GRAPHIC: Police officers beat teen shoplifting suspect at Calif. mall
By KCAL/KCBS Staff
GLENDALE, Calif. (KCAL/KCBS) – Video from a California mall shows a group of police officers beating a 17-year-old suspected shoplifter.
Plainclothes officers punch the teen in the face and a uniformed officer kicks the teen in the head as he lies on the floor of the Dick’s Sporting Goods store inside the Glendale Galleria.
“It was really hard to watch,” said Melissa Navarette, the teen’s sister. “We got traumatized. We still have all of the video stuck in our head.”
A man who was shopping at the store Saturday evening grabbed his cellphone and recorded the incident.
“The officer that wasn’t even there to begin with, that ran up on the situation, as soon as he arrived he just decided, ‘I’m going to kick this kid in the face,’” the witness said.
A police spokesman said officers received a call about petty theft in another part of the mall minutes before the confrontation.
“Officers responded and located a suspect matching the description, and eventually contacted that suspect inside the Dick’s Sporting Goods,” said Sgt. Christian Hauptmann of the Glendale Police Department.
Police said they recovered stolen merchandise from the teenager and arrested him on suspicion of petty theft and resisting an officer by force.
Civil rights attorney Connie Rice watched the video and said there’s no doubt the officers’ behavior goes against the training they receive when it comes to apprehending a suspect.
“Oh, this is worse than a rough arrest. I’ve seen better tactics and discipline in a barroom brawl,” Rice said.
“Apparently he doesn’t have a weapon, so he’s not posing any kind of imminent threat of lethal force or bodily injury to anybody around him.”
The teen suffered injuries to his eye and head.
Family members hope the video reinforces the need for additional training and improved measures to prevent something like this from happening again.
In the meantime, they’re focused on the teen’s recovery.
The officers involved are on administrative leave.
Another Cop Punch Probed
by Paul BassMarch 4, 2021 3:33 pm
The police have opened an internal investigation into an incident this week at Walmart, in which an officer punched a man in the face during a confrontation after the man allegedly threatened to hit him.
It’s the ongoing probe into 2021 incidents in which an officer punched an arrestee in the head, prompting community discussion over how cops should handle difficult encounters.
The latest incident occurred inside the Route 80 store Tuesday at around 2 p.m.
Officer Rafael Ramirez punched the 37-year-old Fair Haven man, Jose DeJesus, after DeJesus objected to an order to leave the store.
A 24-second Facebook video of a portion of the incident went viral Wednesday. Assistant Police Chief Renee Dominguez (who becomes interim chief starting Saturday) told the Independent that when the department learned of the viral video, it opened the internal investigation. She released a longer body camera video of the incident to the Independent upon a request.
Watch the police video at the top of this story.
DeJesus was a regular presence at the store. His wife works there as a cashier. He was coming Tuesday to pick her up.
Officer Ramirez told him that store management wanted him banned from the store because he continually refused to wear a mask.
DeJesus refused to leave.
What happened next was not visible on the cellphone video that was shared on Facebook. A person was blocking the view. What was audible was the sound of the punch. Then DeJesus is seen falling to the floor.
The body camera video shows more detail, though the actual punch is still not visible.
The video shows Walmart employees objecting that DeJesus was not wearing a mask as he entered the store.
They alerted Ramirez, who was working an extra-duty shift and dealing with an unrelated shoplifting incident.
Ramirez, who recognized DeJesus, proceeded to converse with him in Spanish.
“You have to leave,” Ramirez told him. “The store wants you to leave.”
“I need a reason,” DeJesus said, holding a face mask in his hand. “I come here with my wife, and I don’t have problems.”
“We’ll you’re going to wait for her outside.”
When DeJesus refused to leave, the two were in close contact.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” DeJesus said.
The next key moment isn’t clear on the video. According to both Ramirez, in his subsequent written report, and DeJesus, in a subsequent interview, the officer punched DeJesus, who then fell to the ground. They differ on why.
