At the Los Angeles Police Department’s weekly crime briefings this fall, leaders tracked what appears to be an alarming increase in robberies at police departments such as Southwest and Rampart. The numbers showed an increase in stick-up, if only on paper.
A closer look at department records obtained by The Times shows that most of the incidents may have started with shoplifting.
Under Los Angeles Police Department standards, hundreds of thefts in which the suspect committed the crime through violence or fear count as robberies, even if no weapon was used and no one was injured.
This is a common scenario. A shoplifter with an arm full of unpaid items made a beeline for the exit, but was blocked by a security guard. If a fight ensues and the thief overpowers or simply threatens the security guard, a felony charge could be filed.
More than 1,200 similar incidents occurred across Los Angeles through the first week of October, according to department statistics released through a public records request. This accounted for approximately one in eight robberies, a slight decrease compared to the same period in 2023.
Some officials wonder if this data reflects a shift by business owners to more aggressive loss prevention strategies, leading to an increase in confrontations with security guards inside stores. Some people think so.
Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton says more businesses, from mom-and-pop stores to big-box retailers like Target, are making it a priority to “stop people at the threshold” in the face of declining profit margins. He noted that shoplifting remains a serious problem. It’s not as serious a crime as the word “robbery” might suggest, but it is still a crime.
He acknowledged that broad classifications could muddy the department’s numbers.
“You can do what you want as a business, but it doesn’t necessarily give you an accurate picture of crime,” said Hamilton, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s detective bureau.
The escalating shoplifting scandal, sometimes referred to as the Estes robbery, dates back to the early 1980s when a man named Curtis Estes tried to leave a Sears store in Vallejo wearing a down vest and corduroy coat. Paid. When confronted by an armed security guard in the parking lot, Estes pulled out a knife and threatened to kill the guard, before eventually surrendering.
Although Estes was convicted of felony robbery, the court ruled that “store employees may be victims of robbery even if they are not the owners of the stolen property.” and was upheld by the appellate court.
In the decades since then, law enforcement agencies have used Estes’ burglary standard to charge shoplifters with robbery even if they were unarmed. Although some cases may be downgraded by prosecutors to misdemeanors or dismissed due to lack of evidence, the LAPD counts each incident as a robbery.
Of the top 10 robberies across the city of Estes, the majority occurred at WSS, the Southern California chain formerly known as Warehouse Shoe Sale.
The company’s store on Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue in Hollywood had the most robberies, with 22 robberies, followed by the store near MacArthur Park with 20. The other cluster was reported at a WSS store in the southwest region and occurred separately. , Downtown FIGat7th Shopping Center.
Representatives for WSS contacted the Times on Tuesday at the company’s headquarters, which did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Deputy Chief Hamilton said the department occasionally meets with businesses to discuss emerging crime trends. He said retailers such as WSS have security guards around their stores to act as a visible deterrent, but they are also “hardening up” against theft by, for example, only having one pair of shoes on display. It is also possible to do so.
He added that police typically caution store employees against physically restraining people to prevent nonviolent crimes from turning into something more dangerous.
“That’s absolutely a concern to me,” he said. “We’ll take any theft involving Estes any time. Because when you have Estes, there’s always the potential for disaster.”
Additionally, if someone is injured or killed, the store could be held liable, and given the risk of incurring significant legal costs, it may not be justified to beat the thief outright. There is a gender. There have been numerous examples of confrontations turning deadly, including a high-profile incident in San Francisco in 2023 in which a security guard at a local Walgreens shot and killed an unarmed man suspected of shoplifting.
Assaults against security guards have increased over the past five years, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics. On Monday night in downtown Los Angeles, a man suspected of stealing shot and killed two security guards who confronted him outside a Target store at the Fiat 7th shopping mall.
The suspect was arrested the next day after an hours-long standoff with police who raided an apartment in the nearby Westlake neighborhood.
Some experts said the private security industry is moving toward a non-confrontational approach primarily to avoid injury to employees and disruption of service.
Jeff Cole Sr., director of marketing for the Security Industry Association, an industry group, said loss prevention professionals and security guards are trained to “observe, identify, and document situations as much as possible, not necessarily know.” He said that this is happening more and more. in Maryland.
While establishments such as jewelry stores that carry high-value items may still take strong measures to prevent losses, Cole said the continued growth of the multibillion-dollar private security industry will require in-store surveillance. This is further driven by the expansion of
“We’ll probably carry fewer and fewer weapons and rely more on technology,” he says.
Classifying some petty thefts as Estes robberies calls into question the reliability of LAPD crime statistics that have come under scrutiny over the past few years.
Within departments that are obsessed with numbers, the number of crimes still influences staffing decisions and serves as a criterion for supervisors, but the main focus is on whether the department has succeeded in reducing serious crimes such as murder, robbery, and burglary. Supervisors are judged based on their failures.
When LAPD numbers are made public, they influence public opinion and become fodder for political debate.
Although reliable data is scarce, the recognition that retail theft is out of control across the state led to the passage of Proposition 36 in November, which provides increased penalties for certain types of theft and drug crimes. Ta.
After a protracted political battle in Sacramento over the summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of bills to address the rise in organized theft at retail stores, police are arresting shoplifters and large-scale made it easy to disrupt retail crime syndicates.
Critics warn that a more punitive approach could do more harm than good by rolling back legislation aimed at reducing the state’s prison population.
The Los Angeles Police Department has created several task forces to crack down on organized retail theft, and occasionally conducts “blitzkrieg operations” that send teams of both undercover agents and uniformed police officers to popular shopping areas. It is expanding.
Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based crime analyst and consultant, said that with the exception of murder and auto theft, most crime categories are notoriously unreliable and tend to be underreported. .
Because retail theft in particular is not well tracked, “it’s very difficult to determine what’s increasing and what’s increasing in reporting changes.”
That said, he added that the most reliable data available shows that, with a few exceptions, shoplifting is lower today than before the onset of the pandemic.
“We’re seeing a decline in both theft and robbery across Los Angeles,” he said.
Long-time defense attorney Greg Hill said charging shoplifters with felonies not only has the potential to skew the city’s crime numbers, but also has life-altering consequences.
Hill said that if he were convicted of a felony that would be considered a “strike,” he could suddenly be sentenced to years in prison instead of being charged with a misdemeanor or being diverted to treatment. This will have a significant impact on jobs, housing and educational opportunities.
“It’s basically shoplifting under duress,” he said. “And that’s usually because the loss prevention personnel haven’t properly identified themselves, and they’re not usually in uniform, so shoplifters don’t see it, so someone grabs them by the arm. I just exist.”
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