California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday signed 10 bipartisan bills aimed at reducing robbery and property crimes and increasing penalties for repeat offenders and those who run professional resale schemes.
The Democratic governor was joined by a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers, business leaders and local officials at a Home Depot store in San Jose.
“Let me be clear: this is the most significant bill addressing property crime in California’s modern history,” Gov. Newsom said Friday. “I thank the bipartisan legislators, retail partners and advocates for putting public safety over politics. While some have sought to return to the ineffective and costly policies of the past, these new laws show a better way forward — providing meaningful tools that make our communities safer and help law enforcement apprehend and hold criminals accountable.”
This comes as Democratic leaders are taking a tough stance on crime while urging voters to reject Proposition 36, a bill that would create felonies for repeat shoplifters and some drug-related crimes and increase penalties for those crimes.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday signed 10 bipartisan bills aimed at reducing robbery and property crimes. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Large-scale robberies, in which groups of people break into stores and steal merchandise in public, have become a major problem in California and other states in recent years. Many of the incidents have been recorded on video and posted to the Internet, drawing national attention to the rise in retail theft in California.
The law would allow prosecutors to add up the value of items stolen from different victims in different counties to help meet the threshold for grand theft charges, allowing for tougher penalties for burglary and large-scale resale crimes.
“This gets to the heart of the issue and it’s done in a thoughtful and smart way,” Governor Newsom said of the bill. “This is the real deal.”
The bill received bipartisan support in Congress, but some progressive Democrats did not vote for it due to concerns that parts of the bill were too punitive.
The bill also aims to address cargo theft, close legal loopholes to make it easier to prosecute auto thefts whether the vehicle was locked or not, and requires marketplaces like eBay to start collecting bank account numbers and taxpayer identification numbers from high-volume sellers.
One measure could also allow retailers to obtain restraining orders against people convicted of shoplifting.
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The bill received bipartisan support in Congress, but some progressive Democrats did not vote for it due to concerns that parts of the bill were too punitive. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“We know that retail theft, big and small, has serious consequences, both physical and financial,” said state Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Democrat who authored the online marketplace bill, “and we know that we must take appropriate steps to deter theft without returning to the days of mass incarceration.”
Earlier this year, Governor Newsom and other state Democrats tried unsuccessfully for months to remove the crime-fighting Proposition 36 from the November ballot. Democrats worried the bill would unfairly criminalize low-income people and those with drug problems, rather than targeting the masterminds who hire large groups of people to steal goods and resell them online.
Governor Newsom said Friday that the ballot measure would be a “devastating setback” for California, and likened it to the ongoing War on Drugs, which aims to combat illegal drug use with tougher penalties and longer prison sentences for drug offenders.
“This effort is a throwback to the 1980s War on Drugs,” he said. “Mass incarceration.”
Crime issues have seemed harder for state Democrats to address in recent years, as many of them have pushed progressive policies over the past decade to reduce prison and jail populations and invest in rehabilitation programs.
Meanwhile, the Newsom administration has spent $267 million to help local law enforcement increase patrols, buy surveillance equipment and increase prosecutions of criminals.
Newsom said Proposition 36 would be a “devastating setback” for California. (Don Campbell/Herald Palladium via The Associated Press)
The issue has come to a boiling point this year amid growing criticism from Republicans and law enforcement, who point to viral videos of grand thefts in which groups of people brazenly break into stores and steal merchandise in plain sight. Voters across the state are also outraged by what they see as a lawless zone, plagued by retail crime and drug abuse, even as California grapples with a homeless problem.
The California Retailers Association said it’s difficult to quantify California’s retail crime problem because many stores don’t share data, but anti-crime advocates point to big-box store closures and plexiglass coverings on items like deodorant and toothpaste as evidence the problem has become a crisis.
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Shoplifting has steadily increased in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area from 2021 to 2022, according to a study by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
The California Highway Patrol has recovered $45 million worth of stolen property and made nearly 3,000 arrests since 2019.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
