Tag: shoplifting

Audit: Police Could Do More, Without Hiring Extra Cops, To Address Retail Theft Rings

By Erica C. Barnett

A report from the city auditor’s office on the city’s response to organized retail theft concluded that the city, particularly the Seattle Police Department, is not doing everything it can to combat local commercial fencing operations that resell goods stolen by individual “boosters,” typically “”people who are homeless and people with substance use disorder,” who receive drugs or small amounts of money in exchange for bearing most of the legal risk for organized theft operations.

The audit, pointedly titled “The City Can Do More to Tackle Organized Retail Crime in Seattle,” points to a number of actions the department could take, without hiring additional staff or increasing its budget, to target people organizing thefts and directing the resale of stolen retail goods. City Councilmembers Andrew Lewis and Lisa Herbold announced the audit last year, and its chief author, the City Audit Office’s Research and Evaluation Director Claudia Gross Shader, presented its findings to Herbold’s public safety committee Tuesday morning.

Cities, like Auburn, that have been successful at reducing organized theft have succeeded by taking down the organizers of fencing operations—”cutting off the head of the snake,” as Gross Shader put it Tuesday.

The police department and City Attorney Ann Davison have rolled out numerous initiatives to crack down on the people at the bottom of the fencing food chain—Davison’s “high utilizers” initiative, for example, imposes extra penalties on people arrested repeatedly for stealing from stores—but have not taken meaningful steps to disrupt theft rings by focusing on the people actually running them, the report concludes.

According to the Washington Organized Retail Crime Association, organized retail theft refers to operations in which street-level shoplifters steal items in exchange for drugs or small amounts of money on behalf of fencers, who resell the items in markets that range from sidewalk setups to international theft and resale rings.

Under state law, however, a single shoplifting incident is considered “organized” if a person steals merchandise worth $750 or more in a single incident. As PubliCola has documented, the city has used the organized theft statute to prosecute people stealing valuable items without determining whether they are actually part of any organized theft ring.

The audit puts a number on this tendency to focus on cases that do not appear to be “organized” in any meaningful sense: Of the 49 “organized retail theft” cases SPD referred to the King County Prosecutor’s Office in 2022, 45 involved thefts that qualified because they were above the $750 threshold, while only the remaining four indisputably involved fencing. The 45 people in the former category were disproportionately Black (38 percent) and included people who were homeless and had substance use disorders.

According to the audit, responding to calls from just the top 100 retail locations in the city used up almost 19,000 hours of police time, equivalent to the work of nine full-time officers—”a significant body of work” that could be streamlined, the report suggests, by using tools like “rapid video response” (essentially a police version of Zoom) to interview store employees instead of sending officers all over town.

Although the report says nothing about police hiring, City Councilmember Sara Nelson said it validated her efforts to secure more funding for police recruitment, and suggested (for the second time in a week) that if the council would  “just lift” a budget restriction that requires council approval before SPD can spend salary savings from unfilled positions, “they could spend that those resources on whatever they need to help with the crime situation.”

Although a report on place-based strategies specifically called for eliminating “extreme measures” like the razor-wire-topped fences the city installed to prevent people from accessing a parking lot at 12th and Jackson, the fences remain, giving the area the feel of a prison camp.

Chiming in a few minutes later, Councilmember Alex Pedersen said the “defunding movement against the police” movement had led to the loss of more than 400 police officers, which he said contributed to the spike in retail theft that began in 2020.

The audit found that although the city does participate in a number of collaborative efforts to address organized theft rings—including state and federal task forces focused on the issue—SPD could be doing a lot more to access existing resources outside the department. For example, the US Department of Justice offers free assistance implementing a strategy called Problem Oriented Policing, or POP, that addresses the conditions that lead people to do things like working for fencers with the goal of preventing crime rather than just reacting to it.

“Although POP has existed since the 1980s, SPD has not systematically implemented it,” the audit says. “In fact, SPD’s lack of experience with POP was seen as a limiting factor in a federally funded pilot project designed to address two downtown Seattle crime hot spots.”

