Harger: Washington leads the nation in shoplifting. A 33-officer department in Bonney Lake is trying to do something about it
Jul 13, 2026, 6:33 AM | Updated: 1:09 pm
Shame has worked for as long as people have lived next to each other. The neighbor who saw you do it and told your mother. The coach who sat you on the bench in front of the whole team. The look on your mom’s face when the store manager walked you back to the register. It wasn’t the jail cell that kept most people honest. It was the idea that the people around you would know, and that knowing would cost you something you couldn’t buy back.
We decided that was cruel, at least in Washington. And now we lead the nation in shoplifting.
But a 33-officer police department in Bonney Lake decided to stop just accepting it. What they’re doing costs nothing, it’s working, and almost nobody else in the state is bothering.
Bonney Lake Home Depot put the tools behind Plexiglas. The honest people pay for it
There’s a car wash in Bonney Lake I’ll drive out of my way for. The Costco lot up there is the best parking of any Costco within range of my house, and yes, I’m the kind of person who has ranked them. So a couple of times a month, I’m on the plateau, and while I’m there, I may hit the Home Depot or the Lowe’s or the Walmart. Target if I’m feeling fancy.
None of these stores is immune to what’s happening everywhere else. The tools are behind Plexiglas. The razor blades are behind Plexiglas. Somewhere in there is a locked cabinet guarding $20 worth of laundry soap, and an employee with a key who’s been asked to babysit it. You stand there with your cart, pressing a button, waiting to buy a thing you were always going to pay for.
That’s the deal now. Honest people get treated like criminals.
Washington ranks worst in the nation for retail theft, and the bill lands on you
Washington sees 48% more retail theft than you’d expect from a state our size. That’s the Forbes Advisor analysis that ranked us worst in the country.
Worst. Ahead of every other state.
The Washington Retail Association puts the haul in a single recent year at $2.7 billion. Hundreds of millions in sales tax never collected, never paid for anything.
Every one of those dollars finds its way back to you. As a price tag. As a locked cabinet. As a store that quietly stops restocking what keeps walking out the door.
Bonney Lake police posted a shoplifter’s face. Nine hundred neighbors shared it
Which is why I like what the Bonney Lake Police Department is doing, and why I can’t figure out why more departments aren’t doing the same thing.
They run a Facebook page called Can You ID Crime. Surveillance stills of people they haven’t identified yet, with the date, what got taken, and a tip line. I scrolled through a few weeks of it.
June 25: three men, $1,164 in merchandise, out the door of the Bonney Lake Home Depot and into a gray Nissan Altima. That post pulled 1,600 reactions, 924 comments, and 919 shares.
June 19: a man in an orange hoodie walking into the Bonney Lake Lowe’s to pick up phone orders placed with stolen credit cards. Twice.
June 11: a woman who’d been hitting that same Lowe’s over and over, more than $1,000 in merchandise. Over a thousand reactions. Four hundred and thirty-four shares. And an update at the top of the post, four words long: “Female has been identified.”
April 6: a man and a woman who stole $754 in merchandise and hid it under their infant’s car seat. Same update at the top. “These suspects have been identified. Thanks to all who submitted tips!”
It works. It costs nothing. It asks nothing of the community except a pair of eyes.
Washington even has a statewide site built for this, called CanYouID.me, where investigators can post photos of people caught on camera they can’t identify. The tool exists. Most departments barely touch it. Meanwhile, we’re the worst in the country for shoplifting, and we have fewer officers per capita than any state in the nation.
You’d think cities across the state would want to do something similar.
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Washington retired the word “offender” and started wondering why nobody behaves
Instead, we spent the last decade making sure nobody who breaks the law has to hear an ugly word about it.
A minute ago, I called these people criminals. I shouldn’t have. I mean justice-impacted individuals.
Our own Department of Corrections retired the term “offender” in 2016, when the secretary issued a memo instructing staff to use “individual,” “student,” or “patient” instead. Washington is one of a handful of states that officially use “incarcerated individual” rather than “prisoner,” “inmate,” or “convict.” Go to the DOC website right now. You won’t find a prisoner anywhere on it. You’ll find a page called “Incarcerated Individual Personal Property.” You’ll find a section titled “Where Incarcerated Individuals Live.” Not cells. Not housing units. Where incarcerated individuals live, like they picked the neighborhood off Zillow.
A convict is a “formerly incarcerated person.” A guy who keeps getting arrested is a “returning citizen.” We built an entire language system around protecting the feelings of the people making the rest of us miserable, and we can’t figure out why none of it is working.
And that’s the problem. Every time we sand the edge off a word, we sand the edge off the consequence. Call a thief a “person with retail involvement” and you’ve told them, and everyone around them, that what they did doesn’t quite deserve an ugly name. Do that long enough, and you inoculate people from the one thing that kept most of us in line for free: the idea that what you did would follow you home.
Shame only works if the word stings. We spent a decade making sure it doesn’t.
Nobody gets convicted on Facebook
Police still investigate. Prosecutors still decide whether to file. Courts still decide guilt.
Bonney Lake is asking the public one question: Do you know who this is?
Shame was never the whole answer. But it was the cheapest, fastest, most democratic form of accountability a community ever had. Your neighbors didn’t need a badge, a budget, or a committee. They just needed to see your face and know what you did. For centuries, that was enough.
We decided it wasn’t fair. We wrapped the whole concept in syllables until it stopped stinging, then stood back, watched the shoplifting numbers climb, and wondered what happened.
What happened is that the guy walking out of the Home Depot with a thousand dollars of merchandise under his arm knows nobody is going to say a word. Not the employees, who’ve been told not to confront. Not the police, who don’t have the staffing to respond. And definitely not the culture, which has spent a decade making sure he knows he’s not a thief. He’s a person experiencing a lapse in retail-compliant behavior, or whatever we’re calling it this year.
Bonney Lake said no more. They put up the photo. They asked the question. And the neighbors answered.
Every department in this state has surveillance footage sitting on a hard drive. Every department has a Facebook page. The tool is free. The audience is already there. Bonney Lake is doing it with 33 officers and a tip line.
What’s everybody else’s excuse?
Shame is free. Right now, it’s the only thing in that store that isn’t behind glass.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
