Flash Mob Shopliftings Are Falling
A case where how we know is arguably more important than that we know.
A bunch of kids in late 2023 stole more than $10,000 worth of goods from a Nike store in Los Angeles. This brazen theft was caught on video which made it onto the local news broadcast below.
Data from the FBI shows good news though — these types of incidents appear to be falling. The big story here isn’t just that these types of incidents are falling, but that crime data has advanced to be able to measure flash mob shopliftings (among scores of other offense types) as trends develop.
The first source that tipped me off to the trend was a report that the FBI published last year titled “Reported Flash Mob Shoplifting Incidents: 2020‒2024”.
These “flash mob” shoplifting incidents have become more common in recent years, and they receive disproportionate coverage in the media when they do occur. They are exceedingly rare though, with these types of incidents making up around 0.1% of all shoplifting incidents reported to the FBI between 2020 and 2024.
The number of flash mob shoplifting incidents reported to the FBI rose in 2024, but that’s largely a factor of improved reporting as agencies like NYPD and LAPD became NIBRS compliant. Among agencies that had consistent data from 2020 to 2024, however, flash mob shopliftings fell a bit in 2024.
The FBI report points to one factor that is notnot surprising: offending in these incidents skews younger. A plurality of offenders in these incidents are under 20 and around 65 percent of people arrested between 2020 and 2024 in a flash mob shoplifting were under 30 compared to around 36 percent of people arrested in all other shopliftings.
There are a few aspects of this report that are especially noteworthy. First, I’m not entirely sure why, but I chuckle at the idea of traveling back in time and telling J. Edgar Hoover that his FBI will one day be writing public reports about flash mob shopliftings.
Second, it’s noteworthy that the FBI is writing these reports for public consumption in the first place. This is one of more than a dozen special reports the FBI has released since the start of 2025 covering a large variety of topics and points to the Bureau’s efforts to better communicate crime data and trends.
Finally, and most importantly, everything in the report can be replicated by the public with a little gumption and know-how. Indeed, with the FBI reporting monthly data we can extend the findings of this report out to the end of 2025 and say with confidence that the downward trend is continuing. The ability to do this is pretty revolutionary in how we interact with crime data.
To do that, I grabbed the FBI’s NIBRS master files and, using their definition of flash mob shoplifting, took every incident between 2022 and 2025 of a flash mob shoplifting. I removed agencies (like LAPD) that weren’t reporting to NIBRS in 2022 to get a consistent reporting population. Doing this shows the number of these incidents peaked in 2023/204 and came down in 2025. Even if we assume that December’s figures are underreported, the trend of a peak in 2023/2024 and a steady decline holds.
I stopped the analysis in December 2025 because of fears of underreporting — the FBI has data available through February 2026. Shopliftings are almost certainly badly underreported to the police, but I’m guessing that more high profile shopliftings like these get reported with much more frequency.
So, good news that these types of offenses are falling, and even better news that we are able to measure and report out complex offense types like this in something approximating real time. The NIBRS transition was an enormous struggle and created confusion, misinformation, and an asterisk year. Now that we are 5 years removed from that transition, however, there is enormous improvement and the benefits of switching to NIBRS are plainly obvious.
New on the Jeff-alytics Podcast
Have you heard about the police department in Utah where report drafting AI interpreted footage from an officer’s body camera of The Princess and the Frog playing in the background of an incident to mean the officer had morphed into a frog? AI has come a long way in the last few years but it still isn’t perfect. Within AI is the potential for revolutionary disruption of traditional processes, but there is also the danger of relying too heavily on a tool that is only right most of the time for efforts that require perfection or near perfection.
For this conversation, I turned to Ian Adams. Ian is an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. He has written extensively about AI and gives a terrific perspective on the role of AI in policing. Check it out below or wherever you get your podcasts!
And while you’re here, be sure to check out these other recent great episodes:
Politics podcaster Galen Druke
Arnold Ventures Executive Vice President Jennifer Doleac
FBI Assistant Director Timothy Ferguson
Did these fab FBI reports determine who it was that was doing the flash mob grabbing? Not mobs of old farts on SS. Not mobs of kindergarten kids. Not mobs of divinity school students. Do we not have the demographics of the flash mobsters? Or are we -- like the demo breakdown of homicide victims and murderers -- too afraid to point them out. https://clips.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-150000-dead-young?utm_source=publication-search
I wonder if the reason the number of these incidents is falling is that in many of the places they were most frequent, the target merchants have folded up shop and left. Walmart pulled out of most of the metro areas of Seattle and Portland, as I understand it. I can't think of the other big stores, but I know I've read repeatedly that this has been going on for several years. One of the big grocery store chains, I think. Starbucks is closing all its downtown stores - not that it's a flashmob target, but the crime has gotten to be so high, and the ambience so degraded that the kind of people that used to frequent those places aren't down there anymore.