Even with the intensification of the effort by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol and other local law enforcement agencies clamp down on so-called swarm robberies and smash & grab robberie, in particular as the holiday shopping season is heading toward it zenith, aggressive retail theft in Redlands at its jewelry stores has remained undeterred.
While thieves since time immemorial have devised creative ways to pursue their larcenous inclination, during the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, coordinated thefts spiked. That approach to property crime has become a permanent phenomenon, with upticks when stores or shopping malls are crowded.
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.
An element in those crimes was 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. In recent weeks and months, with the cold and flu season now upon us, many people have again taken to wearing masks in public.
In 2023, 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 had grown particularly acute in the early 2020s, intensified its anti-shoplifting program at the Victoria Gardens Mall in Rancho Cucamonga, which is with the Victor Valley Mall in Victorville, the Shoppes in Chino Hills and the Outlets at Barstow in Lenwood one of the major retail venues patrolled by department.
This year, in what has been dubbed “Operation Smash and Grab” has built on the crime prevention model first explored in Rancho Cucamonga and been expanded to include the Highway Patrol, municipal police departments, the district attorney’s office, store security employees, retail industry loss prevention professionals and outside investigators are working not just Victoria Gardens but the Shoppes at Chino Hills, The Mills in Ontario, the Outlets at Barstow in Lenwood off the 15 Freeway, the Mall of Victor Valley, Montclair Place, the Inland Center Mall in San Bernardino and the Mountain Grove and Citrus Plaza shopping malls in Redlands.
Operation Smash & Grab involves a strategy of sheriff’s personnel and police officers, some uniformed and some undercover being present in sufficient numbers in retail districts and within the malls and stores themselves to discourage theft and interrupt crimes in progress and respond to reports of the same rapidly. In coordinating with the the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, the law enforcement officers and retail security personnel will utilize the opportunity presented by the passage of Proposition 36 on November 5 to discontinue the past practice of merely citing offenders and instead booking them into jail under substantial bail, with designations going a separate team of investigators to look into the activity of the arrestees, obtaining search warrants where appropriate to determine if they have on their premises other stolen items.
Proposition 36 undid the restriction against filing felony charges on any theft cases which involved property valued at less than $950. A ploy that has been used by some thieves in recent years is to steal merchandise that in total value amounts to less than the $950 threshold. Felony charges can now be applied to those who have stolen items valued below $950 if they have two prior theft convictions.
The sheriff’s department is also giving focus to how thieves are arriving at their target locations and how they are making their getaway. This entails not just patrol of mall parking lots, but employing automated license readers, programmed to detect stolen vehicles, often used in such thefts, and vehicles that may have been used in other such robberies.
Despite the stepped up effort with Operation Smash & Grab, there yet remains a major problem in a few isolated areas of San Bernardino County where there are concentrations of either jewelry stores or other types of 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.
This type of crime has been recurrent, the Sentinel has learned, in Redlands, which is host to some of San Bernardino County’s most affluent neighborhoods. Consequently, Redlands has a number of jewelry stores as well as venues that feature high-end designer products such as Bottega Venetta, Saint Laurent, Gucci, Hermès, Chanel, Rabanne, Li Bingbing, Louis Vuitton, Mouawad and the like. These have been targeted for smash & grab as well as sudden swarm attacks.
There is concern that these roving criminals will go to other areas where there are concentrations of stores vulnerable to such attacks. Ironically, one such place is in lower San Bernardino, which is not considered to be an affluent area whatsoever. Nevertheless, the Inland Center Mall features no fewer than eight jewelry stores land a jewelry repair shop. The mall does have a security office and a police department satellite station, which is manned, generally, by a single officer.
Concern extends to action that might be taken by law enforcement officers in reaction to swarm and/or smash & grab robberies, including gunfire where there are large numbers of bystanders present.