Socialist NY lawmaker Emily Gallagher says shoplifting for ‘biological need’ is OK

Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher wants New Yorkers to know that stealing soap is different from stealing, apparently, because soap is something your body needs. By that logic half the inventory of every CVS in Brooklyn qualifies as a human right the moment someone decides they'd rather not pay for it. Toothpaste, deodorant, diapers, painkillers, all "biological needs" if you squint hard enough. It's a neat trick: take an actual problem, the cost of hygiene products for poor families, and use it to justify letting people walk out of stores with whatever they can carry.

The stores footing the bill aren't hedge funds. They're the same pharmacies and bodegas that have been boarding up windows and pulling merchandise behind plexiglass across the city for years now, because the calculation for shoplifters has become "worst case, nothing happens." Gallagher isn't describing a loophole in the law, she's describing the policy New York has basically already been running since bail reform and low-level retail theft got treated as unworthy of prosecution. She's just saying the quiet part out loud and dressing it up in the language of need.

There's a version of compassion that actually helps people who can't afford soap. It looks like food pantries, hygiene banks, subsidized clinics, things this same legislature could fund without asking a Duane Reade clerk to eat the loss. Instead we get a lawmaker telling shop owners their merchandise is basically communal property once someone decides they need it badly enough. That's not empathy, it's a permission slip, and the people who'll pay for it are the small business owners trying to keep their shelves stocked in a city that's already made that job hard enough.