“I walked closer to DeJesus and placed my right hand on his left arm and attempted to guide him toward the exit door. DeJesus became further irate and yelled, don’t touch me. I ordered DeJesus a fourth time to leave the store. DeJesus ignored my commands and began walking toward the service desk. I grabbed him by his arm and in a firm voice ordered him to leave,” Ramirez wrote in his report.
“DeJesus then got in a fighting stance, very close to me and stated, I’m going to fuck your face up, in Spanish, and began raising his arms with clenched fist. I immediately struck him in the face with a closed fist on the left side of this face.
“The strike caused DeJesus to fall on the ground. I immediately followed him to the ground and was able to secure him in my department issued handcuffs.
“I noticed DeJesus had a hard time breathing so I placed him in a side resting position. I then called for medical assistance.”
Ramirez escorted DeJesus outside as an AMR ambulance was headed to the scene. The police video shows them conversing again in Spanish outside the store.
“Why did you do this to me? I’m not a bad person,” DeJesus asked Ramirez.
“You attacked me. You went for my face like you were going to attack me. I tried to treat you with respect, but you wouldn’t listen.
“That’s the last time you’re going to ever do that again.”
DeJesus was charged with disorderly conduct, interfering with a police officer, and first-degree criminal trespass. He was taken to the 1 Union Ave. lock-up.
He was released later that day.
That night, his sister Miriam Rodriguez, got home from her job as a nurse at the Mary Wade Home and saw her brother’s bruises. She said she took him to the emergency room at Yale New Haven Hospital. The doctors there said he had suffered a head fracture and a broken jaw, she told the Independent.
Jose DeJesus briefly spoke with the Independent by phone Wednesday evening. He maintained that he had done nothing wrong. He said he just wanted to pick up his wife and go home.
“He hit me hard,” DeJesus, crying, said of Ramirez. “Right in my jaw, right in my face. My whole left side is numb. I can’t even eat. I’m in pain.
“I can’t do nothing.”
He said he wasn’t up to speaking any further.
“We have opened an IA [internal affairs] investigation, which is normal course of action for any use of force incident,” Dominguez said.
She said Walmart later turned over a knife that had fallen from DeJesus during the altercation.
This is the partial version of the incident that was captured in the cellphone video posted to Facebook.
Last May, the video of an encounter with a different officer and a different man inside the Route 80 Walmart also went viral on social media and led to a police internal investigation. Click here to read about that.
Police are also conducting an internal investigation into a Jan. 29 incident that took place inside the CT Financial Center on Church Street, in which an officer punched a man in the head after the man kicked him in the course of a call about an eviction dispute, until a fellow officer stepped in and stopped it. Read about that here. That investigation, and now this latest Walmart incident probe, will reveal in coming weeks where New Haven stands on the question of what actions its officers should be allowed to take in responding to people who are objecting to their actions.
Harry Droz offered Spanish language translation for this story.
Myth of the Starving Shoplifter
Retail crime is driven by reduced penalties and organized gangs, not economic hardship.
/ From the Magazine / Economy, Finance, and Budgets
A recent video on Twitter showed a supermarket employee tussling with a shoplifter who had filled her bag with items. As the employee pulled the bag from her hand, she cried, “I have to feed my family!” That’s a common refrain from shoplifters these days, echoed in media headlines proclaiming that people have turned to stealing to put food on the table—despite a U.S. social safety net that includes $185 billion in spending on food stamps and other nutrition-assistance programs. In truth, America’s exploding shoplifting problem predates our current economic difficulties. Much of the stealing, store owners and security experts say, has less to do with putting food on the table than with a rise in organized theft, and it’s having a particularly adverse effect in cities where criminal-justice reforms have made it easy to get away with.
