The most reliable crime statistic in America isn’t published by anyone. It’s whether you can pick up a tube of toothpaste yourself or have to press a button and wait for someone with a key to unlock it.
By that measure, Washington, D.C., has turned a corner. CVS locations across the city have stopped locking their anti-theft cases. Six months ago those same stores had candy and toilet paper behind plexiglass — M&M’s, Kit Kats, paper goods — at locations in some of the most expensive real estate in the district. A shopper quoted at the time said he’d stopped buying things there because it wasn’t worth the hassle. That is what urban decline looks like at street level: not a statistic, but a resident deciding a store isn’t worth entering.
The numbers behind the change are not ambiguous. Metropolitan Police report homicides down 30 percent. Assault with a dangerous weapon down 42 percent. Motor vehicle theft down 45 percent, theft from autos down 20 percent, other theft down 10 percent. And the mechanism is right there in the Justice Department’s own accounting: prosecutions in D.C. Superior Court rose 67 percent following the federal law enforcement surge.
JUST IN: CVS locations in Washington, D.C. are reportedly no longer locking anti-theft merchandise cases, as the city experiences a drastic decline in crime.
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) September 27, 2026
That last figure is the one to keep. The drop didn’t come from a task force, a listening session, or a program with a name. It came from arresting people and then charging them. For years, the theory animating progressive prosecution was that low-level offenses weren’t worth the system’s attention — that declining to charge shoplifting freed resources for serious crime. What actually happened is what anyone who has run a business could have predicted. When theft carries no consequence, theft scales. It becomes organized, it becomes routine, and the people doing it graduate to worse.
Retailers responded the only way they could. They locked the merchandise. The cases were never a security strategy; they were a white flag, an admission that the city would not protect the transaction so the store would have to ration access to its own shelves. Every one of those plexiglass boxes represented a small surrender of ordinary life, paid for entirely by the law-abiding people who live nearby.
Notice too who bore the cost. Not the commentators who spent 2020 explaining that enforcement was the real problem. It was the elderly resident who now waits for an employee, the working parent buying diapers on the way home, the neighborhood that watched its pharmacy turn into a vending machine. The people most harmed by non-enforcement are always the ones who can’t move.
Even lefty scribe Matt Yglesias, no one’s idea of a conservative, has acknowledged that the unlocked cases are a real quality-of-life upgrade. He’s right, and the admission matters. It’s harder to argue with a store shelf than with a statistic.
So you've given Trump the credit he deserves – right??
— USA Features Media (@USAFeatures) September 28, 2026
https://t.co/JD30QrOm8N pic.twitter.com/Kqwlznl60L
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) September 27, 2026
Whatever anyone thinks of how the surge came about, the result is on display in every drugstore aisle in the District. Enforce the law and the cases come off.
