California lawmakers passed a slate of retail theft bills, but rifts over crime remain

Retailers still aren't coming back. The last Deny's in SF closed this month after 25 years. You can easily guess why?

 
Can you post the highlights? not going to remove my ad blocker for them.

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Before the Lego sets were kept behind locked glass panels, Michelle Leopold said the boxes of popular toys were regularly stolen from the shelves of her Ace Hardware store in Laurel Heights. One time, a group of shoplifters entered the store with garbage bags, filled them with Lego boxes and fled to a waiting van.
Michelle and her husband, Jeff, who own six Ace locations across the Bay Area, have started locking other merchandise — including the entire tool aisle — in an effort to curb shoplifting.

“The losses are definitely piling up,” Michelle said. “In the past 10 years, there’s definitely been an increase in shoplifting.”


After a customer helped her stop someone from stealing two Yeti coolers this week, she thinks everyone — not just those running retail businesses — is getting fed up with “brazen” theft.
In response to complaints from business owners like Michelle Leopold, California lawmakers passed a slate of bills Monday to address retail theft crimes, including by cracking down on the sale of stolen goods and making it easier to prosecute burglaries. They also include a measure that would eliminate the requirement that victims prove their vehicle was locked to press car burglary charges.
The bills now await final approval from Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Democratic governor hasn’t officially committed to signing them, but he’s praised lawmakers for their work to address retail theft and has said he supports the general policies in the bills.
They represent one vision for how best to address crime on California streets, an issue that has divided Democrats.
Newsom and legislative leaders say the crime bills strike a balance between targeting organized crime rings and prolific thieves with harsher punishments and keeping lower-level criminals out of jail.

But they face opposition from both sides. To their left, some Democrats with more liberal stances on criminal justice policies say the bills are too punitive and will lock too many people in jail.

During debate on one of the bills to make it easier to prosecute theft, state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, D-Los Angeles, said such measures would make communities less safe by saddling low-level offenders with criminal records that prevent them from getting jobs to support themselves.
“This measure and others like it are making our communities unsafe because these measures deepen mass incarceration,” she said.
On the other side, a bipartisan coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans says the bills, while good, don’t go far enough. They argue addressing retail theft requires going back to California voters and asking them to roll back parts of Prop 47, a ballot measure passed in 2014 that reduced punishments for drug possession and theft of property worth less than $950 to misdemeanors.

That coalition backs a November ballot measure, Prop 36, to do just that. It would allow people caught stealing three times to be charged with felonies, regardless of what they stole and how much it cost. It would do the same for felony drug possession charges and would increase jail time for repeat and organized retail theft. The measure also contains provisions to compel people with multiple drug convictions into treatment.
While the Leopolds were not aware of the details of the retail theft legislation, they emphasized that they think doing anything short of rolling back the $950 threshold included in Prop 47 will not be far enough. They said they think shoplifters understand the law and are careful to take under $950 in merchandise.
There’s debate over whether the $950 threshold is indeed to blame for the kinds of shoplifting crimes the local business owners describe. Newsom has been adamant that it is not the root problem, pointing out that California has one of the lowest felony theft thresholds in the country. Texas, for example, has a minimum felony theft threshold of $2,500.
Data from the California Department of Justice shows reported shoplifting crimes have fluctuated since Prop 47 passed in 2014. That year, the state recorded 97,000 shoplifting crimes. There were nearly 114,000 reported shoplifting crimes in 2023, but the year before, there were just under 82,000. Opponents of Prop 47 often argue that the reduced threshold means such crimes are underreported.

Melanie Kim, state policy director for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, wrote in a letter to lawmakers this year that retailers have exaggerated the prevalence of theft in pushing the Legislature to crack down, She pointed to an incident last year when the National Retail Federation walked back a claim that organized theft accounted for half of all inventory “shrink,” a term for lost product that also includes products lost or damaged by retailers themselves.

“Crime in San Francisco is in a long-term decline. This is true of both rates of property crime and violent crime. Despite this, the media regularly produce sensationalized news reports about the city,” she wrote. Kim pointed to studies that she said showed harsher penalties would not combat retail theft. She instead advocated for increased funding for housing, education and employment opportunities to address root causes of theft.
“Theft is an act of desperation and poverty,” she wrote.

