New Rules in California Are Meant to Cut Down on Shoplifting, Car Theft, and Smash-and-grab Crimes

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of 10 bills from both parties that aim to crack down on smash-and-grab thefts and property crimes. These bills make it easier to go after repeat shoplifters and car thieves and make it more expensive for people who run professional reselling schemes.

The move comes as the Democratic leadership tries to show that they are tough enough on crime while also trying to get people to vote against a ballot measure that would make terms even harsher for people who steal from stores or use drugs more than once.

Shoplifting has become a bigger problem, but in California and other places, smash-and-grab thefts—in which groups of people break into shops and take goods while they’re not being watched—have become a crisis. The problem of retail theft in the state has gotten a lot of attention because of crimes like these, which are often caught on video and shared on social media.

The most important changes to stop store theft in years are in the bill, the Democratic governor said. It lets police use the value of goods stolen from multiple victims to come up with harsher punishments and arrest shoplifters based on video footage or comments from witnesses.

Newsom said of the package, “This gets to the heart of the matter and does so thoughtfully and wisely.” “This is the real deal.”

The plan had support from both parties in the legislature, but some progressive Democrats did not vote for it because they thought some of the measures were too harsh.

The laws also make it harder to steal cargo, close a legal loophole that made it easier to charge auto thieves and require marketplaces like eBay and Nextdoor to start getting bank account and tax ID numbers from sellers who do a lot of business. One of the bills also lets stores get protection orders against shoplifters who have been convicted.

We know that shoplifting has big and small health and financial effects, said state Sen. Nancy Skinner on Friday, who wrote one of the bills. “And we know we need to do what we need to do to stop it without going back to the days of putting a lot of people in jail.”

Democratic lawmakers, led by Newsom, fought hard earlier this year but failed to keep a tougher-on-crime proposal off the November ballot. Proposition 36, on the ballot, would make it a crime to shoplift more than once and for some drug offenses. Democrats were worried that the bill would get more people with low incomes and drug problems in jail than it would target the people who hire big groups of people to steal goods to sell online. Instead, lawmakers’ bill would make it easier for prosecutors to charge multiple thefts that happened in different places as a single felony. It would also make the fines harsher for smash-and-grabs and large-scale reselling operations.

In June, Newsom even suggested putting a different measure on the ballot, but the next day he pulled the idea. Prop 36 has the support of a group of district attorneys, companies, and some local leaders, like San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

In a San Jose Home Depot store, Newsom spoke with a group of state politicians, business leaders, and local officials from both parties. They told him that the ballot measure would be “a devastating setback” for California. Last month, Newsom said he would fight the bill.

“That plan is about going back to the drug war in the 1980s,” he said. “It’s about locking up a lot of people.”

In recent years, it has become harder for California Democrats to figure out how to deal with crime. This is because many of them have spent the last ten years pushing for progressive policies to reduce the number of people in jails and bars and increase funding for rehabilitation programs. Not only that, but Newsom’s government has also given $267 million to assist dozens of local police departments in increasing patrols, purchasing monitoring gear, and charging more criminals.

This year, the problem reached a boiling point as Republicans and police officers voiced more and more criticism. They point to videos that went viral of large-scale thefts in which groups of people rush into stores and take goods while no one is looking. People across the state are also angry about what they see as an unlawful California where drug abuse and shop crimes are common while the state struggles with a housing crisis.

Some Democrats went against their party’s leadership and said they backed Proposition 36, which is a tough-on-crime plan. This was because the issue could even change the makeup and control of Congress.

California doesn’t have a lot of local crime data, so it’s hard to say how bad the problem is. However, many people say that the fact that big stores have closed and common items like toothpaste are locked behind plastic is proof of a crisis. The California Retailers Association said it’s hard to put a number on the problem in California because a lot of shops don’t share their information.

A study by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that between 2021 and 2022, shoplifting steadily rose in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. The attorney general of the state and other experts said that California’s crime rates are still low compared to how high they were many years ago.

Since 2019, the California Highway Patrol has arrested almost 3,000 people and found $45 million worth of stolen goods.