The city should also invest in “place-based strategies”—better lighting, activating vacant lots, and other non-law-enforcement approaches—to make “hot spots” less appealing places for people to operate illegal street markets. SPD proposed 68 such strategies last year for the intersection of 12th and Jackson, a frequent target of aggressive “hot spot” policing operations, but the city has only implemented three of them.

Although the SPD report specifically called for eliminating “extreme measures” like the razor-wire-topped fences the city installed to prevent people from accessing a parking lot at 12th and Jackson—specifically because they make the area feel “unsafe”—the fences remain, giving the area the feel of a prison camp.

Another problem the auditors identified is that when police arrest shoplifters who work for fencing operations, they rarely interview the people they arrest to find out how the operations work, squandering opportunities to disrupt the market for stolen goods.

Last year, as part of an effort to build cases they could actually prosecute, the prosecutor’s office created a checklist of information SPD needed to provide before sending a case to the county. According to the audit, none of the five cases SPD filed after getting the checklist had all the required information, and all five are currently on hold because they lack information the prosecutor needs to move forward. The audit recommends training detectives in how to use the checklist, which includes four items and detailed instructions on how to obtain them.

Arrests of “Prolific Shoplifters” Netted First-Time Offenders, People Previously Deemed Incompetent

Photos distributed by SPD showing items recovered during recent shoplifting arrests downtown
Photos distributed by SPD showing items recovered during recent shoplifting arrests downtown

By Erica C. Barnett

Capping off a year of renewed focus on low-level street crime such as shoplifting, the Seattle Police Department announced just before the new year that it had arrested 11 “prolific shoplifters” in an operation targeting downtown retail theft, booking eight of them into the downtown jail.

In a post on the department’s blog, SPD described a carefully orchestrated operation in which officers worked with security staff at three stores to identify prolific thieves and apprehend them after they “gather[ed] items like clothing, makeup, food, and liquor, and then walk[ed] out of the store with no attempt to pay.”

SPD declined to provide police reports for the arrests, and information about the eight bookings hasn’t shown up yet in the Seattle Municipal Court’s public portal. However, the department did post images of the recovered goods, which included beer, ice cream, sandwiches, lip gloss, and toilet paper. With the exception of a case of beer and what looks like two sample bottles of cologne, none of the items appear to be worth more than several dollars.

Of the three people with multiple prior arrests or charges, two were deemed incompetent to stand trial in the past because of mental illness, including one whose history of paranoid, delusional outbursts, attributed to schizophrenia in court documents, is described at length in police reports.

Indeed, while the SPD post makes it sound like police targeted some of the city’s worst offenders, our review of the court history of the eight booked offenders shows that most of them have scant criminal records or well-documented histories of mental illness and addiction—conditions that aren’t addressed by sending people to jail for a night or taking them to trial. At least two people on the list have been declared incompetent to stand trial because of mental illness in the past. None appear to be on the city’s “prolific offenders” list.

SPD released three of the suspects without booking them, and booked the remaining eight into jail; the department provided the names of those eight to PubliCola in response to a request.

Of the eight, one—as SPD noted in its post—had several outstanding warrants and faced additional charges, including possession of auto theft tools.

Among the remaining seven, only three have been charged with, or arrested for, more than one misdemeanor in Seattle in the past, according to court records—an extremely minimal definition of “prolific.” The remaining four had either zero or just one prior case in Seattle Municipal Court records, which go back decades.

Of the three people with multiple prior arrests or charges, two were deemed incompetent to stand trial in the past because of mental illness, including one whose history of paranoid, delusional outbursts, attributed to schizophrenia in court documents, is described at length in police reports.

Almost every person who was booked into jail as part of this highly publicized operation was released within a day, and City Attorney Ann Davison’s office declined to file charges in seven of the 11 cases.

