San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan traveled to Washington, D.C. this week to testify before a House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement and Intelligence on Tuesday for a hearing about organized retail crime.
Her appearance before the committee came just days after the lobby group responsible for a high-profile study about their wide-ranging economic effects retracted a key statistic undergirding a major claim.
“Law enforcement and our retailers agree that the increase in retail theft-related incidents has been the direct result of changing laws and penalties for shoplifting,” Stephan told the subcommittee this week. “The message that these deficient laws send is that this is the Wild West with no rules or accountability.”
Stephan also called for stronger penalties for theft and also urged the passage of proposed legislation which would broaden the scope of offenses considered “organized” crime and increase potential penalties.
The National Retail Federation originally stated in an April report that “nearly half” of the $94.5 billion in inventory losses reported by retailers in a 2021 survey was attributable to organized retail crime.
That number was repeated in multiple media reports on the issue before it was officially retracted in December and revised to just 5 percent.
According to the NRF, the false claim that organized crime accounted for “nearly half” of all inventory losses was based on two-year-old testimony from Ben Dugan, former president of the advocacy group Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail.
In 2021, he told a U.S. Senate committee that organized retail crime accounted for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers, according to estimates by the coalition.
The NRF’s revised report deleted any estimate of organized retail crime’s overall impact in dollars and any reference to CLEAR.
“It was an inaccurate inference,” said David Johnston, the NRF’s vice president of asset protection and retail operations. “We missed it.”
