Here's where shoplifting hits hardest on Long Island — and how retailers' crackdown is changing the shopping experience

If you ask Long Island police where shoplifters strike most often, they won’t point you to a corner convenience store or a small boutique. Instead, they’ll steer you to the aisles of the nation's largest, most heavily monitored retailers. 

In Suffolk County, Target dominates the shoplifting charts, making up nine of the 10 most-hit locations reported to the county police department last year. Nassau County’s list is more mixed, with four big-name retailers — Macy’s, JCPenney, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Nordstrom — at Roosevelt Field mall in Uniondale, as well as four Target stores.

Complaints in both counties have dipped in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2024, but remain higher than pre-pandemic levels.  Police credit stepped-up enforcement and closer cooperation with retailers for the recent declines.

“There was a time years ago when these big-box stores were just throwing up their arms and they weren’t even reporting it anymore because it was so prevalent. We’re way past that,” Suffolk County Police Department Commissioner Kevin Catalina told Newsday in an interview over the summer.

The stakes go beyond missing merchandise.

Retailers say shoplifting drives up their costs and slows down shoppers with more locked cases and security checks. 

But getting a clear picture of how big the problem really is isn’t easy when big chains collect detailed theft data but some retailers, particularly small shops, stay quiet, and there’s no standardized way to track incidents across Long Island’s dozens of police agencies. 

Meanwhile, some analysts say that retailers are exaggerating the extent of store thefts.

At the same time, police argue that bail reform has made it tougher to curb repeat offenders — a point that remains hotly contested.

Long Island data and police response

The annual number of shoplifting incidents reported to the Nassau County Police Department has risen since at least 2022, according to agency data. (Data for 2020 and 2021 was excluded from this story because of store closings and other business impacts during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Last year, the Nassau department received reports of 4,995 shoplifting incidents — 4.1% higher than the 4,800 in 2023 and 22.5% higher than the 4,077 in 2022. The increase was driven by more complaints involving petit larceny shoplifting, which is thefts of goods valued at less than $1,000, while grand larceny shoplifting declined.

The department did note a slight dip in the first half of this year, with 2,265 complaints — a 1.3% decrease from the 2,294 reported during the same period in 2024.

The Suffolk police department received complaints about 6,724 shoplifting incidents last year, a 4.8% decline from the 7,060 in 2023. In the first half of this year, the department logged 3,188 complaints, down 3% from 3,285 in the same six-month period in 2024.

Nassau and Suffolk's police departments are the third- and fourth-largest law enforcement agencies, respectively, in the state, but they are only part of a much broader enforcement network.

Across the two counties, 39 village, city, town and college police departments also respond to shoplifting complaints. Most of those departments do not count shoplifting separately from overall larceny, and no agency compiles statewide shoplifting statistics.

Nassau and Suffolk County police data is heavily dependent on large national retailers that track and report theft in detail.  But some, particularly small shops, don't report the crimes to police of staffing limits or concerns about negative publicity, retail experts said. The result is uneven data that makes it difficult to capture the full scope of the problem.  

Police leaders say the declining theft numbers reflect their stepped-up efforts to combat theft.

“We’re going to keep working on the problem. And … we understand that it’s a big issue for the residents of Suffolk County and certainly the retailers, so it’s certainly important to us, too,” said Catalina, the Suffolk police commissioner.

The department is also aggregating crimes so that multiple lower-level thefts can be combined into a single felony charge.

“So, if we find that someone has entered a location on four different dates and stole $300 worth of items on four different days, well, now we’re going to aggregate those crimes. We’re going to charge them with a felony, as opposed to four misdemeanors,” Catalina said.

In Nassau, police have assigned 10 officers each to Green Acres Mall and Roosevelt Field, Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said.

About two and a half months ago, the department also launched a 40-officer Strategic Response Team that focuses on quality-of-life issues, with shoplifting at the top of the list. 

Nationwide spike, policy shifts and bail reform backlash

Reported shoplifting rose for several years in some cities across the country and reached record highs in some areas during the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by factors including high inflation, fewer store employees, a perceived low risk of penalties and the wider use of self-checkout lanes, retail loss-prevention experts have said.

Organized retail crime rings selling stolen goods online also played a major role, retail trade groups said.  Local retailers added that New York State’s ban on single-use plastic shopping bags, enforced since October 2020, contributed by enabling thieves to conceal merchandise in personal bags.

Nationwide, retailers reported a 93% increase in the average annual number of shoplifting incidents and a 90% increase in annual dollar loss in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a National Retail Federation report released last December.

But some retail researchers say those losses were overstated.  

A 2023 report by investment banking firm William Blair argued that while retail theft was elevated, some companies likely used the attention around shoplifting as cover for weak sales or poor inventory management.  The firm said that some store closings were due to low performance but retailers publicly blamed shrink, which is inventory loss from theft, damage or other reasons. 

More recent data suggests shoplifting is now declining nationally. A Council on Criminal Justice study of 22 cities — including Boston, Charlotte, New York City and San Antonio — found a combined 12% decline in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. The rate remained only 4% lower than in 2019, indicating a return toward pre-pandemic levels. 

Retailers’ putting more emphasis on fighting theft, such as scaling back or eliminating self-checkout registers and introducing additional security measures, have helped, said Ernesto Lopez, a senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice.

Others pointed to a broader return to economic normalcy after the pandemic’s disruptions.

