There is concern that the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office may have engaged in inadequate follow-up after the Redlands Police Department’s Community Engagement Team collared two women believed to be key members of a regional retail theft ring.
On January 30, officers with the Redlands Police Department blanketed the Mountain Grove and Citrus Plaza shopping centers in a coordinated effort that also involved store employees, store security/loss prevention officers and retail theft investigators.
With both uniformed public law enforcement and undercover private personnel monitoring the malls in a casual manner, they were able to nab 11 individuals and recover of $7,600 in stolen merchandise in and around several stores, including Target, Kay Jewelers, Burlington, Lane Bryant, Sephora, Ross, Designer Shoe Warehouse, Old Navy, Victoria’s Secret, TJ Maxx, Famous Footwear, Ulta, World Market, Banana Republic, Kohls, Gap, and BevMo.
Among those 11 were two in particular, whose reputation for thievery proceeded them. One of these was Maria Isabel Torres, 28 of Los Angeles, who was recognized from photos taken of her during the commission of similar acts of larceny throughout Southern California in retail establishments in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside County as well as her believed affiliation with others whose thefts range from simple shoplifting such as the type she engages in to more aggressive acts, some of which involve violence and aggressive destruction as both a means of effectuating the theft and as a diversion. Torres, who had earlier that day been identified as having looted a Nordstrom Rack in Riverside in broad daylight and thereafter swiftly making a getaway, was recognized by members of the retail theft prevention team virtually as soon as she came into the Ross store in the Mountain Grove center. The theft-prevention team had been alerted by a Nordstroms loss prevention agent with an accurate description of how Torres was dressed. That information was followed up with a security camera photo of Torres at the Riverside location. Upon surveilling Torres for more than ten minutes, satisfying themselves as to her identity and observing her in action and that she was about to dash off, members of the community engagement team moved quickly to take her into custody. Arrested with her was Maria Isabel Hernandez, 53 and also of Los Angeles, who acted as a lookout while Torres filled a suitcase with merchandise shed did not pay for and then left the store. The pair communicated via Bluetooth, while Hernandez observed her partners from various angles and distances as much as 75 feet away. Hernandez did not detect any of the community engagement team in the area.

Torres had made it to her van when Redlands police officers confronted her. In the van, they discovered $3,400 worth of merchandise from the Ross store and items valued at $2,600 which she had stolen from the Riverside Nordstrom Rack.
In recent months throughout San Bernardino County, authorities have stepped up the effort to clamp down on so-called retail theft, including both passive shoplifting and more active and violent instances of swarm robberies and smash & grab robberies. Such operations intensified during the holiday shopping season but such enforcement has carried over through January and is yet taking place this month.
In Redlands, the community engagement team routinely conducts operations to hold retail theft in check. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, occasionally in coordination with the California Highway Patrol and local municipal police departments last year initiated Operation Smash & Grab, which 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.
More recently, in coordinating with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, the law enforcement officers and retail security personnel have sought to utilize the opportunity presented by the passage of Proposition 36 on November 5, 2024 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.
In the aftermath of the 2014 passage of Proposition 47, which prohibited the filing of felony charges on the theft of property valued at less than $950, shoplifting and retail theft in general escalated in California. Over the years and then with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in which the wearing of masks in public became commonplace, thieves grew bolder still, engaging in swarm theft or smash & grab robberies.
In a typical swarm theft, a significant number of participants – a dozen or more and, in some, multiple dozens or scores 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 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.
Last year, in what was dubbed “Operation Smash and Grab,” a crime prevention model was first explored in Rancho Cucamonga by the sheriff’s department at the Victoria Gardens shpping Venue and was then 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 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.
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 reason to believe that Torres and Hernandez are associated with a number of other “professional” shoplifters and smash & grab artists, known to have carried off multiple capers in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. It is believed that they go into shopping malls a day or several days in advance of a roving gang of thieves to “reconnoiter” the general area, the shopping malls or centers, the retail venues themselves and engage in a smaller scale level of theft to gauge the security in place and the reaction of law enforcement and authorities in general.
Inexplicably, both women were released in short order by the sheriff’s department after their arrests in Redlands. The inmate locater for San Bernardino County indicates that neither woman remains in custody in San Bernardino County. And though it was known at the time of their arrests that they were wanted on crimes committed in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties, they were not relegated to the authorities in those jurisdictions either.
Of note is that another location in San Bernardino County vulnerable to roving criminals is the Inland Center Mall, located in San Bernardino, which is not considered to be an affluent community at all. Nevertheless, the Inland Center Mall features no fewer than eight jewelry stores and a jewelry repair shop, a concentration of stores that can be subject to attack. 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.