Because Simi Valley borders Los Angeles County, the pleasant suburb makes a convenient target for organized retail theft rings
On April 12, the Simi Valley Police Department (SVPD) received a call from a manager at the CVS store on Alamo Street who said that a group suspected of stealing from another CVS in the area had just exited his store in a white Honda. Shortly after this, police received a call about a shoplifting in progress on the other side of the city at the CVS in Wood Ranch. The suspects matched the description the manager provided. They fled northbound on Madera and entered the 118 highway when officers attempted to pull them over. Police said the suspects, Gabriela Melendez of North Hills, Paoula Martinez-Luna of North Hollywood, Sindy Medina of Van Nuys, and Ruben Cazares of Panorama City, failed to stop and continued toward Los Angeles County until they were finally apprehended at the Stearns off-ramp. SVPD announced the arrests in a release titled, “Another Organized Retail Theft Crew Apprehended in Simi Valley.”
Organized retail theft rings increasingly cross over into Ventura County to hunt for affluent and vulnerable targets. Ongoing crime sprees have prompted big-city retailers to increase security, reduce store hours, lock up items or close stores outright. Taking advantage of lax California shoplifting and sentencing laws, criminals expect little or no punishment if they are caught leaving a store with stolen merchandise on their way out of a county.
Just two weeks before the above incident, SVPD released a statement titled, “Yup, You Guessed It … Another Organized Retail Theft Crew Caught!” Officers had responded to a reported shoplifting in progress at Walmart on Cochran, where an employee said a female walked out with a cart full of merchandise without paying. Police say the woman left in a vehicle with three other females and $1,000 in stolen goods.
The quartet was pulled over at Kuehner on the 118, one stop shy of Los Angeles County. Michelle Jackson from Los Angeles, Brittany Miller from Los Angeles, Marshawna Montgomery from Los Angeles, and Tameka Land from Long Beach were booked for conspiracy to commit a crime and organized retail theft. Jackson had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear on a previous shoplifting charge.
Two days earlier, SVPD announced, “Yet another suspect from out of town arrested for shoplifting.” This time, $1,300 worth of cosmetics was stolen from the CVS store on Cochran. The suspect was identified only as Wibisono, 47, of San Gabriel, who was arrested for resisting arrest and grand theft.
Waves of retail theft are not plaguing only Simi Valley. When Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff released the 2022 county crime statistics in February, he noted that organized retail theft, along with fentanyl dealing, catalytic converter thefts, and residential burglaries by crews of robbers, “continue to be the main cause[s] of our property crimes in Ventura County.”
The fact that these crews feel comfortable stealing catalytic converters, staging brazen daylight home burglaries and performing smash-and-grab robberies in Ventura County indicates that whatever protections Ventura County had from big-city crime in the past now seem to be evaporating.
“Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff noted that organized retail theft, along with fentanyl dealing, catalytic converter thefts, and residential burglaries by crews of robbers, ‘continue to be the main cause[s] of our property crimes in Ventura County.’”
One culprit could be Proposition 47, which was passed by 60 percent of voters in 2014. It aimed to reduce the prison population by decriminalizing drug possession and reducing thefts of less than $950 to misdemeanors with a maximum penalty of six months in jail. Prop. 47 was supported by then-Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, then-San Francisco district attorney George Gascon, the ACLU, an assortment of Hollywood celebrities and moguls, and even Republicans Newt Gingrich and Rand Paul.
That same year, as the Guardian previously reported, Chile became the first South American country admitted to the Visa Waiver Program, which permits its citizens to stay up to 90 days in the U.S. without a visa. Three years later, Senate Bill 54 prohibited police from sharing information about suspects with federal immigration authorities, leading directly to the rise of South American Theft Groups (SATG), which now target luxurious homes around Ventura County and elsewhere. Stolen items are sold at a discount or shipped internationally, according to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.
In addition to stealing from residences, these SATG criminals also prey on retailers. In June 2022, three Chileans were sentenced for organized retail theft for stealing $2,500 worth of merchandise from Macy’s in Thousand Oaks. They were Esperanza Venejas, 25, Hugo Perez Martinez, 35, and a minor. A fourth suspect was not apprehended. The Ventura County district attorney’s office said all were suspected SATG members. Pursuant to Prop. 47, Martinez and Venejas were sentenced to 270 days in Ventura County jail and two years of probation. A warrant is currently out for Venejas, whose whereabouts are unknown.
To make it harder for Ventura County police officers and deputies in their policing of theft rings, the officers may take a disproportionate hit to their “RIPA score” (Racial and Identity Profiling) if they pull over or arrest a suspect from outside of Ventura County. This puts their advancement and promotion at risk. The reason: RIPA assumes there is a bias if an officer disproportionately pulls over a certain race relative to the community his department serves. It doesn’t take into consideration the makeup of the community the suspect came from, only where he is stopped or arrested. Suppose suspects frequently come from counties where that particular race is a larger makeup of the population than it is in Ventura County, and they come to Ventura County in numbers proportionate to their home county. In that case, simple mathematics says proactive officers will stop members of that race more often. If that race is uncommon in the officer’s area, then it will look, according to RIPA scores, like he is targeting the residents of that race in his community because the numerator will be inflated relative to the denominator.
“[Theft] crews feel comfortable stealing catalytic converters, staging brazen daylight home burglaries and performing smash-and-grab robberies in Ventura County, indicating that whatever protections Ventura County had from big-city crime in the past now seem to be evaporating.”
This perverse incentive discourages proactive policing, one of the protective barriers that has kept Ventura County safer than Los Angeles County.
Increases in crime directly impact the quality of life. Residents in big cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco are already inconvenienced by a shrinking number of stores, higher prices due to increased costs, and the fact that even low-value items are now locked away. Ventura County is trending in the same direction due to laws encouraging criminal behavior and handcuffing police.
