During the Los Angeles Police Department’s weekly crime briefings this fall, leaders noted a seemingly disturbing increase in robberies in police divisions like Southwest and Rampart. The figures showed an increase in the number of robberies – even if only on paper.
Upon closer inspection, department data obtained by The Times shows that most of the incidents may have started as shoplifting.
According to LAPD statistics, hundreds of robberies in which a suspect uses force or fear to commit a crime are counted as robberies – even if no weapons were used and no injuries were reported.
It’s a common scenario: a shoplifter, with his arms full of merchandise he hasn’t paid for, rushes for the exit, but the escape is blocked by a security guard. A struggle ensues and the thief knocks over or merely threatens to knock down the guard, leading to a possible misdemeanor charge.
According to department statistics released through a public records request, there were more than 1,200 such incidents across LA in the first week of October. This accounted for approximately 1 in 8 robberies, a slight decrease compared to the same period in 2023.
Some officials question whether the data reflects a shift by business owners toward more aggressive loss prevention strategies, leading to more confrontations in the store with security guards.
Faced with plummeting profit margins, more and more companies — from mom-and-pop stores to major retailers like Target — are making “stopping people at the doorstep” a priority, said LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, who noted that shoplifting is still a problem. crime, although not the serious type that the term “theft” conjures up.
He acknowledged that the broad classification may be clouding the department’s numbers.
“You can do whatever you want as a company, but you’re not necessarily going to get an accurate crime picture,” said Hamilton, who heads the LAPD’s detective bureau.
Shoplifting incidents that escalate are sometimes called Estes robberies, after a legal standard that dates to the early 1980s, when a man named Curtis Estes tried to walk out of a Sears store in Vallejo wearing a down vest and corduroy jacket that he didn’t have. paid. When Estes was confronted by an armed guard in the parking lot, he pulled a knife and threatened to kill the guard before ultimately surrendering.
Estes was convicted of a felony, which was upheld on appeal with the court ruling that “a store employee can be the victim of a robbery even though he is not the owner of the property taken.”
In the decades since, police have used the Estes robbery standard to charge shoplifters with theft, even if they had no weapons. While some incidents may be downgraded to felonies by prosecutors or dismissed for lack of evidence, the LAPD considers every case it refers to as a robbery.
Of the top 10 locations in the city where Estes robberies occurred, the majority occurred at WSS, a Southern California chain formerly known as Warehouse Shoe Sale.
The top location was the company’s store at Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue in Hollywood, where 22 Estes robberies occurred, followed closely by the location near MacArthur Park, where there were 20. Other clusters were reported at a WSS store in the Southwest Division and separately, the FIGat7th shopping center downtown.
A WSS representative on Tuesday referred The Times to the company’s headquarters, which did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Hamilton, the deputy chief, said the department occasionally meets with businesses to discuss emerging crime trends. Retailers such as WSS, he said, will post security guards around their stores to act as a visible deterrent, but can also “harden” themselves against theft by, for example, displaying only one of each pair of shoes.
He added that police typically discourage store employees from physically restraining someone to prevent a nonviolent crime from turning into something more dangerous.
“It definitely concerns me,” he said. “I’ll take a theft of an Estes any day, because when you have an Estes, you’re always at risk for catastrophe.”
Stores can also be held liable if someone is injured or killed, and the risk of expensive legal fees may not justify trying to wrestle a thief to the ground. There have been numerous cases of confrontations that turned deadly, including a high-profile case in 2023 in San Francisco involving a security guard at a local Walgreens shot dead an unarmed man he suspected of shoplifting.
LAPD statistics show that attacks on security personnel have increased over the past five years. On Monday evening in downtown LA, a man suspected of stealing shot and wounded two security guards who accosted him outside the Target store in the FIGat7th mall.
The suspect was arrested a day later after an hours-long standoff with police raiding an apartment in the nearby Westlake District.
Some experts say the private security industry is shifting to a non-confrontational approach, especially to prevent employee injuries and service disruptions.
Loss prevention specialists and security guards are increasingly trained to “observe, identify and document the situation as best they can, not necessarily detain it,” said Geoff Kohl Sr., marketing director for the Security Industry Assn., a trade group. in Maryland.
Establishments such as jewelry stores that sell high-value goods can still take strong action to prevent losses, but Kohl said the continued growth of the billion-dollar private security industry is driven more by the expansion of retail surveillance.
“You’ll probably see fewer and fewer weapons being carried and more reliance on technology,” he said.
The classification of some petty thefts as Estes robberies raises questions about the reliability of the LAPD’s crime statistics. come under strict supervision in recent years.
Within the numbers-obsessed department, crime rates still drive personnel decisions and serve as benchmarks for supervisors, who are still judged largely on their successes and failures in reducing serious crimes — such as homicides, robberies and burglaries — in their divisions.
The LAPD figures are released publicly and also influence public opinion and become fodder for political debate.
Although reliable data is scarce, the perception that retail theft has spiraled out of control statewide led to the passage of Proposition 36 in November, which included stiffer penalties for certain types of thefts and drug crimes.
After a protracted political battle in Sacramento last summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills to address the increase in organized shoplifting, making it easier for police to arrest shoplifters and disrupt larger retail crime rings.
Critics warn that the more punitive approaches could cause more harm than good by rolling back laws aimed at reducing the state’s prison population.
The LAPD has created several task forces to crack down on organized retail theft, occasionally deploying “blitz operations” in which teams of both undercover and uniformed officers are sent to popular shopping areas.
Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant based in New Orleans, said that, aside from homicides and car thefts, most crime categories are notoriously unreliable and prone to underreporting.
Shoplifting in particular is not properly tracked, “which makes it very difficult to say what is an increase and what is an increase in the change in reporting.”
That said, he added, the most reliable data available shows that, with some exceptions, shoplifting rates are lower today than they were before the pandemic began.
“Overall, in Los Angeles, you’re seeing a decrease in both thefts and robberies,” he said.
In addition to potentially skewing the city’s crime rates, subjecting shoplifters to misdemeanor charges also has life-changing consequences, according to longtime attorney Greg Hill.
Instead of being charged with a crime or diverted to treatment, a person could suddenly face years in prison if convicted of a crime that counts as a ‘strike’ – which has major implications for their future employment, housing and educational opportunities, Hill said.
“It’s basically shoplifting at a push,” he says. “And that’s usually because people in loss prevention don’t properly identify themselves and usually don’t wear uniforms, so it’s not obvious to a shoplifter, so it’s someone just grabbing their arm.”