In other words: The great holiday Retail Theft Operation of 2022 was a bit of a bust.

Because SPD, and Mayor Bruce Harrell, have placed such an emphasis on the need to prosecute people who engage in frequent shoplifting from downtown stores (a practice that, as we’ve documented, can be prosecuted as “organized retail theft” even if the person is stealing something for their personal use), it’s worth taking a closer look at the cases in which the city previously arrested or charged the people picked up last month for other misdemeanors.

The only clear-cut case of a “prolific offender,” the Northgate Target shoplifter, was arrested repeatedly for stealing clothes, including 10 incidents in 2020. In the December bust, SPD picked him up for taking $51 worth of items from a downtown Bartell drug store, including pens, two sodas, and a notebook.

According to court records, the man had been referred to community court for several of his previous cases, but didn’t follow through; in a mental health evaluation in 2020, he acknowledged a history of drug abuse and claimed he was having auditory hallucinations, but was found competent to stand trial.

The other two cases involve people whose mental health issues and struggles with addiction were well documented.  In one, the court referred an alleged serial shoplifter to mental health court; the man, who is homeless and reported daily drug use and heavy drinking, was recently found incompetent to stand trial in several cases and referred for a mental health evaluation. All but one of those cases involved shoplifting from downtown stores; the other was an alleged assault at the downtown library in 2016.

A spokeswoman for SPD noted that officers don’t always arrest people identified as shoplifters by store security guards. It’s also true that security guards don’t always call police when they witness or confront someone shoplifting, so the number of arrests doesn’t represent the actual number of shoplifting incidents.

The second involves a man court records describe as schizophrenic. The man had been arrested, most recently, in August, after neighbors called the police when he was “standing in the street and screaming” in a “possible mental crisis,” according to police reports. Officers who responded to that call arrested the man for subsequently walking out of a nearby drug store with three board games. His criminal history included many arrests for harassing and attacking members of his family, who lived nearby, when he was “off his medication” and using drugs.

Asked to comment on the downtown arrests and the details of specific suspects’ legal histories, a spokeswoman for SPD noted that SPD doesn’t always arrest people identified as shoplifters by store security guards, so some of the people could been repeat offenders without being arrested. Additionally, security guards don’t always call police when they witness or confront someone shoplifting.

“The Retail Theft Operation was conducted to assist in identifying prolific offenders, but also deter shoplifting in the stores overall,” the SPD spokeswoman said. “Detectives, Officers and Loss Prevention teams often contact suspects, who have shoplifted liquor or other items multiple times, but may not arrest these suspects for various reasons. Most often the contact is reported as a terry stop, shoplift or trespass by officers.”

The City Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about their charging decisions.

SPD Jails Shoplifters for Thefts as Small as $6.99; Pedersen Unilaterally Installs Bike Board Member; Helmet Law Overturned

1. Seattle police officers took part in a crackdown on retail theft at Target’s downtown Seattle store last week called “Operation New Day,” booking people suspected of shoplifting into the King County jail despite ongoing pandemic-related restrictions that limit booking to people arrested for violent crimes.

On Friday, plainclothes officers from the Seattle Police Department’s Community Response Group, a team that floats between the city’s four precincts to supplement patrol, were working with Target’s loss prevention team to identify people stealing merchandise, flagging them for uniformed officers waiting on the sidewalk outside.

Over the course of the day, officers arrested at least five people. One woman was booked into jail for stealing $6.99 worth of merchandise, while another man was booked for stealing vitamins, baby formula and other merchandise valued at more than $600, according to police reports. Two of the people arrested had previously spent time in the jail in the past year for misdemeanor assault or weapons offenses, among other charges. All of the people arrested on Friday have since been released from jail, though the woman booked for stealing $6.99 worth of merchandise was later charged with assault for hitting a Target employee—a detail not included in the original arrest report.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, King County Executive Dow Constantine limited booking at King County’s jails to people arrested for assaults, DUIs and firearms violations, and other high-priority offenses, with the goal of reducing the county’s jail population to stem the spread of the virus. However, Constantine allowed the jail to make exceptions when agencies that use the jail, including SPD, can argue convincingly that booking people for nonviolent crimes is necessary to protect public safety.

