California Governor Says Efforts to Tackle Retail Crime Have Paid Off
California's expensive efforts to crack down on retail crime are paying off.
Since January, the Golden State's Organized Retail Crime Task Force (ORCTF) has recovered $4.4 million in stolen goods as a result of 211 investigations, which led to the arrest of 383 suspects. In March alone, the ORCTF, which is spearheaded by the California Highway Patrol, recovered $2,134,742 in stolen assets and collared 174 criminals.
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Some of the individual operations carried out so far this year have been massive in scale; according to the governor's office, a sting operation in the San Francisco Bay Area led to the recovery of merchandise worth over $770,000. Last month, real-time tracking capabilities led CHP to an individual suspected of stealing 137 beauty items in Lincoln, Calif. worth $19,000—and doing $10,000 in damage to the victimized store. After the seizures are catalogued, the merchandise is returned to the retailer.
Since the ORCTF was established in 2019, it has conducted 3,700 investigations into retail theft incidents, leading to the arrest of about 4,200 suspects. Solving these crimes led to the recovery of 1.3 million stolen goods valued at $56 million.
With retail crime on the rise in California since the pandemic, Governor Gavin Newsom in 2023 made the state's largest investment to date in bolstering law enforcement capabilities across the state. A whopping $267 million was funneled into 55 local law enforcement agencies to up technological capacities and train and hire officers.
Those investments are now bearing fruit; last month, the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department's (LASD) ORCTF, along with collaborating agencies, took down a retail theft ring that boosted $4 million in merchandise from retailers like Target, Nordstrom and TJ Maxx.
An analysis of Real Time Crime Index data by the Public Policy Institute of California showed that property crime dropped by 8.5 percent and violent crime dropped by 4.6 percent in 2024, with burglary and larceny also decreasing by 13.6 percent and 18.6 percent respectively from 2019 levels.
'The CHP's Organized Retail Crime Task Force teams have demonstrated exceptional dedication and coordination, leading to significant disruptions of criminal networks targeting California's businesses,' CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee said this week. 'Their proactive investigations, strategic partnerships, and relentless pursuit of offenders have resulted in numerous arrests and recoveries, restoring a sense of safety and accountability in our communities.'
The governor's office attributed much of the initiative's success to CHP's work with local law enforcement in high-crime areas. Since the beginning of the regional training and collaboration, nearly 6,000 arrests have been made, about 4,500 stolen vehicles recovered and around 300 firearms confiscated throughout Bakersfield, San Bernardino and Oakland.
California voters last year made their voices heard on the matter, passing Prop. 36, which allows certain property crimes to be prosecuted as felonies if there is a history of criminal activity. The bill unraveled some of the provisions of Prop. 47, a controversial bill passed in 2014, which set the felony threshold for shoplifting at $950. Now, petty theft or shoplifting with two prior theft-related convictions may be charged as a felony.
