By Erica C. Barnett

Claudia Balducci, a King County Council member who’s running for county executive, announced on Thursday that she’s planning to introduce a measure that would dedicate a portion of a recently approved countywide 0.1-cent sales tax increase to create a permanent retail crimes task force. The funding, around $600,000 a year, would pay for two new detectives in the King County Sheriff’s Office and one new prosecuting attorney—a position that was cut when a grant ran out.

Balducci announced her proposal outside the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, flanked by former King County sheriff (and interim Seattle police chief) Sue Rahr and Kent mayor Dana Ralph, who said organized shoplifting rings were partly responsible for Kroger’s decision to shut down the Fred Meyer in Kent’s East Hill neighborhood.

The store’s closure, Ralph said, “means that our neighbors can no longer walk to get groceries, diapers, prescriptions and other essential supplies. It means that our neighbors will struggle with food insecurity. Our neighbors who are being impact impacted here on the East Hill are not that affluent. They’re working-class people doing everything they can to get by, and this is a major blow to their quality of life.”

Ralph and Balducci both said there are multiple reasons corporations like Kroger choose to close stores, but that shoplifting was a major factor.

Balducci said her proposal was necessary “in order to avoid more closures like we are seeing here today. We shouldn’t go grocery shopping, and our grocery workers shouldn’t go to work, and worry about robbery and theft. We shouldn’t worry about sending our kids to the market and experiencing violence. And no one should be anxious about how they are going to be able to buy food and the necessities of life.”

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Shoplifting is generally a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor prosecuted at the city level. “Organized retail theft,” a felony, refers not just to sophisticated crime rings that employ shoplifters to boost in-demand items from stores for mass resale, but individuals who steal items worth $750 or more from a store.

Balducci and Rahr said it was incorrect to think of shoplifting as “petty” theft. “I invite people to talk to the owner of a small business who gets robbed day in and day out and loses inventory and can’t afford to replace it and is hard working people,” Balducci said. “Often our small business owners are immigrants, people of color, and they are we hear frequently that it’s very hard for them to stay in business because there’s no help for them.”

Seattle is also preparing to pass its own 1-cent public safety sales tax, under state legislation passed last year as part of Governor Bob Ferguson’s commitment to boost police hiring across the state. The law allows jurisdictions to interpret “public safety” broadly; in Seattle, for example, Council President Sara Nelson has proposed dedicating a quarter of revenues from the sales tax increase to addiction services and treatment.

Balducci said she would be “open to spending some of this funding for that purpose,” but suggested the county’s Mental Illness and Drug Dependency (MIDD) levy, which is up for renewal by the county council this year, might be a more appropriate funding source for programs that address root causes. The sales tax “was actually also intended to fund public safety, and I want to make sure that we are using it for that purpose in ways that will make a difference, like on retail theft, where we are losing grocery stores, we are losing small shops, and people are losing their jobs, and we can do better.

King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay, Balducci’s opponent in the county executive race, called Balducci’s announcement “budgeting through press conferences” and questioned whether Kroger is truly closing stores primarily because of shoplifting, something the grocery workers’ union, UFCW 3000, has also disputed. (UFCW has endorsed Zahilay.)

“Retail theft is a serious problem in Washington, and I support putting real resources toward solving it,” Zahilay said, adding, “It would be irresponsible to pre-commit a fixed slice of the new sales-tax revenue to any single use before a transparent and deliberative process has occurred with our Sheriff, Prosecuting Attorney, workers, retailers, and community members. If those partners tell us dedicated detectives and a prosecutor are the highest-impact use of limited criminal justice funds, I am open to it.”