Jeff Reisig at a Forum in April 2022 in Woodland
By Robert J. Hansen
The last Saturday afternoon “organized” retail theft involving as many as 30 people inside the Nordstrom store at the mall led to the theft of merchandise valued by police at about $300,000.
It followed a similar heist carried out last week by a mob of thieves at the Americana at Brand mall in Glendale, with an also estimated loss of $300,000 mirroring other smash and grabs in California the last few years.
Los Angeles County District attorney George Gascón insisted the perpetrators will be brought to justice and considers the heist organized crime, a felony offense.
“We assigned our organized crime division to work on these cases about a year and a half ago. We view them as organized crime, and we will use every tool available under the law when there is an arrest made to make sure these individuals are held accountable,” Gascon said. “This is unacceptable behavior in a civilized society.”
Yet, Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure reducing a handful of drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, remains a favorite scapegoat of some California prosecutors. A law that does not apply to the Saturday incident.
Yolo County District attorney Jeff Reisig said the Nordstrom heist happened “because of broken state laws, these crimes are considered ‘non-serious’ and ‘non-violent’ and nobody will go
to state prison, even if caught and convicted.
“The lack of deterrence and accountability in California has never been worse. We are in a spiral,” Reisig said. “State laws need to be fixed and yes, many people need to go to prison for this type of crime.”
Reisig routinely blames Prop. 47 for crime rates.
“The retail theft problem is across California and it’s what’s driving these smash and grabs. As long as it’s under $950, nobody is going to jail because the law says that these people get a ticket. That is a broken law,” Reisig said at a debate in March 2022.
Comprehensive data on retail theft is lacking. However, in November 2019 the Retail Industry Leaders Association and Buy Safe America Coalition released a report examining the rise in organized criminal activity targeting local retailers.
“Organized retail crime is more than petty shoplifting, and the economic impact has become alarming,” said Michael Hanson, Senior Executive Vice President of Public Affairs for the Retail Industry Leaders Association. “Professional thieves and organized criminal rings are building a business model by stealing and reselling products, increasingly online through marketplace platforms like Amazon or Facebook.”
As much as $68.9 billion worth of products were stolen from retailers in 2019.
“The impact on front line retail workers can no longer be ignored by policymakers,” said Ben Dugan, President of the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR). “As these crimes have become more organized and brazen, they have also led to more violence against employees. These crimes are not just property crimes, they impact the safety of everyone in the store.”
This issue is national and, though California is one of the top ten most impacted states, there is no evidence, aside anecdotal, that shows correlation, let alone causation, between the smash and grabs and Prop. 47.
Recently, the Riverside County District attorney’s Office unnecessarily sought to blame the measure after Christopher Michael Jackson pleaded guilty to 54 felony burglary charges for a litany of property crimes in Riverside County.
Jackson was sentenced to seven months imprisonment in county jail, but was credited for time served in jail while awaiting trial. He also faces other significant measures to hold him accountable and hopefully steer him in the right direction.
“Jackson was ordered to wear an ankle monitor for almost 12 years, pay more than $150,000 in restitution and stay away from a list of 54 businesses in Riverside and Moreno Valley that he admitted burglarizing,” reported the Southern California News Group. “Jackson was also ordered to participate in a six-month residential drug treatment program at the Coachella Rescue Mission.”
These are all terms the DA’s office agreed to. Yet the DA’s office took the opportunity to complain about the lack of prison time. The DA’s office complained that “as a direct result of Proposition 47…Jackson was not eligible to receive any prison time.”
This is quite the claim, considering that Proposition 47 doesn’t involve the crime of felony burglary, One would think prosecutors would know this.
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