By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, the Seattle Police Department announced it had completed a successful “Organized Retail Theft Operation” at the Westwood Village mall in West Seattle, arresting five shoplifting suspects at “retail store … which suffers a significant amount of theft.” That retail store is Marshall’s, which, according to police, is a frequent target for shoplifting.
The merchandise police recovered, which included warm clothing such as knit caps and sweatshirts, had a total value of $406. (SPD’s post, which calculates the total as $460, does not match with the amounts catalogued in the police reports.)
In addition to the five people arrested for theft, police arrested another man on outstanding warrants and booked him into SCORE jail in Des Moines.
It’s unclear why SPD described these arrests, which occurred individually throughout the day, as “organized retail theft.” The total amount of merchandise the officers recovered was well under the legal threshold for a charge of organized retail theft under state law, which defines that term as a theft by a group of people, or by just one person, of merchandise with a total value of more than $750.
Asked why SPD considers the Marshall’s arrests an example of organized retail theft, an SPD spokesperson responded, “Charges for cases are determined by prosecutors. While we arrest individuals for probable cause of a crime, that is where the process ends for us.”
Conservatively, the operation may have cost the city upward of $10,000, between the ten officers who played direct or peripheral roles in the one-day sting and the cost of jailing several people on misdemeanor theft charges, including two who remained in jail for almost a week.
Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes have frequently talked about the urgent need to hire more officers in order to address violent crime and other critical public safety issues. For many years, SPD has had a program that allows security officers to apprehend shoplifters themselves and file “security incident reports,” which have the same weight as a police report, saving the department the hassle and expense of going to stores in person, arresting people, and booking them in jail.
SPD would not provide copies of the incident reports for the arrests. Instead, they provided narrative summaries from which the identity of each officer involved in the operation was redacted, while the names of all but one of the suspects—a man in a wheelchair who allegedly stole several pairs of children’s shoes and was not booked into jail—were included in the narrative.
The narrative, and the three full police reports we were able to obtain by cross-referencing other publicly available records, said, “The mission of this operation is to disrupt shoplifting, the trafficking of stolen goods, criminal activity and other criminal activity that negatively impacts the public’s quality of life in the City of Seattle.”
When we asked for the reports, a representative for SPD’s public affairs office responded, “You will have to submit a PDR [public disclosure request] for the full police reports as SPD Policy prevents me from releasing them.” In fact, SPD’s policy manual says, “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” as opposed to through the public disclosure process. We have asked SPD to explain why they appear to be violating their own policy.
The three police reports we obtained, along with the summaries of two additional cases provided by SPD, show that SPD dedicated at least 10 officers and detectives to nabbing four people for stealing small, low-value items. The merchandise SPD recovered included three pairs of children’s shoes ($26 a pair), beanies ($7 each), cologne ($10), two sweatshirts (at $30 each, the highest-value items stolen), and a pet toy (price unknown).
At least ten officers were involved in the bust, including at least two sergeants; their salaries, according to publicly available records, range from $129,313 to $161,470, or between $62 and $78 an hour. An SPD spokesperson said it was too soon to know whether any of the officers received overtime pay for participating in the operation. During the sting, a detective sat in the security office along with Marshall’s security guards and directed officers to arrest people who appeared to be stealing, according to police reports.
The cost of arresting and jailing people isn’t minor. Booking a person into the King County Jail on misdemeanor theft charges costs the city a minimum of $665, a price that includes a one-time booking fee of $278.60 and a daily “maintenance fee” of $386.36 for every day a person remains in jail.
Three of the four people booked at the downtown jail have been released; one served a night in jail, while the other two were there for six days and seven days, respectively. The fourth person was initially arrested for shoplifting but was booked on two felony warrants and remains in jail; the city isn’t charged for felony bookings.
Asked what the police department hoped the Marshall’s operation and similar stings would accomplish, the SPD spokesman said, “The goal of retail theft enforcement is to encourage people to follow the law.”