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He's withdrawn security clearances from and directed his administration to investigate two critics from his first term, Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs. Last week, Trump ordered a federal investigation into the right-wing conspiracy theory that aides to then-President Biden misused his autopen to implement decisions without his knowledge. Trump has ordered the Justice Department to investigate Democrats' principal grassroots fundraising tool, ActBlue. Large institutions Trump considers hostile have faced comparable threats. He's signed executive orders imposing crippling penalties on several large law firms that have either represented causes or employed attorneys Trump dislikes. 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While pursuing these penalties for critics, Trump has conspicuously rewarded allies. His Justice Department dropped federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, who has pledged to support Trump's immigration crackdown, and regulators have terminated high-profile enforcement actions against the crypto industry even as his family's financial ties to the industry have mushroomed. Trump has also issued a flurry of early second-term pardons targeted at his supporters, beginning with the mass pardon of January 6, 2021, rioters and extending to a growing list of Republican and conservative public officials. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, author of 'The Pardon,' a recent history of how presidents have used that power, said Trump's actions have no precedent. 'It's not even close,' Toobin said. 'I can't even think of even a parallel.' Taken together, these actions signal something like a mafia-style protection racket, Bassin argued. For those who meet the administration's demands, Bassin said, Trump is offering protection from federal interference, and for those who resist his demands, he's brandishing the opposite. The speed at which Trump flipped from praising to threatening Musk and his companies, Bassin added, 'is a perfect example' of how no one is safe from falling from one side of that line to the other — which allows Trump always to preserve the option of raising the price of protection with new demands. It's a method of operation, Bassin argued, that would be equally recognizable to Russian President Vladimir Putin or mobster John Gotti. Nixon unquestionably wanted to sharpen federal law and regulatory enforcement into the cudgel Trump is forging. Behind closed doors in the Oval Office, Nixon often bombarded his aides with demands to punish those he viewed as his political enemies. 'We have all this power, and we aren't using it,' Nixon exploded to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, in one August 1972 meeting captured by the White House taping system. At times, Nixon succeeded in channeling that power against his targets. He successfully pressed the Justice Department to intensify an investigation into kickbacks and illegal campaign contributions swirling around Alabama Gov. George Wallace. The administration tried for years to deport John Lennon (over a British conviction for possession of a half-ounce of marijuana) after Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond sent a letter to the Justice Department warning that the former Beatle might headline a series of concerts intended to mobilize young voters against Nixon's reelection. A team of White House operatives — known informally as 'the plumbers' because they were supposed to stop leaks to the press — undertook a succession of shady missions, culminating in the break-in to the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building that eventually led to Nixon's resignation. Chuck Colson, one of Nixon's most hardcore aides, tried to pressure both CBS and The Washington Post over their coverage of the administration by threatening FCC action to revoke the licenses of local television stations they owned. Colson and Nixon openly strategized about holding open the threat of a federal antitrust investigation to pressure the three television networks. According to research by Mark Feldstein, a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland, the plumbers even fleetingly discussed ways to assassinate investigative journalist Jack Anderson before they were diverted to a more urgent project — the Watergate break-in. In his obsessive hunt for leaks, Nixon illegally wiretapped the phones of both journalists and his own National Security Council aides. All these resentments converged in the development of what became known as the enemies list. The White House actually compiled multiple overlapping lists, all fueled by Nixon's fury at his opponents, real and imagined. 'It clearly originated with Nixon's disposition, anger, reaction to things he would see in his news summary in the morning,' said Dean. In an August 16, 1971, memo — titled 'Dealing with our Political Enemies' — Dean succinctly explained that the list's intent was to find all the ways 'we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.' Dean told me he wrote the memo in such stark terms because he thought it would discourage the White House. 'I actually wrote that memo that way thinking I would make this so offensive … that they would just say, 'This is silly, we don't do this kind of stuff,'' he said. 'I never got a response to that directly, but when I went to the (National) Archives decades later, (I saw) Haldeman had written 'great' on the memo with an exclamation point.' In fact, though, enthusiasm in the White House did not translate into action at the agencies. On the advice of Treasury Secretary George Shultz, the IRS commissioner put the list in his safe and ignored the White House request that he audit the people on it. Subsequent investigations found no evidence that those on the enemies list faced excessive scrutiny from the IRS or other government harassment. Once Dean revealed the list's existence during the 1973 hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, inclusion on it became 'something for people to celebrate,' he recalled. 