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Every day, retail employees throughout New York’s 5 boroughs get up within the morning and head to the retailers, markets and different locations of labor.
They go to assist their households and to assist New Yorkers with the products and companies they should get by.
This ought to be pretty routine — rise up, go to work, and are available residence. Yet for too many retail employees, merely being at work has change into harmful.
We noticed that once more this week when a bunch of ladies senselessly assaulted 25-year-old cashier Lisbel Rodriguez Luna within the Bronx.
Time and once more, retail employees have been attacked, and shops have been violently robbed.
That’s why it’s time to vary our legal guidelines to protect these workers and the shoppers they serve.
New York’s impartial supermarkets, bodegas and mom-and-pop retail retailers are the backbones of our communities.
From hiring our native residents to offering entry to wholesome, recent meals and day by day requirements for households, these companies and their employees maintain neighborhoods operating 24 hours a day, seven days every week.
Retail workers have been important employees and took their accountability critically, from risking their lives on the top of the COVID-19 pandemic to stepping up within the Seventies and ’80’s, guaranteeing underserved communities weren’t with out entry to meals and different necessities.
But their jobs are getting tougher and extra harmful.
As The Post reported, “Burglars and thieves had a area day” final yr, propelling town’s 22% surge in main crime.
This rise in crime has hit impartial supermarkets laborious. Indeed, some have employed non-public safety. Single robberies have been as excessive as $72,000.
New Yorkers anticipate and should really feel protected after they store — however proper now, for too many, they merely don’t.
The crime rise has many victims: the shops that lose cash, the employees who’re harmed and customers who don’t really feel protected to buy.
These usually are not the one surprising statistics.
Just 327 offenders accounted for 30% of New York City’s 22,000 retail theft arrests in 2022. Recidivists have been arrested practically 6,600 instances, averaging about 20 instances every.
Merchants have made roughly 63,000 complaints — most going unresolved.
As a consequence, shoplifting is vastly underreported, and shopkeepers are placing themselves in hurt’s solution to resolve altercations.
The state of affairs is solely untenable — one thing have to be accomplished to rectify it earlier than extra shops shut and extra employees are harmed.
That’s the place town and state can step in to assist.
While district attorneys and different legislation enforcement, in addition to mayors all through the state, are doing their greatest to deal with the problem of repeat retail theft, which regularly entails severe violence, extra have to be accomplished.
That’s why, on the state degree, I’m proud to hold laws making assaulting a retail worker or proprietor a class-D felony, comparable to with livery drivers, utility workers and different important employees.
This common sense laws will assist deter crimes and maintain individuals who perpetuate them accountable.
What occurred within the Bronx to the cashier was merely unacceptable and we have to take steps to cease it.
What small retailers and their advocates are asking of town and state usually are not troublesome requests — they’re completely cheap.
Let’s come collectively to assist these shops and guarantee employees are protected and customers can store in peace.
Manny De Los Santos, MSW, is a Democrat representing New York’s 72nd district within the state Assembly.
