City of Thieves
The New Yorker|March 25, 2024
In L.A., cops battle crime rings that steal everything from purses to power tools.
By Paige Williams. Photograph by Philip Montgomery
City of Thieves

The California Highway Patrolhas recovered more than thirty-eight million dollars' worth of hot merchandise.

A dozen detectives from the California Highway Patrol gathered in a Los Angeles-area parking lot the other morning for an operational briefing. In about twenty minutes, they would drive to a nearby Home Depot, where customers were known to regularly wheel carts of merchandise out the door without paying, and to stick power tools down their pants. The investigators had planned a nightlong “blitz”—surveillance, arrest, repeat. Anyone caught stealing would be handcuffed, led to a back room, and questioned: What did you plan to do with these items? Did you take them on behalf of someone else? The goal was not to micro-police shoplifting but to discover and disrupt networks engaged in organized retail crime, a burgeoning area of criminal investigation.

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