Harger: Washington is No. 1 in the nation for retail theft. The state found a fix that worked, then killed it over $500K
Jun 29, 2026, 6:23 AM | Updated: 3:02 pm
We took a quick camping trip to Hood Canal in our fifth wheel trailer this past weekend. Saturday morning, while trying to install a new RV kitchen faucet, I installed it wrong and needed to get a wrench. So I ran to the nearest Walmart.
The whole tool aisle was behind plexiglass.
I pressed the call button. Waited. Pressed it again. Nobody came. A couple of aisles over, another guy was trying to buy a can of spray paint, also behind plexiglass. He’d been pressing a call button, too. We weren’t the only ones. Up and down the store, customers were standing around waiting for somebody to come unlock a case so they could buy a wrench, a can of paint, a pack of underwear.
The workers weren’t ignoring us. They were overwhelmed. When so many things are locked up, it seems every purchase in half the store requires an employee with a key. Three people on the floor can’t cover 20 aisles of plexiglass. They were doing their best. It just doesn’t work.
A fifteen-minute errand took an hour. The store wasn’t crowded. The store was locked up.
And I’m standing there thinking: what kind of way is this to live?
The plexiglass is everywhere because shoplifting pays for fentanyl and meth. And regular people are the ones paying the price
I’ve spent time talking with addicts who steal for a living, and I don’t mean the grandmother slipping a can of soup into her purse. I mean people who get up in the morning and lift $200 to $1,500 in merchandise a day, every day, the way you and I go to work. They hand it to a fence, the fence resells it at a discount, and the cash buys that night’s drugs. The addict needs money by dark. The fence needs stolen products. The rest of us get the plexiglass.
That’s the deal we’ve accepted. We didn’t vote on it. Nobody asked us. But every time you stand in front of a locked case waiting for a $6 wrench, you’re paying the cost of somebody else’s addiction. Your time. Your patience. Your dignity as a customer in a store that treats you like a potential thief because it can’t stop the actual ones.
And the prices. Retailers pass theft losses straight through to the shelf. When Forbes says Washington has 48% more retail theft than our population should produce, that number is sitting in your grocery bill.
Washington is ranked the No. 1 state for retail theft impact. No. 1 out of 50
Forbes ranks us as the state most impacted by retail theft in the country. Third-worst for value of goods stolen per resident. Second-worst for larceny per capita.
No. 1. Out of 50 states.
A lot of it is organized. A state pilot program tracked the problem across King, Snohomish, and Spokane counties for five months last year. Retailers filed 5,868 organized-theft reports in that window. One crew, same faces, same vehicle, worked cosmetics counters across three counties before anyone caught up to them.
Police responded to 402 of those 5,868 reports.
Before you blame the cops, look at the staffing. Washington has the fewest officers per capita of any state in the country. Dead last. We run 1.38 per 1,000 residents, compared with a national average of 2.31. You can’t answer 5,868 calls with a force stretched that thin, and Olympia is the one that stretched it.
The state found a fix. It worked. Then Governor Ferguson cut the funding by more than $500,000
The pilot worked anyway.
The money paid for a dedicated prosecutor. King County’s office used that position to file 142 retail-theft cases in six months, two and a half times its usual pace. The state’s own Commerce Department reviewed the program and called it “highly effective.” For once, the government found a lever that actually moved.
Then the original money ran out in June of last year. When lawmakers tried to restart and expand it this spring with another $500,000, Governor Bob Ferguson struck the line as he signed the budget, saying the state faced a shortfall and had to balance its books. This is the same governor who backed the original $1 million pilot the year before.
Five hundred thousand dollars. Out of a budget of nearly $80 billion.
He’ll tell you he hasn’t gone soft on theft. As attorney general, he stood up the state’s first organized retail crime unit, and it’s filed more than two dozen cases. Fair enough. But the program he cut is the one his own Commerce Department had just praised. We found something that worked, and let it die over a rounding error.
Diversion only works when saying no has a consequence. Right now, it doesn’t
You can’t arrest your way out of addiction, and a jail cell doesn’t cure anybody. Treatment beats incarceration for someone in the grip of fentanyl, and I’d rather watch a person walk out clean than cycle through booking again.
But look at what that same pilot found when it offered treatment the polite way. Of the 1,194 people eligible for court-ordered diversion, prosecutors offered it to 323. Fewer than half of those, 142, said yes.
Run the math the way someone in withdrawal runs it. Hit three stores in an hour, walk out with $800 in goods, and a fence pays you $150 on the spot. That beats any shift you could clock, and it pays before the sickness gets bad. A diversion program you can decline and still walk out the door is a suggestion, not a consequence. And a suggestion doesn’t beat that fence. Nobody deep in fentanyl is going to pick a 90-day program over tonight’s fix on their own. That’s the disease choosing. The only thing that changes the math is taking away the option to say no and stroll out, which means the offer has to be treatment or jail, today, with no door back onto the sales floor next Tuesday.
Tuesday isn’t a figure of speech. Most shoplifting gets charged as third-degree theft, anything under $750, a gross misdemeanor. Cite and release. The same person can be back on the floor that afternoon. That’s how the law is written, not a call the officer or the prosecutor gets to make, and the people who wrote it work in Olympia.
So here’s what I think we have to do, and I know some people won’t like hearing it.
We have to stop being nice about this. Shoplifters, especially repeat offenders who’ve been arrested more than once, get two options: jail or treatment. Pick one. Today.
Nobody wants to send a person struggling with addiction to jail. I don’t. But we can’t keep letting the same people walk out the door time after time, committing the same misdemeanors, making life miserable for the rest of us, while we pretend a pamphlet and a court date six weeks out count as a consequence. A pamphlet is a suggestion, and the fence on the corner pays better than a suggestion.
Treatment has to be real, funded, and available the same day. And if someone turns it down, jail has to be the answer. Not next month. That day. Because right now, the only people facing consequences for retail theft in Washington are the ones standing in front of the plexiglass trying to buy a wrench.
I got my wrench. The plexiglass stays
So we know the cause. Addiction, organized on top of that. We know what bends the curve, because a state pilot just proved it. We had the tool in our hands and let the funding lapse.
I got my wrench, eventually. At least the pipes aren’t leaking now.
The plexiglass is still bolted over the underwear, the cold medicine, and the spray paint, and it stays there until Olympia decides a working fix is worth more than a tidy spreadsheet.
The shoplifters aren’t paying for any of this. The addicts aren’t paying for it. The fences aren’t paying for it. You are. Every time you stand in front of a locked case, waiting for somebody with a key, burning your Saturday morning on a fifteen-minute errand that takes an hour.
That’s the price of looking the other way.
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.
