Policing the Grocery Store: Crime Panic Narratives and Enclosure in the Wake of Urban Uprisings

Abstract

US grocery retailers, drawing on faulty data and vague assertions, claim that shoplifting has become an epidemic since 2020 and have been organising to call for more policing. In retail trade publications, grocery industry representatives narrate shoplifting as a direct result of criminal justice reforms that threaten their businesses. In these moments, grocery retailer dependence on systems on policing come out into the open, troubling perceptions of grocery stores as benign or beneficial, as they are often represented in policy literature on food deserts. The history of grocery retailers’ broader entanglements with race, place, and policing helps us see grocery stores as contested spaces of enclosure that play a crucial role in maintaining a food system characterised by hunger amidst plenty. Seeing grocery stores as spaces of enclosure dependent on policing asks us to imagine something different—to expand our thinking of what abolitionist food systems might look like.