California Gets Tough on Retail Crime
On 16 August, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law 10 bills designed to decrease property theft. The legislation addresses retail theft from a variety of angles, all designed to make it easier to catch, prosecute, and punish offenders, with the ultimate goal of enhanced deterrence.
For the last few years, California—and more specifically, the state’s most populated areas—has faced a rash of high-profile retail thefts using brazen tactics, such as smash-and-grab or flash robs.
One feature of the laws is to make felony prosecutions easier to undertake. Thieves had caught on to the fact that to reach felony level in the state, the value of stolen goods had to exceed $950. Stay below that in any single theft event, and the crime remained a misdemeanor. In general, law enforcement and districts attorney shy away from pursuing such low-level crimes because the results were not worth the effort.
The new laws allow prosecutors to aggregate the value of stolen goods no matter how many different theft events occurred in order to get over the $950 threshold, including events that occurred across county lines—another loophole in current law that thieves often knew and exploited.
The laws also make evidence easier to obtain and admissible and created stricter penalties for those convicted.
The laws are not without some controversy. California has a ballot measure this year, Proposition 36, designed to roll back a ballot measure that passed in 2014 that made many theft and drug possession offenses misdemeanors instead of felonies. Democrats, who control statewide offices as well as the state legislatures, are working to defeat Proposition 36 this year, and this set of laws is designed to bolster that effort.
“Let’s be clear, this is the most significant legislation to address property crime in modern California history,” Newsom said at the bill signing. “I thank the bipartisan group of lawmakers, our retail partners, and advocates for putting public safety over politics. While some try to take us back to ineffective and costly policies of the past, these new laws present a better way forward—making our communities safer and providing meaningful tools to help law enforcement arrest criminals and hold them accountable.”
The criminal tactics targeting retail are not limited to California, and Security Management recently published a series of articles dealing with workplace violence in retail.
To help understand the impact of the new laws, Security Management had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Michelin, president and CEO of the California Retailers Association. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Security Management (SM). Can you explain what your organization does?
Michelin. We are the trade association for the retail industry in California, so we advocate to the state legislature, to the governor’s office, to local government up and down the state of California, and then we also advocate to over 25 different regulatory bodies in the state. Our members are a lot of the national brands, but we also represent small regional retailers. Our members are diverse, so we have everything from grocery to online marketplaces to big box stores to specialty retail. We also have members who associate--members who are industry that support the retail industry.
SM: Could you talk about some of the feedback that you were getting from your members about what they were seeing or struggling to deal with when it comes to retail crime in their stores?
Michelin: I’ve been leading the [California] Retailers Association now for five years and we’ve been really engaged in this area for the last four years, and have been pretty successful. We’ve worked pretty closely with the governor’s office on the [Organized Retail Crime or ORC] task forces through the California Highway Patrol [CHP], so we were able to make sure those task forces stayed intact during COVID. There was a sunset on the legislation, so we were able to get that sunset extended.
And then we actually worked with the governor, I believe it was in 2021, on his Real Public Safety Plan. I don’t know if you recall, we had a string of smash-and-grabs, particularly in Walnut Creek where there was a really bad smash-and-grab at the Nordstrom. And there were a bunch of others going on around the state. And [Governor Newsom] immediately reached out to me, and we worked with him on getting the task forces expanded from three to five, so now pretty much the entire state had an organized retail crime task force through the CHP. We have permanent funding for that, and we were able to get dedicated prosecutors through the attorney general’s office because we needed to show that there would be consequences for the behavior. If people are being prosecuted, it helps deter them from doing that behavior. We also secured $300 million in local law enforcement grants as well as grants for the district attorney’s vertical prosecution program.
So, we’ve been really involved in this space for a while, and then we started seeing incidents that didn’t really fit the organized retail crime definition: serial shoplifting, repeat offenders, and that type of thing, where folks were going in and stealing, maybe selling it to the boosters, or similar things that are on the lower end of the scale. And that’s really why we then worked with the governor’s office and the legislature on this package of bills.
This package of bills really did come from conversations [between lawmakers, law enforcement, and the retail federation]. I went to the professionals and asked, “What is it that you need that will be impactful?” And that’s what’s reflected in this bill package.
SM: The package has 10 different bills that address a wide range of issues. Is there one or two that particularly stand out as something that is kind of a game changer for how to address retail crime in California?
Michelin: Yeah, I think so. AB 2943 which is the authored by [Assemblymember Rick Chavez] Zebur and Speaker [Robert] Rivas, is probably the meat of the package that includes the new felony. It creates a new felony for serial shoplifting that goes not only after the person who is shoplifting, but also the boosters who resell the products. More importantly, though, it expands probable cause. So now, in California, retailers, law enforcement, they can use video. Currently you can’t use video, right? So now, if you have someone on video, that now is probable cause, so you can use that in prosecution.
