It was just a few years ago that you could walk into Home Depot, check out the weed eaters and leaf blowers, make your selection, and take it to the checkout without assistance.

Not anymore.

They are locked in cages.

Do no misunderstand. The Home Depot staff was quick to respond and courteous.

This is about a problem we as Californians, are a little bit too accepting of these days.

Retail theft.

This is clearly not just a Manteca problem.

I was with a friend at the Tracy Walmart three weeks ago. She was looking for a specific hair shampoo.

It  — along with an incredible number of other items in the hair care and cosmetics aisles — were locked behind glass sliding doors.

The shampoo she wanted to buy was $5.99.

The theft rate of the item is so high that Walmart was forced to lock it up and invest employee time to locking and unlocking the displays.

All of this is the direct result of an effort to reduce incarceration and plugging up the judicial system by making thefts from stores of $950 or less punishable by simply issuong a citation.

If criminals aren’t stupid — but some of them are — they simply steal the amount under the threshold. And, if they’re confronted by a store employee, they do not strike or injure them.  Or, if by chance, they are pursued by police, they do not flee.

Those two actions even with the value under $950 elevate the crime from a simple misdemeanor citation. And — depending upon the county the offense occurs in — might actually have consequences.

There are those that defend Proposition 47 — the clearly misguided measure that emboldened retail theft and took it to new levels in California — that pooh-pooh such concerns.

They argue people are irked about massive grab and dash crimes where a group of criminals swarm a store like locusts, clear what they can from shelves, and go on their merry way.

They contend such crimes — including the infamous one where a criminal bicycled into a  CVS store in San Francisco and fills a large garbage bag with all sorts of items before bicycling out — are few and far between.

In the overall scheme of things, they are probably right. They get the attention because they are not the norm but they are getting there.

But what is the norm is what is forcing stores like Home Depot that are at their wits’ end with retail theft to lock down merchandise.

To be clear, proponents of Prop. 47 are right. The measure passed in 2014 reclassified theft offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, including shoplifting, doesn’t mean people can steal up to $950 in goods without consequences.

It’s just  that the consequences are essentially inconsequential as they can’t aggregate a number of different smaller thefts to reach the $950 threshold for a felony.

The felony level is important for one reason, and one reason only. Misdemeanors in California are extremely low priority. There is no time-out behind bars while you post bail.

The one exception to less than $950 theft scores are those that act in concert with other constituting an organized retail theft ring. Now you’re talking felony. That said, those in organized retail theft rings rarely take less than $1,000 in merchandise per store visit

In 2020 and 2021, Home Depot and Walmart in Manteca experienced $5 million theft losses — both reported and not reported to Manteca Police. Another store — Ulta Beauty Supply — lost $200,000.

Retail theft accounted for the lion’s share of the $5.4 million in property losses reported to the MPD in 2021. Of that, 38.14 percent or $2.09 million worth of property was recovered.

Given retailers don’t simply absorb those kinds of losses, the cost of theft is collapsed into the price you pay for goods.

That said, Manteca is one of the few jurisdictions effectively fighting back. And you can thank retiring Police Chief Mike Aguilar for that.

Several years ago, Aguilar, after officers noticed a rising trend in organized retail thefts, embraced a rank-and-file proposal to assign a detective fulltime to such crime. In addition, he has made a pitch for a second detective to be funded in the upcoming budget.

By having a dedicated detective that can be contacted directly by store loss prevention officers and who also networks with nearby departments, Manteca has been able to position itself to be at the locations of retail theft crimes either in advance or within minutes.

Typically, police departments depending upon call volume and dealing with higher priority crime can easily take 15 minutes or more to respond to such calls

The dedicated organized retail crime detective has resulted in a large number of arrests.

Criminals will travel from town-to-town hitting stores often within the same chain. Due to the network Manteca police has established with other departments in the region as well as working with local stores, they are often alerted when such criminals are in the area.

As such Organized retail Crime Detective Dave Brown — along with patrol officers — are often on scene as culprits are leaving stores, are able to stake out stores that are likely to be hit based on criminal activity going on in nearby cities, or relay critical information to other departments that allow then to nab suspects.

The department has also  trained store loss prevention officers to properly fill out crime reports and forward them to the department for more minor shoplifting incidents when they retain individuals caught trying to steal less than $950 in merchandise which makes it a misdemeanor. Those reports are reviewed by Brown.

Brown then forwards those reports to an assistant San Joaquin County district attorney dedicated to prosecuting retail crime.

While critics of online reporting for minor crimes often bemoan the fact an officer doesn’t show up to take their reports in a timely manner if they don’t want to file a report online, doing so with stores has freed up significant time of officers.

That means they are able to devote energy and resources to go after the more egregious offenders

And — as Brown noted — many of those involved in organized retail crime have serious criminal backgrounds running the gamut from murder and drug trafficking to other serious felonies such as assault. That means if they make an arrest they have a high likelihood of getting them off the streets and back into prison.

The department has also trained its own officers on how to better investigate retail crime.

 By being able to focus resources better by freeing up officers and not tying them up with lower level shoplifting reports, the police are able to significantly increase their pursuit of organized retail crime suspects.

By catching them in the act with witnesses, video footage and arresting them on the spot they are able to close the case and deliver to the district attorney everything needed to prosecute offenders and send them to prison.

Manteca has been able to secure a 50 percent reduction in retail crime losses in the last two years.
They also were able to arrest or identify 202 suspects in 2020 and 187 suspects in 2021.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com