Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Wednesday said he’s looking at ways to bring harsher charges for certain types of thefts — specifically taking aim at “opportunists” who methodically hit up city stores.
The sudden shift from the DA, who’s been accused of being soft on crime, comes amid a surge in retail thefts, complaints of which have jumped 36 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to the NYPD.
Just on Tuesday, The Post caught a man brazenly swiping about a dozen steaks from an East Village Trader Joe’s — prompting the Rev. Al Sharpton to call for Mayor Eric Adams to address the rampant shoplifting.
Bragg — who recently reversed a pair of his most controversial soft-on-crime policies amid outrage — took a tougher stance as he addressed rampant thieving and shoplifting afflicting retailers.
“We have amongst us opportunists, who are repeat players, who are just taking goods,” Bragg said during a virtual meeting with the Association for a Better New York.
“We are brainstorming about how to respond to that … People who are really going from store to store and just taking, and how we can kind of aggregate that conduct and so charge it at a higher level when appropriate.”
The district attorney talked up his recently launched Manhattan Small Business Alliance, which is seeking to address “policy and enforcement around commercial robberies and theft.”
Sharpton said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that businesses have been forced to respond with such extreme security measures that they are even “locking up my toothpaste.”
Some Upper East Side drug and grocery store workers have highlighted how powerless they are to stop shameless shoplifters who target their establishments daily — speaking out after actor Michael Rapaport filmed an alleged crook casually strolling out of a neighborhood Rite Aid with his loot.