The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday that 50 people were charged or arrested last weekend during a retail theft operation at a Target store in the Sacramento area.
Detective Ryan Drummond of the sheriff’s Property Crimes Bureau said that during the operation, nearly $5,000 worth of things that were not “of necessity” were returned to the Target at 5001 Madison Ave. in Old Foothill Farms. Someone stole something valuable, so four people were caught and taken to the Sacramento County Main Jail.
Drummond said that people from 15 to 54 years old were arrested as part of the operation. Nine of the people arrested were minors. About half of the people who were arrested had been caught stealing from stores before, and 15 of them had already been taken by Drummond’s team in earlier operations, he said.
“We’re fighting it and catching more of them, but it’s still not enough to stop them,” Drummond said.
Drummond says that there aren’t many large-scale smash-and-grab store thefts in the capital region. All of the people who were arrested last weekend worked alone or with one or two others to take things and leave without paying. He said that many families brought kids with them when they stole things.
Drummond said, “The main problem right now is people who are doing this for fun and don’t see any consequences for their actions.”
A few months ago, hundreds more people were arrested for shoplifting during operations in Sacramento County. This operation comes after those operations. In March, sheriff’s detectives arrested almost 100 people at three Target stores as part of a big operation. Operation Bad Elf, which was run by the Sheriff’s Office for a week last year, caught 285 shoplifters at 12 stores.
Drummond said that the operation at Target last weekend wasn’t as big as Operation Bad Elf, but it was bigger than what the Sheriff’s Office usually does.
Drummond said, “It won’t be the last one, and it probably won’t be the biggest one this year.”
The Sheriff’s Office, which is run by Sheriff Jim Cooper, has said many times that operations aren’t successful at stopping theft because the laws aren’t strong enough. According to past Bee reporting, after Operation Bad Elf, Cooper said that Proposition 47, which was passed by voters in 2014, was a big reason why retail theft has become a “major problem.”
Prop. 47 raised the amount of money that was stolen from $400 to $950, making it a crime. At the moment, any theft worth less than $950 is a crime.
To stop the rise in in-store theft, a group of district attorneys put Proposition 36 on the November ballot. Cooper supports the measure, but many Democrats do not. Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom spoke out against the bill, calling it more of a “drug policy reform” than an effort to stop retail theft.
In the past, Newsom and lawmakers tried to get the California District Attorneys Association to take Proposition 36 off the election. After some attempts by lawmakers to pass different bills failed, the governor spent the last few days before the end of the legislative session arranging a different bill to go against the district attorneys’ plan. But Newsom took it down the night before the lawmakers were supposed to vote on it.
Instead, Newsom has pushed the Legislature’s theft and drug plan, which is a group of 14 bills that lawmakers have been working on for most of the year.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office says that Proposition 36 could add hundreds of millions of dollars to the annual costs of the state’s criminal justice system. This is mostly because it would mean more people being locked up in California. It could also add tens of millions of dollars to the cost of the local justice system every year by making courts busier and putting more people in county jail and under community control.
Drummond said that the number of thefts at Target stores in the Sacramento area has been going up over the past few years and doesn’t look like it will stop this year. Californians are feeling the effects of this. He said that shops were locking goods behind glass cases and raising prices to stop theft and try to get back the money they had lost.
“These people are not facing consequences for what they do,” he said. “No matter how hard we work and how long we keep trying, things won’t change or get better until the law changes.”
