One big thing
Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes says criminals looting stores provide critical funding to larger criminal enterprises.
Why it matters
Reyes says many of the criminals (referred to as boosters)are forced to work for the larger criminal enterprises. He says they are often caught in a web where they are not only criminals, but victims of human trafficking, and forced to carry drugs or sell drugs.
“When people think about these crimes as just white collar crimes that are not really hurting anyone, that’s absolutely not the case,” Reyes said on the first episode of Retail’s Most Wanted. “It’s very misleading because it fuels violent crimes, creates a culture of lawlessness. It hurts on so many levels economically and then it subjugates more people to be enslaved for the purposes of these organized retail syndicates.”
Go deeper
Utah was the first state to form a task force specifically designed to combat organized retail crime.
“The cartels have figured out they can also maximize and exploit them, monetize them in even more efficient ways,” said Reyes. “And that’s sending them in every single day to a Lowe’s, a Home Depot, a Target, a Walmart, and walk out with thousands of dollars worth of goods, and because many of the retail stores have non-intervention policies, they want to avoid the liability or the danger to their own, employees.”
Mike Combs, the former director of asset protection, organized retail crime and central investigations team at The Home Depot, played a key role in forming the task force, bringing retailers to work with Reyes’ office.
“We found out that most of these cases are cross jurisdictions,” said Combs. “So it was really hard for a little city or a local county to work a case that goes all the way across the state and sometimes across state lines. The Attorney General Task Force had the power and the oversight and the ability to kind of go across those boundaries, which really made a huge impact.”
Reyes and Combs were the initial guests on the newly-launched Retail’s Most Wanted podcast.