America’s absurd war on ‘organized retail crime’

One Saturday last October, private investigators working for Lululemon and Victoria’s Secret walked into an outdoor flea market in San Francisco’s Mission District and pretended to go shopping. The handful of vendors at Arriba Juntos, Spanish for “upward together,” are mostly immigrants trying to keep up with the rising costs of rent and groceries. Since white shoppers seldom visit the market, one of the vendors suspected that the investigators were undercover cops. Sure enough, uniformed officers with the San Francisco Police Department soon descended on the market’s stalls and without a warrant arrested two women who were selling bras for $20 each.

Veronica Lumbreras-Villanueva, 40, and her mother-in-law, Deysi Ramirez, 59, told the police they had purchased the bras from another flea market. But the garments still had their price tags — a sign that they’d probably been stolen at some point. The women had only $79 in cash on them, but the police valued their collection of 267 bras at $16,000, the full retail value of the merchandise at Victoria’s Secret. Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s district attorney, accused Lumbreras-Villanueva and Ramirez of taking part in a “Mission District fencing operation,” an alleged criminal enterprise she claimed incentivizes “organized retail theft.” If convicted of the felony charges, the women could face more than three years in prison.

Ever since the COVID pandemic hit, drugstore chains, luxury retailers, and department stores across the country have been working more closely with local prosecutors to imprison people in response to a wave of “smash and grab” thefts. In 2021, during Black Friday weekend in the Bay Area, more than 80 people swarmed a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek. Cameras captured another group fleeing a Louis Vuitton in San Francisco, and a third smashing the glass at a Sam’s Jewelers in Hayward. Even though retailers nationwide reported little, if any, overall increase in lost inventory, it became common in major cities to hear reports of people brazenly stuffing merchandise into bags and walking out in full view of shoppers and employees. Many chains, including CVS and Target, began locking their wares behind plastic shields, requiring shoppers to search understaffed stores for an employee to help them purchase items as simple as razors or Tide Pods.

Retailers and prosecutors responded to the thefts with the kind of coordinated crackdown usually reserved for terrorists and drug cartels. Arguing that the epidemic of thefts is being orchestrated by high-level crime rings, the retail industry successfully lobbied 9 states in 2023 to up the penalties for what it calls “organized retail crime” and to prosecute it aggressively. Last fall, Sen. Chuck Grassley stood outside the Capitol flanked by leaders of the National Retail Federation to introduce a bill that would make organized retail theft a federal crime. Even the Department of Homeland Security has gotten involved. Organized retail crime “is not shoplifting,” the agency says on its website, “and these crimes are not victimless.” Some lawmakers and industry lobbyists have gone so far as to claim that retail theft has direct links to human trafficking and domestic terrorism.

Nowhere has the industry been more successful in selling its War on Retail Crime than in California. The state passed a law in 2018 defining organized retail theft as two or more people who steal “with the intent to sell, exchange, or return the merchandise for value.” If the total amount of the stolen merchandise reaches $950, the theft becomes a felony, and two-time offenders can face up to three years in prison. A new measure on the ballot in California this November would eliminate the $950 requirement on the third offense, effectively creating a “three strikes” rule for shoplifting. If you and a friend keep ripping off your local drugstore, you could, by definition, be participating in felony organized crime.

To be sure, there have been a handful of cases where people have been convicted of organizing multi-million dollar thefts and recruiting others to steal for them. But after thousands of arrests, prosecutors have shown no evidence that the nationwide wave of shoplifting is being secretly coordinated by mobsters or terrorists. In the San Francisco bra arrest, there appears to be nothing even linking the women from the flea market to an actual theft. Last February, three months after the felony charges were filed and the women’s names were splashed across local news outlets suggesting they had links to organized criminals, a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office appeared to be struggling to build a case. The prosecutor emailed investigators from Victoria’s Secret to plead for assistance. “Had anyone from Victoria Secret (or other retailers) observed Ramirez and Villanueva selling VS merchandise before 10/7?” the prosecutor asked.

Instead, the crackdown by industry and law enforcement has effectively criminalized poverty. Attorneys, defendants, and experts familiar with the surge of prosecutions report that retail theft is overwhelmingly committed by people in serious need, especially those lacking housing or suffering from drug addiction or mental illness. The result, as with the government’s long-running “wars” on drugs and terrorism, has been a dragnet that ensnares a lot of small fish who are then presented to the world as big catches. Several others facing felony charges for what the San Francisco police describe as “prolific Organized Retail Crime” are minors, including a 14-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy.

