Newsom, CHP Announce Increased Retail Theft Operations, Arrests In 2023

Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Tuesday that the California Highway Patrol (CHP) will be setting new records in combating organized retail theft in 2023, including making more than 1,000 arrests through their Organized Retail Crime Task Force (ORCTF).

Since the beginning of the decade, organized retail theft has gone up dramatically throughout California. Nationally, events such as the San Francisco Union Square robberies in 2021 and the spate of LA-based smash and grab flash mob robberies earlier this year have made major headlines.

With flash mob and large scale robberies always seeing a peak during the Christmas shopping season, the Governor’s office and the CHP announced last month that the Real Public Safety Plan will send more CHP officers and other law enforcement to retail areas across the state to help deter those kinds of robberies. Specifically, the ORCTF, in conjunction with local law enforcement, have sought out retail areas with higher risk and monitored those areas closely.

The greater “holiday blitz” efforts in the past month, as well as ramped up operation efforts though the year, showed results results on Tuesday, with Governor Newsom and the CHP highlighting not only an increase of operations, but more overall arrests. According to the CHP, 215 retail theft operations were conducted in California in the first 11 months of 2023, a 313% increase from only 52 in 2022. Investigations went up by 52%, going from 358 last year to 528 this year, with the number of arrests similarly going up by 109% from 482 to 1,005. The number of stolen items also went up by 25%, from 148,891 to 187,515.

The drastic rise of retail theft arrests is due in part to a huge increase of operations, more funding going to local law enforcement to help assists operations, and Newsom’s Real Public Safety Plan finally yielding quantifiable results.

“As reports of organized retail crime increase nationally, California is meeting the moment by leading more takedowns and making more arrests than ever before,” said Newsom on Tuesday in a statement. “I’m grateful for the CHP — along with our critical police, sheriff, and district attorney partners — for their continued efforts to leverage the state’s tools and unprecedented resources to crack down on this unacceptable crime.”

Cracking down on retail theft

CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee also added that “Working with our local law enforcement partners, and utilizing the CHP’s extensive statewide resources, we are cracking down and stopping organized retail crime. These early results, which are a team effort, show California is headed in the right direction.”

While many pundits have chastised the high cost of the measures, including $267 million going to 55 cities and counties to combat retail crimes earlier this year, security experts have said that the early results have been showing promise.

“It took Newsom 5 years or so, but he realized that you can get more arrests by spending more on law enforcement,” said former Bay Area law enforcement officer and security consultant Frank Ma. “On the surface, this is good for Newsom because retail thefts have been a major problem, and look here, he has been fighting a lot and putting all these resources to it and now more people are being caught and more stolen goods are recovered. That is a good thing.”

“But this is only so high because he, as well as others, had the problem get so bad in the first place and wasn’t doing much for the first few years when it started getting bad. Also, so much money was taken away from law enforcement in 2020 and 2021, that these problems arose from that. Less consequences. Also comes from a lot of places not arresting or prosecuting as much. Retail crimes just exploded then.”

“So this is very good. There is more fighting back against retail crimes now. But remember, these are the same people that let the problem get that bad in the first place. They helped start the fire, now they’re working to put it out. The Real Public Safety Plan is kind of an apology for not putting full support behind them earlier.”