Governor Newsom has signed new legislation to further crack down on property and retail crime at the behest of local lawmakers including Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Hollywood).
The new laws provide tougher criminal penalties for repeat offenders and additional tools for felony prosecutions.
The California Retail Theft Reduction Act cleared both houses of the Legislature and was signed last week. Also known as AB 2943, it’s been described as a pivotal bipartisan legislative package aimed at curbing retail crime.
“Let’s be clear, this is the most significant legislation to address property crime in modern California history. I thank the bipartisan group of lawmakers, our retail partners, and advocates for putting public safety over politics. While some try to take us back to ineffective and costly policies of the past, these new laws present a better way forward — making our communities safer and providing meaningful tools to help law enforcement arrest criminals and hold them accountable,” said Governor Gavin Newsom in a statement.
Authored by Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Assemblymember Zbur, the bill is part of a multi-bill package designed to address retail crime and related thefts. The Select Committee on Retail Theft, chaired by Zbur and including Principal Coauthors Assemblymembers Juan Alanis, Matt Haney, Liz Ortega, Blanca Pacheco, Cottie Petrie-Norris and Pilar Schiavo, has been key in pushing this legislation forward.
“I [was] getting approached by businesses and property owners in my district, telling me that they were very worried about the levels of retail theft and how much it had grown … and my district is one that’s harder hit than others in the state, in Hollywood in particular,” Zbur told the Daily Press.
The bill places great emphasis on stopping organized crime rings that are harming our communities. It does this by creating a new crime targeting “serial” retail thieves, with a penalty of up to three years behind bars for possession of stolen property with intent to resell. It also specifies that the value of thefts from different victims can be aggregated to reach the threshold for grand theft.
Moreover, the bill helps get at the root cause of theft by expanding the use of diversion and rehabilitative programs like drug court through increased supervision for shoplifting and petty theft. It also expands tools for police to arrest for shoplifting based on a witness’ sworn statement or video footage of the crime.
Finally, the bill extends the ability of police to keep repeat offenders, together with those committing organized retail crime, in custody and it protects businesses and retailers that report retail crime by ensuring they will not have “nuisance actions” brought against them simply for doing so.
Zbur says that getting the bill this far has not been without its challenges. “[There are] some members of the legislature who basically have not experienced it as much in their district and didn’t think it was that much of a problem,” he said, adding, “Because the data on this is so sparse and spotty, people were saying, ‘Well, the data doesn’t justify us doing something.’”
He explains that it was essential to be data driven, in order to properly understand the circumstances. “And then the other constraint was the fact that we had Prop 47, which meant there were some things that we could do legislatively, but some things required going to the ballot,” Zbur says.
Thankfully though, the team behind this bill were able to come up with a legitimate work-around.
“We could solve retail theft [in a way] that did not require us to go to the ballot. We could do things within, within our legislative authority, that were equivalent to some things that you could do to the ballot,” he says.
Zbur himself is no stranger to this sort of legislation. A former Executive Director of Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, he worked to advance civil rights and social justice for the diverse communities to which LGBTQ+ people belong, including communities of color, communities of faith, immigrants, women and people living with HIV.
He also fought to address climate change with urgency as an environmental lawyer and 20-year board member of the California League of Conservation Voters, now renamed California Environmental Voters and was its president for six years
“I understand the legislative process. I have deeper relationships with existing members of the legislature, because I’d been working with them [for] so long before I got here. And then the speaker put me in the role of leading this, because he trusted me. I’m his Democratic Caucus Chair. I’m part of his key leadership team. And and then on top of that, I have very good working relationships with the folks in the governor’s office,” he says.
“Probably over 80% of the retail theft that’s occurring in the Los Angeles region is actually happening through these crime rings … What the Governor’s proposal, which is embedded in my bill, focuses on, is giving law enforcement the tools and prosecutors the tools to really target these repeated thieves,” Zbur says.
“If we can tackle these crime rings, a big chunk of the retail theft is taken off the table. And I think the public doesn’t really understand that … Our bill also embraces diversion and rehabilitation programs and so it’s twofold,” he says, adding, “What has an impact is the likelihood that you’re going to get caught, and once you’re caught, the likelihood of being convicted of something and having a meaningful impact. So people actually think they’re going to have to go to prison for one or two years
“Think about it in the same way that you do traffic violations. I mean, people generally comply with our traffic laws and we’re not putting people in prison for 20 years for doing certain things … The reason why people comply is because we have enough enforcement so people understand that if you have a pattern of driving in a way that violates the law, you’re going to get caught. And once you do, there’s a consequence.”
The California Retail Theft Reduction Act takes effect January 1, 2025.
scott@smdp.com