One homeless woman in jail who pleaded guilty to felony organized retail theft tells me she steals out of desperation. “It’s very hard for me,” she says. “I steal because I can’t read or write.” On a crowded sidewalk in the Mission District, a group of people are selling pants with the anti-theft tags still attached and other items. Two homeless men with the group say they sometimes steal from Walgreens and Target. They scoff at the idea of retail theft being an organized crime. “Not even close,” says one. “It’s a bunch of fucking crackheads.”

For retailers and government officials, retail theft can be a convenient scapegoat for the woes that have been facing American cities and malls since the onset of the pandemic. In 2021, videos of smash-and-grabs at chain stores began playing regularly in national news segments about San Francisco’s “doom loop.” Retailers were quick to blame crime rings for widespread store closures, and law enforcement was quick to agree. Last October, Gov. Gavin Newsom sent $267 million to cities across California to increase arrests of organized retail crime — and the crackdown has escalated dramatically. In April, after a 25-year-old and two teenagers in Napa County were accused of walking out of a Lululemon with $25,000 worth of athleisure, officers from three police departments and a California Highway Patrol helicopter pursued them in a high-speed chase to retrieve the runaway leggings.

A big chunk of Newson’s initiative — $17 million — went to the police department and the district attorney’s office in San Francisco, which retailers often call the focal point of organized retail theft in America. The grant centers on patrolling Union Square, the city’s version of Rodeo Drive, featuring luxury retailers like Saks, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel. The crimes, because of their supposedly organized nature, are handled by the white-collar division of the prosecutor’s office. But those on the ground paint a different picture of the thefts. A security guard at a Victoria’s Secret in San Francisco tells me that most of the people who steal from the store are teenagers, or middle-aged men he assumes are looking to buy drugs. “They’re not sophisticated,” the guard says.

The National Retail Federation insists that homeless people are recruited by criminal organizations to steal, and portrays itself as trying to assist the very people its members are working to lock up. “The goal is to get them the help they need for health and services,” says David Johnston, the federation’s vice president of asset protection and retail operations. But some retailers have made clear that they’re targeting homeless people for other reasons. At an industry talk last year, an asset-protection executive for Kroger said homeless people and the “drug-afflicted” were among the most “extreme” and violent shoplifters. “Every retailer in America I think faces similar issues,” he said. “No longer are we going to allow that population to rule our stores.”

There is no evidence to suggest that homeless people are more violent than others who commit retail theft. The homeless people I talked to said they steal from corporate chains, which often prohibit employees from confronting shoplifters, specifically to avoid violence. In reality, homeless people suspected of retail theft may be more likely to be victims of violence. In separate cases in San Francisco and Los Angeles, security guards fatally shot unarmed homeless people suspected of shoplifting at Walgreens stores. The guard in Los Angeles was charged with murder. But in San Francisco, the district attorney refused to prosecute the guard, saying he had feared for his life.

San Francisco’s jails are starting to fill up with people accused of stealing from leading retailers. Of the 90 women incarcerated at San Francisco’s County Jail No. 2 in April, seven faced charges of organized retail theft. Shalia Brown, a 25-year-old arrested in a sting outside Walgreens, has been incarcerated without bail for 11 months. Because of the nature of her case, she’s being held “behind the door,” meaning she can’t interact with anyone besides her cellmates. “I feel like I’m going crazy,” she says.

Many chain stores employ “asset protection” teams, some of whom now wear body cameras. Big-box stores, it appears, are the new Big Brother.

Brown spent her teenage years in foster-care institutions. At 21, after moving into an $85-a-night motel room in Oakland with her young son, she struggled to find childcare and a job. Her neighbors told her about an easier way to make money: going together in small groups to shoplift from chain stores like CVS or Walgreens, where corporate policy forbids employees from getting physical with suspected thieves.

The first time Brown stole from a CVS, she was terrified: She just wanted to get diapers for her son. But it was so easy that she started going back regularly. Afterwards, she and other “boosters” on the street would sell stolen goods at a discount, making as much as $500 a day. To protect herself from being robbed, she started carrying a toy gun that shoots water-gel pellets.

Last October, in a run on CVS, Brown planned to get her son diapers for the night. But a CVS employee named Thomas Riddle tried to stop her. In surveillance footage of the confrontation, Riddle pulls Brown to the ground. Brown stands up, backs away, and pulls out the toy gun. Riddle responds by punching and kicking her, until others appear to intervene, allowing Brown to get away. (In a court hearing, he said he was fired two weeks later.)