On Thursday, Constantine told PubliCola that the county has received and approved few requests for exceptions.

“Law enforcement agencies have been judicious about making them,” added Noah Haglund, a spokesman for King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. In order to receive an exemption, a law enforcement agency needs to submit a request before bringing arrestees to the jail. According to Haglund, the City of Seattle requested an exemption before booking the people arrested for shoplifting on Friday. Sergeant Randall Huserik, a spokesman for SPD, the bookings are intended to “deter the suspects” from committing crimes in the future.

2. Next week, the city council will vote to appoint Dr. Douglas Migden, a long-distance recreational cyclist who lives in the Queen Anne neighborhood, to the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board. Council transportation committee chair Alex Pedersen chose Migden for the board unilaterally after a five-month-long recruitment and nomination process in which the bike board interviewed dozens of candidates and ultimately selected land-use planner Anthony Avery for the seat.

Ryan Packer covered Pedersen’s decision to discard the bike board’s choice for the Seattle Bike Blog last week.

According to SBAB co-chair Sarah Udelhofen, the bike board has three top priorities when choosing new board members. They look for candidates with unique biking experiences (such as family cyclists and newer riders); those who offer “perspective from a community that has been underrepresented in or marginalized by the mainstream bike movement”; and people who are familiar with neighborhoods that are underrepresented on the board or that lack safe bike infrastructure. Historically, the mainstream bike movement has been dominated by white, male recreational cyclists who ride in the road.

“These commissions and boards have processes for how they make appointments. They review applications, do interviews, and so it can be frustrating when the folks that they have chosen through community process are not selected. And I understand why folks might feel demoralized when that happens.”—City Councilmember Tammy Morales

Avery did not respond to an email seeking comment on Pedersen’s decision. His LinkedIn page describes him as a member of Cascade Bicycle Club and an advocate against car-oriented streets—positions that put him at odds with some of Pedersen’s stated views on transportation planning. “I plan for people, not cars,” Avery wrote. “If you want to call it a war on cars, that’s fine. Each year over 35,000 Americans are killed by people driving motor vehicles. … In 2021, despite a commitment to Vision Zero, traffic-related deaths in the City of Seattle are on the rise.”

Pedersen advocated against a long-planned protected bike lane along 35th Avenue NE in his district, which former mayor Jenny Durkan killed after business owners complained about the loss of on-street parking spaces. He also opposed bike lanes on Eastlake, arguing that cyclists could simply veer back and forth between parallel “greenways” located on nearby streets. And before he was elected in 2019, Pedersen argued against the Move Seattle levy, among other reasons, because it funded safe bike lanes, which Pedersen argued are useless for “senior citizens, the disabled, single parents, parents of young children without transportation to school, and those juggling multiple jobs .”

After the city council discussed Migden’s appointment earlier this week, Councilmember Tammy Morales noted pointedly, “These commissions and boards have processes for how they make appointments. They review applications, do interviews, and so it can be frustrating when the folks that they have chosen through community process are not selected. And I understand why folks might feel demoralized when that happens.”

Udelhofen said the bike board plans “to be even more proactive with our timeline” for the next open seat, and will “start the process even earlier to ensure there is ample time for our recommended candidates to be reviewed, discussed, and approved in time for the 9/1/22 term start date.” She said that although the bike board is “disappointed with the lack of transparency around the selection and approval process, we have no qualms about Dr. Midgen’s qualifications for serving on SBAB” and look forward to his participation on the board.

3. The King County Board of Health voted on Thursday to repeal the county’s bicycle helmet requirement, responding to a push from bicycle advocates and civil liberties groups who pointed to data showing that police enforcing the law disproportionately targeted people of color and homeless people.

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