“The most logical explanation [for the shoplifting decline now] is its recovery from the substantial socioeconomic dislocations related to COVID-19,” said Michael Rempel, director of the Data Collaborative for Justice, a research institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

Some cite  as one of the reasons for the declining shoplifting numbers  the enactment of stricter anti-shoplifting laws statewide in 2024.

New York was among nine states that enacted stricter retail theft laws in 2024, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.  

At a news conference in Brooklyn on Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said retail theft in New York City was down 13.6%, while larceny — which includes various forms of theft — was down 13% statewide, excluding New York City, in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2024. 

Hochul attributed the declines to several factors, including the New York State Police Organized Retail Theft Task Force, formed in 2024, working in conjunction with local law enforcement; $40 million allocated in the state’s fiscal 2025 budget for retail theft prevention efforts; and new laws enacted in that budget that increased criminal penalties for theft.

One law elevated the charge for assaulting a retail worker from a misdemeanor to a felony.

On Long Island, a major point of tension centers on whether New York State’s 2020 bail reform law has contributed to shoplifting trends. Both Catalina and Ryder cited the law as a significant factor, saying it is too lenient on crime suspects.

“Bail reform means that no matter what I arrest you for on a small, under $1,000 petit larceny, you can get a ticket. I don’t care if I arrest you 10 times in the same day, I got to give you a ticket on the street. So, you’re out the door,” Ryder said.

Under the 2020 law, cash bail ended in most cases involving misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, including shoplifting. Amendments later in 2020 gave judges authority to set bail in property-damage cases when a defendant had a pending case with similar criteria, and a 2022 amendment clarified that harm to property can include theft.

But criminal justice researchers say data does not support the claim that bail reform has driven shoplifting increases.

A study released last month by the Data Collaborative compared people who had bail set in 2019 with similar defendants released under New York’s new bail rules in 2020, then tracked both groups for 50 months. The study found that eliminating or reducing bail did not increase re-arrest rates for most defendants, and in New York City it led to clear declines, while outcomes in suburban and upstate regions were largely unchanged.

"When we actually start to isolate the effect of bail reform instead of conjecturing about it, [we find] that in New York City, releasing more people under reform has reduced recidivism, and in the rest of the state, it has had no effect in either direction,” said Michael Rempel, the group’s research director.

But for the small number of people with recent violent felony arrests, release without bail was consistently linked to higher re-arrest rates and more re-arrests overall.

Retailers fight back, consumers face trade-offs

National chains are more likely to be targeted than small shops because they tend to be understaffed, operate in large spaces and their corporate policies instruct employees not to physically stop shoplifters because of liability concerns, said Fritz Umbach, an associate professor and historical criminologist at John Jay College in Manhattan.

Large stores also are more likely to carry well-known brands, which are easier for thieves to resell, he said.

On Long Island, large-chain stores — including Target, Macy’s and Walmart — bear the brunt of the retail losses, and, in emails to Newsday, most describe a similar response: more surveillance, additional guards, closer coordination with police and a wider use of locked cases and other in-store security measures.

Target has made significant changes, said Joe Feldman, a senior managing director focusing on retail at the Telsey Advisory Group, a Manhattan-based brokerage firm.

The changes include "the much-discussed locking up of products in certain parts of the store, improvements in staffing, better monitoring of self-checkout, reducing damaged goods and improving the freshness of perishables," he said.

Last year in Nassau, the Target in New Hyde Park reported the most shoplifting incidents, followed by Target in Valley Stream, Macy’s at Green Acres Mall, Macy’s at Roosevelt Field and Target in Westbury, county police data shows. The only supermarket in the top 10 was a Stop & Shop in New Hyde Park.

Roosevelt Field, the largest shopping mall on Long Island and the second-biggest in New York, has installed license plate readers at all parking entrances and now deploys a K-9 and armed handler during business hours, a spokesman said in an email to Newsday.

Dick’s Sporting Goods, JCPenney and Nordstrom, all of which have stores at Roosevelt Field that were among the top 10 most-shoplifted stores in Nassau last year, did not respond to requests for comment.

Some shoppers appreciate stores’ stepped-up anti-theft efforts but aren’t fond of seeing merchandise locked up in cases that can only be unlocked by store employees.

“It gets frustrating," said Islip Terrace resident Kim Ziman, 42, outside the Target in Central Islip on Wednesday. "Because sometimes you just kind of want to go in the store, get what you need and leave. And you can’t. And then they don’t have enough help sometimes to begin with, so you’re waiting forever just to get some basic item you need.”

Others say the added security feels necessary.

Michael Harris, 60, of Copiague, a retired state trooper, said retailers locking up merchandise and other enhanced security measures help protect customers’ wallets.

Shoplifting makes “prices go up and it affects the consumers. So, it doesn’t bother me in reference to [merchandise] being locked up. I understand,” Harris said after leaving a Walmart in Farmingdale on Wednesday.

Retail and consumer experts say shoppers have good reason to care about stores' efforts fighting shoplifters.

Even when retailers absorb some of the losses, higher levels of theft can contribute to price increases and drain sales-tax revenue from local communities, said Barbara C. Staib, spokeswoman for the Huntington Station-based National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, a nonprofit that provides anti-shoplifting education to offenders as a condition of sentencing, probation or diversion.

The public image of who is doing the stealing tends to miss the mark, Umbach said.

Studies suggest a relatively high share of shoplifters are middle-class offenders, and many people are stealing items to resell, not necessities, such as food or diapers, he said.

"We can all understand a morally gray area, where put in a difficult situation, any of us might steal to feed our families," he said. "But that's not what's going on here."

Newsday’s Anastasia Valeeva contributed to this story.