Several weeks later, Brown tried to steal from a Walgreens. This time, she and four others were arrested by undercover police officers who were parked outside the store. With the surveillance footage from other stores at their disposal and a special task force devoted to retail theft, the police were able to identify Brown and connect her to other incidents. The district attorney’s office charged her with felony organized retail theft, along with charges of robbery, assault, and use of a deadly weapon related to the CVS fight with the toy gun. If convicted, she faces up to nine years in prison.

The San Francisco public defender’s office says it’s common for prosecutors to slap retail-theft suspects with multiple charges, making it easier to argue that they should remain in jail until their trials and serve more time. “It’s this idea of overcharging or charging everything on the board, both to file a detention motion and to make sure something sticks,” says Elizabeth Camacho, a deputy public defender. She also notes how racialized the policing of organized retail theft has become. Of the 47 people her office has represented since 2019 on charges of organized retail theft, 38 are Black.

Retail theft itself may not be highly sophisticated, but the arsenal of surveillance tools that retailers are developing to track and prosecute retail theft certainly is. In January, the chipmaker Nvidia announced it was collaborating with more than 500 tech startups to build an AI-based “real-time solution for combating and preventing organized retail crime.” FaceFirst makes facial-recognition technology for superstores, while Flock Safety advertises license-plate readers to build a virtual “perimeter around your parking lot to proactively address theft and organized retail crime threats.” Some Lululemon clothes are embedded with a chip that allows security guards to follow them in real time. That’s not to mention the extensive in-house “asset protection” teams that chains often employ, some of whom now wear body cameras. Big-box stores, it appears, are the new Big Brother.

The surveillance efforts by retailers are playing a central role in the crackdown on retail theft. “It would be impossible for law enforcement to do our job without these retailers — they do so much,” says Capt. Jeff Loftin of the California Highway Patrol, whose own organized-retail-crime division, launched in 2019, has made more than a thousand arrests this year. One organized-retail-crime investigator for a major clothing retailer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says his job includes following suspects to where they live, collecting video surveillance from other retailers, and presenting criminal cases to district attorneys. The investigator, who previously worked at Target for 11 years, says the company barred employees from intervening with shoplifters specifically so it could build felony cases against repeat offenders. Rather than watching suspects get arrested and released on a single charge, he said, the stores keep an eye on them over time and then present the case to the DA, hoping that the shoplifter will serve time. A Target spokesperson speaking on background said that is not the company’s policy, but declined to share what Target’s policy is.

One case in San Francisco also seems to illustrate this has been a case-building tactic. In 2020, a 43-year-old woman named Aziza Graves started picking up items at a Target, scanning them at a self-checkout, and inserting a single penny as payment. Staffers tried asking her to return the items, but she ignored them and kept coming back, paying with a penny each time. Employees started to leave her alone. “I had come to the conclusion that Miss Graves was not worth following closely,” a Target asset-protection manager testified.

But Target continued to follow Graves closely, deploying an internal surveillance system that filmed her using the self-checkout machine and generated case reports for everything she was accused of taking, from Tide Pods to 25-cent shopping bags. By the time she was charged, Target investigators said, she had stolen more than $40,000 worth of items over the course of 100 thefts. After a four-week trial, Graves was convicted of felony grand theft and 52 counts of misdemeanor petty theft. Local business leaders and officials touted the case as evidence of theft run rampant. People like Graves “commit egregious thefts through brazen and repeated conduct,” Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, declared in a press release celebrating the conviction.

What Jenkins neglected to mention in her many interviews and statements about the case is that Graves was surviving on food stamps — and, despite being ruled competent to stand trial, appeared to be unstable. Graves has repeatedly insisted, for instance, that pennies have infinite value, meaning her payments at Target far exceeded the value of the items she took. When I speak with her, Graves tells me she’s concerned the judge in her case might be a hypnotist from Maury Povich’s show.

But in June, at the sentencing hearing for Graves, the prosecutor’s conduct backfires. At the Hall of Justice, the district attorney’s office asks Judge Jeffrey Ross to sentence Graves to two and a half years in prison, or order her to pay $40,000 in restitution to Target if she is put on probation. Instead, Ross tells prosecutors he’s distressed by the statements the office made tying Graves to other retail theft in the city. “For the People in a press release to suggest that Ms. Graves’ issues are similar to those are really quite an inappropriate role for the prosecutor to play,” he says. The judge refuses to send her back to jail, instead sentencing her to two years on mandatory supervision, and ordering her to pay $22,000. A case three years in the making comes to an anticlimactic end.

As she leaves the courtroom, Graves is followed by a local reporter from ABC News, who asks if she’s happy not to be going to jail.

“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Graves responds.

