A Democratic county supervisor from San Mateo, Calif., condemned state laws that have proven ineffective in the face of an “epidemic of organized retail theft.”
“Enough is enough! All this retail theft. All this sort of crime. Enough is enough. We really need to look at state laws. What we have in place right now is not working,” David Canepa told NBC Bay Area on Tuesday. “We can’t go on like this.”
The San Mateo county supervisor has become increasingly outspoken about the shortcomings of Proposition 47 (popularly known as Prop. 47), which passed in 2014 and made retail thefts under $950 a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
“I had supported Proposition 47, which basically said you wouldn’t prosecute — the crimes were much different at the level of up to $950. I thought it was a good idea at the time because I thought, we need to give people an opportunity, we need to give people a chance,” Canepa told the local news affiliate.
“I made a mistake, it was a big mistake, and you have to acknowledge your mistake,” the supervisor added. “By doing this, what we’ve done is we’re letting people take thousands and thousands of dollars. And why should people be subjugated?”
Prop. 47 was co-written by then-San Francisco DA George Gascón who, in 2020, became the district attorney of Los Angeles. In 2018, Gascón maintained that he was “proud” to have been a part of drafting the bill and denounced “critics [who] have attempted to blame Prop. 47 for every social ill short of global warming. It’s long past time to separate fact from fiction.”
While Canepa was initially sympathetic to the push to decriminalize retail thefts, the normalization of robberies in broad daylight across the country has changed his mind. According to the National Retail Federation, retail theft amounted to nearly $100 billion last year alone. “Every day we get calls, emails, and comments from people who are tired of seeing this happen,” the president of the California Retailers Association told the NBC affiliate.
“We need that other tool in the toolbox which is to make policy changes so the repeat offenders, the ones going in with this petty theft. If they’re a habitual shoplifter, they’re going to be held accountable,” the official added.
Canepa agreed: “We [need to] hold the people who commit these crimes accountable. . . . The only way we can do that is through adjusting state law. That’s what’s hamstringing us.”
Canepa vowed on Tuesday to introduce legislation and form a task force within San Mateo County to “combat these organized theft rings to enhance public safety and protect the economy.”
“Whatever we’re doing now to combat the epidemic of organized retail theft is not working. $30 billion lost to national retail theft is an absolute outrage! The fear of organized retail theft is driving people away from our beloved shopping centers,” he wrote above his pledge on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter.