2,000.
Scenes from New York City.
Scenes from New York City.
The “calm down” with the cutesy little hand wave was precious. What is it with people lately? It seems like a thing to escalate a situation by telling a mildly annoyed person to “calm down”, or my favorite, “CALM THE F DOWN” or even “YOU NEED TO CALM THE F DOWN”? Lately I can’t tell if the “calm down” person is doing that knowing that they’re the one being aggressive or if they’re that lacking in self awareness. It’s a little easier IRL, but online it’s bizarre. I suspect there was more going on before this video started but seems very, very odd to expect a passenger to apologize for a uber/lyft driver’s behavior.
What is it with people lately?
Bring back dueling.
And, y’know… to the people who were having their stuff half-inched. But screw those suckers, right?
The direction of Ms Smiley’s sympathies is fairly obvious in the piece, and equally so on Twitter, where she mocks the theft of “Montessori books and dog probiotics,” as if only unimportant possessions were stolen, which is untrue. And as if law-abiding people weren’t finding themselves being targeted repeatedly. To the extent that they were actually being robbed by Ms Fairley while they were in court waiting to see the woman answer for her previous crimes.
This quip about dog probiotics is immediately followed with ostentatious agonising about how Ms Fairley, the chronic thief and credit card fraudster, “lost darn-near everything.” As if she somehow wasn’t the author of her own miseries, determinedly so, and somehow hadn’t wrecked or rejected just about every opportunity to spare her from the inevitable.
Ms Smiley also seems offended by the fact that Amazon’s Loss Prevention Manager was “cheering arrests” of the people robbing his company and its customers. And, of course, there’s the obligatory minimising waffle about “the root problems” – which are never quite specified or causally explained, but which apparently don’t include bewilderingly bad choices, pathological selfishness, and choosing to rob your neighbours again and again and again.
While any of you rabble can sympathize with the hero, only those of exceptional intellect and superior morality can sympathize with the villain instead.
Yes, it does seem to be an exercise in preening, done at others’ expense. Presumably, Ms Smiley can’t imagine that her own progressive pieties – in which agency is denied and excuses are seemingly endless, and in which distinctions between habitual criminals and their law-abiding victims are merrily flattened, even inverted – might have suboptimal consequences. To the point of being not only pretentious but morally perverse.
Ten bucks sez Smiley lives in a doorman-protected building where package theft is not a problem and parading her virtue is a cost-free hobby.
Here’s hoping she steps in a pile of crap left behind by the likes of Ms. Fairley. San Francisco mud. It’s all over the place.
thinking that her neighbours would, therefore, just shrug and move on.
‘Just shrug and move on’ so she could rob someone else and then someone else…
‘Just shrug and move on’ so she could rob someone else and then someone else…
Well, quite.
It’s also worth noting how Ms Smiley frames the “porch pirate” phenomenon – those loveable, thieving rascals – as an issue of “San Francisco’s extremes between rich and poor.” As if we shouldn’t much care about chronic criminal predation if its victims earn more than Ms Smiley does. And as if exactly the same phenomenon, with the same motives, and the same degeneracies, weren’t happening in countless areas that wouldn’t fit her chosen leftist narrative. A quick browse of the YouTube videos mentioned in the piece reveals plenty of people who are by no means wealthy being preyed on in exactly the same way by creatures very much like Ms Fairley, and often with an eye-widening boldness.
I can’t tell if the “calm down” person is doing that knowing that they’re the one being aggressive or if they’re that lacking in self awareness.
I’ll go with “knowing”. She has learned that she can get away with it, and she has the sort of personality that enjoys doing it. Also: female “privilege”? If she were a guy pulling this sort of sh*t, she would long ago have had her lights punched out and thereby learned some restraint.
It’s also worth noting how Ms Smiley frames the “porch pirate” phenomenon – those loveable, thieving rascals – as an issue of “San Francisco’s extremes between rich and poor.”
Note also the graphic at the top of the page that depicts a young black thief pursued by mostly white people. Before we have read a single word, we are being primed to think “racist oppression”. I can’t wait to see the Atlantic’s coverage of the Oberlin College/Gibson’s Bakery lawsuit. /sarcasm
A quick browse of the YouTube videos mentioned in the piece reveals plenty of people who are by no means wealthy being preyed on in exactly the same way
The ‘petty crime doesn’t matter because we can afford it’ line is a particularly hateful one. Poor people are victims of crime far more often and suffer more, due to lack of insurance etc. I also despise the argument that victims of petty crime are just ‘losing stuff’. People, especially the old and vulnerable, suffer beyond the loss of their possessions, there is also the sense of violation and the fear that it generates.
I also despise the argument that victims of petty crime are just ‘losing stuff’. People, especially the old and vulnerable, suffer beyond the loss of their possessions, there is also the sense of violation and the fear that it generates.
Absolutely. To profess indifference to property crime, at least when it happens to other people – as if objecting to the repeated theft of your possessions were just bourgeois fussing – is hypocritical, pretentious and ultimately rather decadent. It implies, dare I say it, a kind of privilege.