The reporter tells her he has no idea what she’s talking about.

Despite all the effort spent prosecuting it, there’s virtually no concrete evidence that retail theft — organized or otherwise — is on the rise. Data on retail theft provided to law enforcement and lawmakers comes exclusively from corporate retailers, or organizations funded by them, and is not independently vetted. Last year, the National Retail Federation was forced to retract its claim that organized retail theft cost its members “nearly half” of the $94.5 billion in lost inventory in 2021. One researcher put the actual figure closer to 5%. Even the guy who says he coined the term “organized retail crime” can’t say how much is lost to it. “Nobody knows and probably will never know,” says Read Hayes, who founded the industry-funded nonprofit Loss Prevention Research Council after retailers recruited him to back their anti-theft campaign with research. “It’s like measuring the wind.”

That hasn’t stopped major retailers from blaming organized theft for their post-pandemic store closures. Victoria’s Secret, which shuttered 250 stores in 2020, said last year that organized retail crime was “a significant component of the shrinkage we experience.” But lost inventory is far from the company’s biggest problem. Its market share has been dwindling for years. Investors and analysts blame the decline on the death of shopping malls, the company’s out-of-touch marketing campaigns, and the public-relations crisis sparked by the close ties between the CEO of its former parent company and Jeffrey Epstein.

Rather than allowing shoplifters to get treatment for mental illness and drug addiction, retailers are pushing to lock them up.

A few shoppers have found radio-frequency-identification chips on the tags sewn into Victoria’s Secret bras, prompting online conspiracy theories that they were being used to spy on customers. A company spokesperson responded in 2020 that “we only use this technology in our back room and sales floors to help us manage inventory so that our associates can efficiently support our customers’ needs.” But the chips were key in filing charges against Veronica Lumbreras-Villanueva and Deysi Ramirez, the two women at the center of the Mission District flea-market case. The police say an investigator from Victoria’s Secret was able to flag the table where the women were selling bras because her scanner detected that the items “had never passed a point of sale.” There is no footage of the woman stealing from a store. Prosecutors appear to be relying solely on the ID chips from Victoria’s Secret.

The preliminary hearing for the two women is scheduled to take place on October 3, nearly a year after they were arrested. The DA’s office would not comment on the case. A spokesperson for Victoria’s Secret said “we take matters of theft seriously and work closely and in cooperation with the appropriate authorities on these types of investigations. We will prosecute offenders to the full extent of the law.”

Victoria’s Secret is not alone in its prosecutorial zeal. Many companies are pushing for hefty restitution payments in theft cases — not for employees injured or traumatized by shoplifters, but for their own losses. One homeless woman I spoke with, who spent eight months in jail for stealing items from Bath and Body Works and selling them on the street, leaves jail owing $15,000 in restitution to the retail chain. And when defendants request to be placed in alternative courts, where they can receive counseling for addiction and other problems, stores and prosecutors have insisted that they do time. In a case involving a suspect accused of stealing jeans from a San Francisco Bloomingdale’s, the prosecutor received an email from Alto, a global “victim advocate” for corporate clients like Walgreens and Target. “Bloomingdale’s is against this case being deferred to Mental Health Court” because the defendant “caused a significant amount of loss and trauma for the store and its employees,” Alto advised the prosecutor. “I wanted to restate that Bloomingdale’s is seeking jail time with restitution granted.”

So the War on Retail Crime rages on. In August, while presiding over a display of buckets at a Home Depot, Gavin Newsom signed 10 bills into law promising to further increase the prosecution of retail theft. Meanwhile, some of the same stores identified as victims in retail-theft cases stand accused of exacerbating the very problem they’re complaining about. In recent years, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart have been required to pay billions of dollars to state attorneys general to settle claims that they fueled the opioid crisis. In 2022, a survey found that two-thirds of Kroger employees struggled to afford food and housing. If retail theft is on the rise, it may have less to do with organized crime than with the refusal of major retailers to pay a living wage.

Cuauhtemoc Ramirez, a 20-year-old being held without bail in San Francisco, was living in his car and struggling to quit alcohol and drugs when he was arrested. He is accused of being “part of an organized group” that stole more than $100,000 worth of products from Walgreens, Safeway, and other major retailers. He came to San Francisco because he heard it was a city that helps people in need. “I want to change my life,” he says. “If I go to trial and lose, it’s six to eight years. I want the mental-health court. I’m in here not getting help.” Organized retail theft, he adds, “is just people from everywhere trying to feed their addiction.”

Amy Martyn is a freelance journalist covering labor, retail, and the criminal justice system.