The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, in an effort to get ahead of the retail theft curve that accompanies every holiday gift buying season but which has grown particularly acute in recent years, intensified its anti-shoplifting program in Rancho Cucamonga earlier this year.
With its Victoria Gardens shopping venue, Rancho Cucamonga for more than a decade has made a bid to become the epicenter of San Bernardino County commercial activity, facing off against The Shoppes at The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, in an effort to get ahead of the retail theft curve that accompanies every holiday gift buying season but which has grown particularly acute in recent years, intensified its anti-shoplifting program in Rancho Cucamonga earlier this year.
With its Victoria Gardens shopping venue, Rancho Cucamonga for more than a decade has made a bid to become the epicenter of San Bernardino County commercial activity, facing off against The Shoppes at Chino Hills, The Mills in Ontario, the Outlets at Barstow in Lenwood off the 15 Freeway, the Mall of Victor Valley and Montclair Place, the vestige of the once grandly successful Montclair Plaza. As a consequence, the sheriff’s department, which serves as the contract police department with Rancho Cucamonga, chose that city to make its most determined statement yet to those who have signed on to two of the fastest-growing trends in criminal activity throughout the country – swarm thefts and smash and grab robberies.
In a typical swarm theft, a significant number of participants – a dozen or more and, in some, multiple dozens or scores of of thieves – will enter a business and spend several minutes collecting and/or pocketing merchandise and then, upon a prearranged signal, walk out en masse without paying for any of it. By their sheer numbers, they overwhelm the clerks or store personnel and their ability to prevent what is occurring.
Smash and grab robberies likewise involve multiple participants, but usually far fewer than in a swarm theft scenario. Such actions similarly involve a rush and entail, at the very least, implied violence which often extends to actual violence, with an intentional display of destruction or mayhem. A key element is the distraction or disabling of any form of security or theft preventative measures. This can involve the brandishing of weapons – usually firearms – or the employment of chemical agents such as bear spray, pepper spray or mace against any security guards, the use of hammers or heavy metal rods in smashing glass display or containment cases, all carried out rapidly and with aggression. In effectuating such a thefts, perpetrators are not reluctant to make noise or conspicuously inflict damage on property to accentuate the intimidation effect. Upscale stores featuring expensive items and valuable commodities are popular smash and grab robbery targets.
Upon the conclusion of such criminal operations, the perpetrators will generally hastily flee the scene, often in a stolen vehicle or one in which identifying features such as license plates or window emblems or placards have been altered or substituted and which can be removed or interchanged.
Such crimes spiked in the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, law enforcement entities and professional security experts maintained that the pandemic was not a driving factor in the uptick in such crimes, but it seems obvious to most observers that the ubiquity of public masking in which all customers were wearing face masks created a situation which allowed perpetrators to make entrance into retail establishments or malls with their faces and outward identities obscured without alarming or putting those agents which could combat the thefts on alert, allowing the criminal activity to manifest quickly and without much prospect of stopping it before its completion and those who have carried it off have made their exodus.
With COVID-19 variants on the rise and the Christmas shopping season just around the corner, there is a prospect of a resurgence or intensification of such theft. Moreover, while San Bernardino County, like most other areas outside the footprint of metropolitan/inner city districts, has not been absolutely immune from such activity, the vast majority of swarm theft and smash and grab robberies have plagued stores in major US cities, where mobs of thieves can pull off brazen nighttime robberies and rapidly meld into the general population after making off with valuable merchandise.
This summer, there were events in Southern California to suggest that the pattern of such thefts, which had for the most part confined themselves to Los Angeles and its greater metropolitan area, was moving eastward and that the perpetrators were boldly willing to operate in broad daylight.
On Thursday June 29, at roughly 3 p.m., a vehicle parked immediately in front of the Diamond Center located at 147 Yale Avenue in the Claremont Village, roughly one mile distant from the Los Angeles County/San Bernardino County border, at which point three individuals wearing ski masks, gloves, and hooded sweatshirts emerged while the driver remained behind the wheel. The trio went into the jewelry store, shattered numerous display cases with hammers before taking as much jewelry as they could quickly gather and then quickly piled into the car, which immediately headed a short distance west on Second Avenue to Indian Hill Boulevard before driving south to the 10 Freeway and east, back toward Los Angeles. A similar caper was pulled in La Verne nearly four weeks later.
The June 29 theft replicated much of what had occurred in January 2022 during a similar but slightly differently choreographed smash and grab which took place two blocks further north on Yale Avenue at 4C’s Finecraft Jewelry.
In that crime, two of the three suspects who came into the shop sprayed employees with mace. While the employees were incapacitated, the thieves smashed display cases and, acting somewhat more methodically than in this year’s Diamond Center robbery, seized numerous pieces of jewelry and then fled further north on Yale to their getaway vehicle. Subsequently, the perpetrators of that caper were caught.
Those engaging in larceny generally and in particular involving forceful theft in retail establishments are doing so in part because of the relatively weak law enforcement and prosecutorial activity of authorities with regard to such crimes.
One quoted statistic relating to swarm theft and smash and grab robbery is that during the official period defined as the pandemic, larceny and theft increased by 88 percent. In recent times, following the official end of the pandemic, authorities are seeing an amalgamation of the swarm thefts and smash and grab techniques, usually involving perpetrators entering stores wearing masks or hoods or both, making it difficult to identify them even when their images are captured on security videos, followed by aggressive tactics to obtain merchandise, with the perpetrators rapidly fleeing.
Statistically, those who have been caught and arrested for this type of activity have preexisting criminal records. At least some of those collared have indicated they were not deterred by the law because they believe there is little chance they will be caught and if they are, the consequences are not that onerous.
While such crimes are not high on law enforcement’s priority list elsewhere, in San Bernardino County the sheriff’s office this summer began to target such activity to ward off further commercial theft in the region.
The place the department made its most conspicuous show of the determination to make San Bernardino County inhospitable to those who would ply their larcenous trade was Rancho Cucamonga.
Starting on July 27 and running through November 3, the department assigned a concerted number of deputies to what it termed its retail theft team, which focused on T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods, Costco, Victoria’s Secret, Ulta, Sephora, Target, Macy’s, Lululemon, Walmart, Zumiez and Home Depot. The involved deputies focused their vigilance in concentrated enforcement operations that went beyond their normal regular patrols of the city’s commercial districts. The effort involved coordination with the various retail outlets’ security personnel, loss prevention specialists and store managers. Store employees were encouraged to communicate with the deputies in real time to nab perpetrators in the act.
A review of the operation’s results show that a significant number of thieves targeting the local commercial establishments are parts of organized networks engaged in retail crime across Southern California. The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office is following up on the arrests that were made. This includes the prosecution of 34 individuals picked up during the course of five demarcated operations over the course of more than three months. Those arrested were taken in for burglary, robbery, grand theft and petty theft involving merchandise worth at least $50,000 that has been recovered.
-Mark Gutglueck