Chandler Tang said she has spent thousands of dollars to increase security at her Lower Pacific Heights gift store, which is called Post.script, because of shoplifting. She installed a security gate outside the door and outfitted the small shop with several cameras and handwritten signs telling customers they’re being filmed.
Tang said shoplifters have pocketed $30 to $50 gifts that are often small enough to be hard to spot.

The San Francisco native opened her store in November 2019 and has dealt with theft since the very beginning.
“It sucked because we’re a small business, and it really hits our morale a lot and kind of makes me a bit more paranoid,” she said.
Tang said that supporting Prop 36 will be drawing her to the ballot box in November.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said he supports both the retail theft legislation and the ballot measure.

“I think these bills are helpful. They’re a step in the right direction,” said Mahan, a Democrat. “They are limited, however, because Prop 47 was passed by a vote of the people and making changes requires going back to the voters.”
Legislative leaders incited backlash when they tried to pit the retail theft bills against the ballot measure.
In June, they amended several of the bills to contain language that would repeal the policies if Prop 36 passed. That would have forced supporters to choose either the bills or the proposition, but it generated so much controversy that legislative leaders were forced to remove the repeal language from the bills.
Now that the retail theft bills have passed, however, they may still erode the ballot measure’s funding. The bills, which were crafted in negotiations with the California Retailers Association and the California Grocers Association, contain those trade groups’ top priorities. With those policies on the verge of becoming law, the businesses they represent may have less incentive to pour more money into the ballot measure campaign.
Rachel Michelin, the chief executive officer of the California Retailers Association, said that the group is hopeful and excited about the retail theft bills. The group, which has previously voiced support for Prop 36, will reevaluate its position following the signing of the legislation, she said.
Michelin said many measures included in the legislative package — particularly those going after organized crime and online resellers — address aspects of retail theft not included in the ballot initiative.

Before the measure qualified for the ballot, big retailers provided the bulk of the funding.
None of the three largest funders of the measure — Walmart, Target and Home Depot — have contributed to the campaign since March.
The companies did not respond to questions about whether they planned to contribute more money to the Prop 36 campaign.
After raising more than $9.2 million during the first half of the year, primarily from retailers, the campaign reported just $103,000 in cash on hand at the end of June. In California, successful ballot measure campaigns typically cost tens of millions of dollars.
Lawmakers passed the following retail theft bills Monday:
  • Senate Bill 905 by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, would eliminate the requirement that victims prove their car was locked to press burglary charges and also makes it easier to combine instances of stolen property possession into one crime.
  • Assembly Bill 1779 by Assembly Member Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), would let district attorneys coordinate to prosecute retail theft crimes across multiple counties.
  • Senate Bill 1144 by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would crack down on people trying to sell stolen property by requiring more sellers to register their identities with online marketplaces.
  • Assembly Bill 2943 by Assembly Member Rick Chavez Zbur, D-Los Angeles, would crack down on people who possess large quantities of stolen goods that aren’t for personal use and make it easier for police to arrest people for thefts they didn’t witness. It would also make it easier for prosecutors to aggregate multiple thefts by the same person or people across different counties to reach the $950 threshold for felony theft charges.
  • Assembly Bill 1802 by Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles, would make organized retail theft a permanent crime, a provision that would otherwise expire.
  • Assembly Bill 3209 by Assembly Member Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park, would let retail stores seek restraining orders against people who steal, vandalize or assault an employee.
  • Assembly Bill 1972 by Assembly Member Juan Alanis, R-Modesto, would expand the work of the California Highway Patrol property crimes task force to include cargo theft and working with railroad police.
  • Senate Bill 1242 by state Sen. Dave Min, D-Irvine, would increase punishments for people who start fires while stealing.
  • Senate Bill 1416 by state Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton (Orange County), would increase punishments for large-scale organized retail theft.
  • Senate Bill 982 by state Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Fremont, would make permanent the crime of organized retail theft and would also make permanent the California Highway Patrol organized retail theft task force.
Reach Sophia Bollag: [email protected]; Twitter: @SophiaBollag. Reach Molly Burke: [email protected]; Twitter: @mollyfburke.
 
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Have you noticed Obama’s sons and daughters never steal dress clothing for work?
 

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