Number two, you can also use sworn witness statements. Number three, let’s say, as an example, someone goes into a store and steals a bunch of clothes and the security tags are still on them, along with price tags, and they go into a car, and you’ve got the license plate reader, law enforcement can stop the car and search it. That’s probable cause. That now can be used to help hold them accountable. So that really expands probable cause, which I think will hold those individuals accountable.
It also provides more clarity on aggregation, which was one of the challenges that we really had in California. Aggregation allows prosecutors to combine the value of stolen items to enable more severe charges, such as felony grand theft. So I think that bill, there’s a lot in that bill, and I think that’s going to be a game changer.
I think the other one is the multi-jurisdictional bill. We used to have that bill in California, and it sunsetted. What we were seeing is folks knew they could cross county lines, and if they committed a crime in, say, Sacramento County, they could go to Yolo County and commit crimes there, and you couldn't combine the cases. Well, now you can. You can stack cases.
Let me go back to 2943 because I think another unique aspect of that bill was that one of the challenges we were having in California, and this is crazy to me, but we did have to put it in statute, was retailers were being cited as a public nuisance for calling law enforcement for retail theft. They were being threatened with citations. And so we actually had to put in statute that retailers could no longer be cited as a public nuisance for calling law enforcement.
SM: So retailers were being classified as a nuisance for calling to report crime in their stores.
Michelin: Yes, they were. I know, it was crazy. A lot of times it was coming from the community, who didn’t want law enforcement constantly showing up. The community would complain to the city and the city didn’t know what to do.
Part of it, I think, was more of a frustration, because everyone was getting frustrated about how to keep this from happening? But the author of the bill, Mr. Zebur, heard that from a number of retailers, and so he was adamant to put it in the bill.
SM: What else would you highlight about the new legislation?
Michelin: We were able to close some loopholes on the online marketplace transactions. You might recall a few years ago the federal Informed Consumers Act. [California has] our own version as well. In California, there was a loophole in the bill where some of the marketplaces were allowing off-site transactions, so you couldn’t track them. We closed that loophole, which I think will be huge.
And then I think the other really interesting thing in the package—and I don’t know where else this is happening in the U.S., maybe Hawaii—but we now have the ability for retail restraining orders. To qualify for serial shoplifting, there have to be convictions. But under the restraining order, with two citations, a district attorney or retailer can petition a judge to get a restraining order against someone. And that restraining order will keep the individual out of not only that store, but the parking lot, and if it’s a chain, out of any of the stores of that chain in a geographic region. If they violate the order, it’s an automatic six-month sentence. So again, it’s trying to keep these serial offenders out of our stores and to protect our stores’ employees and their customers.
There’s really a lot in the package to unpack. The ORC task forces will continue, there’s [enhanced penalties] for arson, there’s enhancements for the middlemen selling stolen goods.
SM: And you mentioned you’re still working on one additional piece of legislation on smash-and-grabs. Can you tell me what that is?
Michelin: That bill calls for penalty enhancements on property damage over $50,000 when committing a felony. So if you are part of a smash-and-grab, and you use a weapon, such as a hammer, and cause property damage more than $50,000, the penalties you will force will be enhanced. It’s on the Senate floor [as of Thursday], so we are hoping it will pass in the next couple of days.
SM: This package of laws goes into effect on 1 January 2025. How are you pushing guidance on these bills out to retailers in the state?
Michelin: We’re working on that now. It’s a lot of information, so it’s going to be important to simplify it.
A number of our member companies are having us get in touch with their asset protection folks and their attorneys and go through the changes. And again, every different area, from prosecutors to law enforcement will be working to interpret the new laws.
Part of the challenge with this package is that we have to manage expectations. California, we still have, in different parts of the state where we have law enforcement that is understaffed. We will continue to work with our cities and counties as they address their staffing challenges.
So we’re still looking at things to do, even the next legislative session, to continue the dialog and find things we can do to help law enforcement. Because we want to make sure that, again, people are held accountable, but realizing that law enforcement is stretched fully thin. They’re going to probably respond to crimes that are a little bit more serious than maybe [a smaller retail theft]. I understand that, so we need to take that into consideration.
While all these policies are great, I have to also caution: It's not going to be a snap of your fingers and the retail crime issues we’ve seen go away. There's still some things we need to continue to work on, most prominently the law enforcement personnel shortages we face.
SM: That makes sense, because this is an issue where everybody has to play their part.
Michelin: Exactly, and we have ideas. Is there a way we can look at private security guards and do additional training around the new probable cause pieces of the legislation and get them an additional license showing this training and that retailers can use to hire them. There are a lot of great things in this package of laws, we just have to figure out how to collaboratively make them work.
