By in large low end habitual criminals have been too stupid and lazy to engage in crime far from home. They foul their own nests, as it were, almost as if their preference.
Shoplifting in upscale stores and neighborhoods was often from relatively wealthier thieves still operating close to home.
Your proverbial Wet Bandits, from Home Alone, who went far afield to tony neighborhoods to steal from them would have been rarer and somewhat of an exception.
Any transition from being a plague on their own neighbors to being a plague in general shows that people are graduating from being stupid and evil to being just evil.
Urban Bible:
“And on the 7th day Liberals looked upon what they had created and saw that it wasn’t any good.”
Most crooks never understood the reply, “because that’s where the money is” when Sutton was asked.
Most crooks never understood the reply, “because that’s where the money is” when Sutton was asked.