'I have actually spoken to (reunions of) a couple groups of members, people who have been on the list, because they had no consequences other than a badge of honor.' That was a common outcome for Nixon's rages. The Justice Department eventually dropped the case against Wallace. The courts blocked Lennon's removal. The Washington Post did not lose licenses for any of stations, said Feldstein, author of 'Poisoning the Press,' a book about Nixon's relationship with the media. 'Trump is doing what Nixon would have liked to have done,' Feldstein said. 'Even Nixon didn't take it as far.' The differences between Nixon and Trump in their approach to federal enforcement and investigative power extends to their core motivations. Nixon, as Dean and other close observers of his presidency agree, wanted to retaliate against individuals or institutions he thought opposed or looked down on him. Trump certainly shares that inclination. But Trump's agenda, many scholars of democratic erosion believe, pushes beyond personal animus to mimic the efforts in authoritarian-leaning countries such as Turkey and Hungary to weaken any independent institutions that might contest his centralization of power. 'Although some of it was (motivated by) revenge, the huge difference here is most of what Nixon did was to protect himself, politically and personally,' said Fred Wertheimer, who served as legislative director of the government reform group Common Cause during the Watergate scandal. 'Trump is out to break our democracy and take total control of the country in a way that no one ever has before.' One telling measure of that difference: Trump is openly making threats, or taking actions, that Nixon only discussed in private, and even there with constant concern about public disclosure. Trump's willingness to publicly deliver these threats changes their nature in several important ways, said David Dorsen, an assistant chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee and former federal prosecutor. Simply exposing an individual or institution to such an open threat from the world's most powerful person, Dorsen noted, can enormously disrupt their life, even if the courts ultimately prevent Trump from acting on it — a point recently underscored by Miles Taylor in an essay for Politico. And because Nixon's threats were always delivered in private, Dorsen added, aides dubious of them could ignore them more easily than Trump officials faced with his public demands for action. Maybe most important, Dorsen said, is that by making his threats so publicly, Trump is sending a shot across the bow of every other institution that might cross him. 'Trump is legitimizing conduct that Nixon did not purport to legitimize,' Dorsen said. 'He concealed it, he was probably embarrassed by it; he realized it was wrong.' As the IRS pushback against the enemies list demonstrated, Nixon's plans faced constant resistance within his own government, not only from career bureaucrats but often also from his own appointees. 'He failed in getting key officials in the government to do what he wanted,' said Wertheimer, who now directs the reform group Democracy 21. If that kind of internal stonewalling is slowing Trump's sweeping offensives against his targets, there's little evidence of it yet. Congress was another constraint on Nixon. Not only did the administration need to fear oversight hearings from the Democrats who controlled both the House and Senate, but at that point a substantial portion of congressional Republicans were unwilling to blink at abusive actions. Ultimately it was a delegation of Republican senators, led by conservative icon and former GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who convinced Nixon to resign during Watergate. By contrast, Trump today is operating with 'a completely compliant Republican Congress' and has filled the federal government, including its key law enforcement positions, with loyalist appointees who 'operate as if they are there to carry out his wishes, period,' said Wertheimer. As Feldstein pointed out, Trump also can worry less about critical press coverage than Nixon, who governed at a time when 'there were just three networks and everybody watched those.' That leaves the courts as the principal short-term obstacle to Trump's plans. In Nixon's time, the federal courts consistently acted across party lines to uphold limits on the arbitrary exercise of federal power. Three of Nixon's own appointees joined the unanimous 1974 Supreme Court decision that sealed his fate by requiring him to provide Congress his White House tapes. John Sirica, the steely federal district judge who helped crack the scandal, was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Today, federal district and appellate courts are mostly demonstrating similar independence. The New York Times' running tally counts nearly 190 rulings from judges in both parties blocking Trump actions since he returned to office. 'I think we've seen the largest overreach in modern presidential history … and as a result, you've triggered a massive judicial pushback,' said Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, a group fighting many of Trump's initiatives in courts. 'I won't say democracy has won so far, because of the damage that Trump and his ilk have done, but I will say Trump lost.' But even if courts block individual Trump tactics, the effort required to rebuff his actions still can impose a heavy cost on his targets. And, on the most important cases, these lower court legal rulings are still subject to reconsideration by the Supreme Court — whose six- member Republican-appointed majority has historically supported an expansive view of presidential power and last year voted to immunize Trump against criminal prosecution for virtually any actions he takes in office. So far, the Supreme Court has sent mixed signals by ruling to restrain Trump on some fronts while empowering him on others. 'We haven't found out yet what the Supreme Court is going to do when … they get the really big cases,' said Wertheimer. Those decisions in the next few years will likely determine whether Trump can fulfill the darkest impulses of Richard Nixon, the only president ever forced to resign for his actions in office.
