Public safety regulators in California are voting Thursday on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to crack down on organized retail crime by sending millions of dollars to police departments and prosecutors.
The Board of State and Community Corrections vote could greenlight the $267 million investment distributed among 55 cities and counties. Funding would be delivered as soon as Oct. 1 if approved by the board.
Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said the funds would let local police hire more cops and help district attorneys dedicate more time to pursuing charges against robbers who have been stealing six figures’ worth of merchandise.
“Enough with these brazen smash-and-grabs,” Mr. Newsom said in a press release. “With an unprecedented $267 million investment, Californians will soon see more takedowns, more police, more arrests and more felony prosecutions. When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they’ll walk straight into jail cells.”
Many of the cities included in the proposed spending are in the Bay Area or Los Angeles and its neighboring counties.
Both parts of the state have been slammed by aggressive retail theft, often in the form of flash-mob robberies where crooks make off with armfuls of expensive goods in less than a minute.
Last month in the Los Angeles area, an Yves Saint Laurent store had $300,000 worth of merchandise stolen and a Nordstrom had upward of $100,000 taken in two incidents.
A Walgreens in San Francisco chained up its freezer section in July after it repeatedly was pillaged by thieves. Meanwhile, the owners of a family-run hardware store in the city said it lost $700,000 in a year due to the organized theft.
The proposed cash infusion put forward by Mr. Newsom would be used to fully staff retail theft investigative units, install new surveillance technology and target the thieves with blitz operations run by local police departments.
Funding given to district attorneys’ offices would create prosecution teams dedicated to organized retail theft as well as build information hubs that show all related retail theft investigations in a given county.
In total, 41 sheriff’s offices and police departments across California will be awarded over $23 million from the state, and 13 district attorneys’ offices each will get more than $2 million.
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.
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