A self-described democratic socialist in the New York State Assembly is arguing that people who steal soap and toothpaste are meeting a "biological need", and that the real crime is the wealth gap, not the theft.
Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, who represents Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and holds a Democratic Socialists of America membership card, stood outside Manhattan Criminal Court last week and made the case that shoplifting basic goods from chain pharmacies should not be treated as a criminal offense. She appeared alongside members of Court Watch NYC, a group that says it monitored hundreds of arraignments over several days and found that half involved misdemeanor charges.
Gallagher did not hedge. In remarks captured on video, she framed the issue as a matter of survival versus corporate profit.
"Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty, people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap. And that means if you're stealing those things, you need them. And we are choosing to protect billion-dollar companies, like CVS and Walgreens, over the people who are struggling to get by. So I would say that the true crime is that there is such incredible wealth disparity in this city that there are people who can be thrown in jail simply for having a biological need."
That framing, theft as biology, prosecution as injustice, drew swift pushback from Republicans, law enforcement voices, and ordinary New Yorkers who live with the consequences of retail crime every day.
Gallagher cast shoplifting as an act of desperation by people too poor to buy hygiene products. But the data tells a different story. The New York Post reported that NYPD statistics show retail theft is already down 14.7 percent and petit larceny down 5.4 percent compared to the prior year, a decline that suggests enforcement, not leniency, is working.
Gallagher did not address those numbers. Instead, she urged the city to move in the opposite direction, calling for "treatment not jail" and defending what she described as "the incredible criminal justice reforms that we have done over the last 10 and 20 years." She accused "right-wing media" of trying to "fear monger about people who are actually just in absolute dire straits."
She also joined allies in pressing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to end what they called "broken windows policing," the enforcement philosophy that targets low-level offenses to prevent larger disorder. Mamdani, who has used public speeches to criticize ICE and federal immigration enforcement, has not publicly responded to Gallagher's specific demand.
New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino, a Queens Republican, did not mince words. She accused Gallagher of deliberately enabling the behavior she claims to sympathize with.
"People like Emily Gallagher try to obfuscate reality because they want to enable this very activity. They know it's devastating to retail stores and that's the point, they're communists and want to use crime to force these stores to close."
Paladino's charge, that the goal is not compassion but economic disruption, reflects a broader concern among conservatives that soft-on-crime rhetoric from the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party is not an accident but a strategy. The DSA has been described in recent reporting as moving toward a larger role inside the Democratic Party itself.
Former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, himself a Democrat, offered a blunter assessment on Fox News.
"Poverty is not a permission slip to steal. Democrats should reject the idea that enforcing laws against theft is somehow incompatible with caring about poverty."
Aronberg called Gallagher's stance "bad policy" and warned that it amounts to a political gift to Republicans. When a Democrat has to tell a fellow Democrat that stealing is still wrong, the party has a messaging problem, and possibly a policy one.
Gallagher's remarks landed the same week that two New York Republican members of Congress warned that socialist thinking is gaining ground among younger Americans. Rep. Claudia Tenney, who spent time in Yugoslavia during the 1980s, described what government-managed economies actually look like in practice.
"There wasn't anything on the shelves. I mean, you had to wait in line for bread, and everybody just figured that was part of it."
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis argued that the pattern is incremental. Governments that adopt socialist policies do not seize everything at once, they chip away at property rights, market freedom, and individual autonomy step by step.
"It is sort of the baby steps where they begin to implement changes. They begin to take away freedoms. They begin to ration things, to implement price controls that are very destructive to the economy."
Gallagher's argument fits that pattern neatly. She is not proposing to abolish property rights in one stroke. She is proposing that one category of theft, items she deems necessities, should simply go unpunished. The logical question is what comes next. If toothpaste theft is a "biological need," what about food? Clothing? Rent? The principle has no obvious stopping point. The pattern of Democratic officials finding themselves on the wrong side of the law is familiar enough, but Gallagher's position is different: she wants to move the law itself to accommodate the conduct.
The backlash was not limited to elected officials. On social media, ordinary residents offered the kind of ground-level testimony that lawmakers rarely hear, or choose to ignore.
One user, posting under the handle @politeracy, described what unchecked shoplifting actually does to a neighborhood.
"You know what else separates people from their jobs? Rampant shoplifting. Our nearest pharmacy closed due to unchecked shoplifting. All of those employees lost their jobs. Now all the elderly people in my neighborhood have lost their closest pharmacy. Last year I witnessed a guy clear out every toothbrush and every tube of toothpaste at my local CVS. He wasn't doing that for his oral health. He was doing it to resell."
That account undercuts Gallagher's framing on two levels. First, it shows that the people hurt worst by retail theft are not billion-dollar corporations, they are the workers who lose jobs and the elderly residents who lose access to a pharmacy. Second, it points to the reality that much of what gets called "shoplifting" is not a desperate mother pocketing a bar of soap. It is organized theft for resale. Gallagher's "biological need" framework collapses the moment someone clears an entire shelf of product.
Another user, Matt Vanswol, framed the issue in starker terms: "The entire foundation for a civilized society rests on private property, ownership, and not stealing. If you legalized stealing, society would literally crumble overnight." That is not a partisan argument. It is a foundational one. Property rights are not a conservative preference, they are the baseline assumption of every functioning legal system.
Gallagher describes herself as a "neighborhood organizer" and a "democratic socialist." She has not specified what legislation her "treatment not jail" language refers to, and the specific criminal justice reforms she praised over "the last 10 and 20 years" went unnamed in her remarks. The gap between her rhetoric and any concrete policy proposal is wide. She offered a moral framework, stealing as survival, without offering a single practical mechanism for distinguishing genuine need from opportunistic theft.
Court Watch NYC's claim that half the arraignments it monitored were misdemeanors does not itself prove that those cases were unjust or that the defendants were stealing out of poverty. Misdemeanor charges cover a broad range of conduct, and the group did not release its methodology or data. Gallagher treated the claim as self-evident proof that the system is broken. A more honest reading is that the system is processing low-level offenses, exactly what it is designed to do.
New York's ongoing struggle with retail crime, quality-of-life offenses, and the political influence of the DSA wing of the Democratic Party is not a new story. But Gallagher's remarks represent a new level of candor. She is not merely excusing shoplifting after the fact. She is arguing, on camera, that it should not be a crime at all, at least when the items stolen meet her definition of necessity. In a city where prominent Democrats already face credibility questions, that kind of open advocacy for lawlessness sets a new marker.
Dave Aronberg had it right. Poverty is real, and it deserves a serious policy response, job programs, affordable housing, community services. But the answer is never to tell people that taking what belongs to someone else is acceptable. Once a society decides that theft is not theft if the thief is poor enough, it has stopped being a society governed by law and started being one governed by whoever can make the most sympathetic excuse.
Gallagher called wealth disparity "the true crime." The pharmacists who lost their jobs, the elderly residents who lost their drugstore, and the everyday Americans who still believe laws should mean something might have a different definition.