California, New York and Virginia Aim for Retail Crime Crackdown
A strip mall in the Los Angeles suburbs was the site of a smash-and-grab robbery that saw a streetwear store stripped of tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise early Sunday morning.
At 4:45 a.m., surveillance video captured a gray sedan packed with people repeatedly ramming its back bumper into the storefront of Hype Kingdom, a small business in Bellflower, Calif. that sells clothing and shoes from brands like Adidas, Nike and Supreme. After shattering the window, thieves piled out of the vehicle and began ransacking the store, ultimately taking off on foot with about 500 items.
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According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, more than a dozen suspects took part in the crime, using a stolen government vehicle as a battering ram and abandoning it afterward. “I drive here and I see a car in my store—and my store is ruined,” Hype Kingdom owner D.J. Snelson told KTLA 5 News. He vowed to rebuild the business, which has already been targeted once. The suspects are still at large, according to law enforcement.
The following day, California lawmakers gathered at the state Capitol in Sacramento in support of AB 1772, which would introduce harsher penalties for retail crime, taking aim at repeat offenders and career criminals. Introduced by Assembly member James C. Ramos, the bill would see a person convicted of petty theft or shoplifting who has two or more prior convictions for theft-related offenses jailed for up to three years.
“In 2014, Prop. 47 was packaged as a Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act, and for the last decade this disingenuous title has plagued California businesses by taking the punishment teeth from theft crimes,” San Bernadino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said at the press conference on Monday. The oft-cited law, which passed by ballot initiative 10 years ago, raised the felony threshold for shoplifting to $950—a move which many in law enforcement believe has emboldened criminals across the state.
In San Bernadino County, law enforcement has received more than 500 reports of retail theft since August, Dicus said. “The statistics show an evident increase in crime in large cities that not only include shoplifting, but also violence and organized retail crime.”
Monday was a banner day for retail theft legislation. Across the country in Virginia, lawmakers safeguarded a recent law that makes organized retail crime a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Enacted last July, it stipulates that a suspect can be charged with a Class 3 felony if they act in concert with others to steal retail property worth $5,000 from one or more stores over a 90-day period, with the intent to sell the merchandise at a profit.
A move by criminal justice reform advocates to repeal the law was defeated when members of a House subcommittee voted to have the Virginia State Crime Commission study the bill’s text further. Opposition cannot file another attempt for repeal until 2025.
New York State Senator Jessica Ramos took action to protect store associates from becoming collateral damage as retail crime continues to ratchet up. She introduced the Retail Worker Safety Act on Monday, which would make it the duty of retail employers to develop and implement programs to prevent workplace violence.
Violence against retail workers is “a growing problem in New York,” with store associates often placed on the front lines while offering “essential necessities to the public.” Amid an uptick in smash-and-grabs, flash mobs and incidents of shoplifting, the bill said “many employers have not done enough to take responsibility for the health and safety of their employees.”
Under the law, any retail establishment with 10 or more employees would be required to create and enact a written workplace violence prevention and employee training program. They would also be tasked with taking physical measures to protect employees, like making high-risk areas of stores more visible, installing proper external lighting and minimizing cash on hand by using drop safes. Employee training would include de-escalation tactics, active shooter drills and emergency procedures.
“Despite the constant harassment and assaults faced by retail workers, there is virtually no training offered by employers in violence prevention, de-escalation tactics or escape procedures,” Ramos wrote. “In fact, few if any employers have actually assessed the risk of violence in the workplace, let alone developed a plan to reduce the risk.”
“There is no formalized system to report violent incidents, assess their causes and develop better strategies for prevention,” the bill text said. “In many retail settings, security guard positions have been cut to save money, despite the threat to workers remaining.”
A study by the National Retail Federation and Lotis Blue Consulting released in December showed that retail crime is having an impact on store workers’ psyches, with many of them considering their health and safety more than they did just six months earlier. In surveying 3,000 store associates across 600 different types of retail, the partners found that the issue had jumped to the No. 3 overall job retention driver, climbing 10 basis points from the previous survey.
That’s due to the growing perception of threats to their personal safety, according to Lotis Blue chief behavioral scientist and head of transformation Aaron Sorensen. “With shrinkage losses of $112 billion in 2022 and increasing to staggering levels in 2023 with organized retail crime, ensuring a safe workplace is now a top priority for associates,” he told Sourcing Journal. The only two factors that they ranked higher were the enjoyability of their work and their co-workers.
“Because crime is so ever-present now in the retail environment, it is in the psyche of the retail associate,” he added. “It’s no longer just a shrinkage and profit-loss thing—it’s a workforce issue.”