Retail theft in America has grown to a $94 billion epidemic, according to the National Retail Federation—a staggering 90 percent increase since 2018. Retailers say that the problem gained momentum about a decade ago, when states began decriminalizing low-level shoplifting, raising the value of goods that a person must steal to enable prosecutors to bring felony charges. More than two-thirds of states now treat shoplifting as a misdemeanor if someone boosts less than $1,000 in goods, and 15 states have raised their limit to $1,500 or more. More than 70 percent of surveyed retailers reported that shoplifting spiked in their stores after these changes. Bail reforms that free without bond those arrested for shoplifting have also contributed to the problem. An official of the Association of Certified Anti–Money Laundering Specialists says that retail theft is now “a low-risk and high-reward line of business.”
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Rampant shoplifting is undermining retailer profits and vaporizing jobs. Walmart announced the closure of its only store in disorder-plagued Portland, Oregon, along with four stores in crime-wracked Chicago. Target, which estimated that retail theft cost it half a billion dollars last year, is shuttering stores in several cities, including Baltimore. Rite Aid is shutting down stores in New York City after the company’s chief executive described how hard it is to stop theft there. Whole Foods closed its flagship San Francisco store after one year because of rampant theft. The CEO of Home Depot told Wall Street analysts that shoplifting threatens its bottom line. “The country has a retail theft problem,” he said.
Organized retail crime now accounts for about half of store losses from theft. It has nothing to do with obtaining food for families; it’s about reselling stolen items for profit. Underlying the crime wave is the emergence of a sophisticated illegal infrastructure for recruiting shoplifters—everyone from gang members to illegal aliens—and disposing of the goods they heist. Gone are the days when petty criminals needed to sell goods through “fences” like legendary London underworld figure Ikey Solomon, so notorious for selling stolen goods from his Bell Lane jewelry shop that Charles Dickens based Fagin in Oliver Twist on him. Much of the merchandise grabbed today by shoplifters, called “boosters,” is sold by operators online—where they are hard to detect or track down. The illegal industry also includes “cleaners,” who strip goods of security devices or repackage stolen items, and money launderers, who process the transactions.
Many operations initially thrived selling on third-party online platforms like Amazon and eBay, where they blend in among legitimate sellers. The federal INFORM Consumers Act, passed last December, now requires these markets to collect information from third-party retailers. So the fencing business is moving to classified-advertising sites like Craigslist and to Facebook Marketplace, according to the National Retail Federation. While incidents of stealing luxury goods—like the flash mob that stripped a Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco in 2021—make headlines, the real money is in everyday items from mass-market retailers. A Craigslist search by security experts found that the top item under listings that appeared to be stolen merchandise were Tide Pods. Also high on the list were diapers, makeup, and baby formula. Even so, a Washington Post story headlined “Stealing to Survive” jumped to the wrongheaded conclusion that a rise in shoplifting was linked to economic need because much of it involved everyday products like baby formula.
Social media has contributed to cultural shifts that portray shoplifting as a “harmless” property crime that damages only “rich” companies. Social-media sites offer tips and how-to videos on shoplifting. They also increasingly feature anticapitalist rhetoric among young people, who claim that shoplifting is a way of “tackling the system.” In England, a TikTok “shoplifting challenge” sparked a spate of attacks on local shops. The discussion site Reddit has hosted conversations on “best practices,” including instructions to avoid being stopped by a door-checker at Walmart and why stores of the supermarket chain Publix are easy marks.
The consequences are growing. Beyond massive retailer losses, states and cities are forfeiting some $15 billion annually in sales taxes. And more than half of retailers surveyed last year said that shoplifting incidents are becoming more violent. Last November, a shoplifter killed a security guard in a Maryland supermarket who tried to detain him, and another murdered a Home Depot guard in April. In San Francisco, authorities declined to press charges against a security guard who killed a shoplifter in Walgreens because they determined that the guard’s life was in danger.
Under pressure, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have begun focusing on organized retail crime, especially “smash and grab” rings. Retailers are also lobbying for passage of the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, which establishes a unit within Homeland Security to address the issue. Some states are also cracking down.
It remains to be seen, however, whether these efforts will be enough to reverse the incentives created by de facto retail-theft decriminalization and revolving-door bail “reform” policies.
