Police in a Southern California city used the Mother’s Day arrest of a shoplifter to highlight its own tough stance on theft, while also commenting on lax attitudes toward retail crime in the Golden State.
Seal Beach police posted an Instagram photo of a theft suspect nabbed on suspicion of stealing flowers, and penned a lengthy caption saying its harsher approach to shoplifting differs from other California cities where the crime is “so normalized that it’s barely reported, let alone prosecuted.”
“We decided that allowing criminals to steal without consequence wasn’t just bad policy—it was a betrayal of the residents and businesses we swore to protect,” Seal Beach police wrote Monday on social media. “That’s why, unlike in some counties, when you commit theft in Seal Beach, you don’t get a ticket or a warning. **You go to jail.**”
The police department, based in Orange County, said its “zero tolerance” policy was inspired by the brazen retail theft seen throughout the state following the COVID-19 pandemic.
California turned into a haven for rampant shoplifting after the coronavirus lockdowns wound down.
Videos of the “flash mob” robberies in which hordes of thieves raided high-end businesses, along with frequent reports of a lone vagrant clearing a store shelf and moseying away, quickly became synonymous with the state’s permissive theft laws.
The Public Policy Institute of California reported that shoplifting jumped 28% statewide between 2019 and 2023.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, sent billions of dollars to police departments and prosecutors’ offices that same year to help them crack down on the “shameless criminals,” mainly in the hard-hit Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.
More definitive changes came last fall when voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 36, a ballot measure to lower the felony threshold for theft back to $450.
Approval for the measure ended a 10-year experiment in which California raised the felony threshold to $950 — a law change that law enforcement blamed for the explosion in shoplifting and smash-and-grab thefts.
The measure’s opponents said it would pack prisons with people who only committed minor offenses, but Seal Beach police said those arguments ignore how the aggressive theft puts store employees and shoppers in dangerous situations.
“Every time we make an arrest for theft, there’s a corner of social media that rushes in to justify it. They say it’s ‘just a big corporation,’ or that the thief ‘probably needed it,’” Seal Beach police wrote. “But no one ever considers the cashier who had to confront the thief, or the family who pays more for groceries next month because of what walked out the door unpaid.”
“Let’s be clear: this isn’t activism. This isn’t civil disobedience. It’s criminal behavior — and when you defend it, you’re not standing up for the vulnerable,” the department continued.
