Yep:

In a similar case, Target blamed shoplifting for its decision to close a store in East Harlem, and the New York Post parroted the claim—but its landlords said that the closure was actually the result of a “business decision to move to small-format stores,” and that theft hadn’t been raised as an issue at all. Last January, Walgreens’s finance chief admitted on an earnings call that “maybe we cried too much” about shoplifting in the previous year, as the company’s rate of “shrink” had actually fallen from 3.5 percent of total sales to around 2.5 percent.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2024/01/the-shoplifting-epidemic-is-a-lie

It's entirely believable to me that retail theft levels are the same or possibly lower and that the problem is simply more visible.

Tinfoil hat on, but I did watch the Andrew Callahan (canceled, I know) video about Kensington in Philadelphia. He talks to locals there who (probably correctly) claim that concentrated visible poverty is basically modern day blockbusting, the old process by which real-estate speculators would move a single black family into a white neighborhood in order to spark those families to sell their land to the same developers.

Obviously the end goal of visible crime is to increase support for police after BLM. Whether this is orchestrated by the cops, the politicians, or both, is a question for the reader.