It’s no secret that mass retail theft has been on the rise in cities around the country for the past couple of years and that’s particularly true in California. Large gangs show up and brazenly steal everything that isn’t nailed to the floor, later selling the loot on the black market or right out on the streets. They do so without fear of repercussions because of California’s lax laws and soft-on-crime prosecutors. But is that changing in Los Angeles at long last? The city recently set up a Retail Theft Task Force, organized between the LA County Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD and they began investigating mass looting at the Nike Community Store in East Los Angeles. And this weekend, they arrested ten looters and returned thousands of dollars worth of stolen goods to the store. So is the tide beginning to shift, or was this a one-off event intended to generate some good headlines? (ABC News Los Angeles)

Ten people were arrested during a two-day undercover operation in connection with recent “brazen” organized retail thefts at the Nike Community Store in East Los Angeles, authorities announced Saturday.

The arrests were made Thursday and Friday, and more than $3,000 of recovered merchandise was returned to Nike, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. According to investigators, the East L.A. store has lost up to $1 million due to theft in about a year.

So of the ten looters, four of them are being charged with felonies, though the details provided by the LAPD were sparse. The rest presumably will be treated as misdemeanors. Two of the suspects were found to have outstanding arrest warrants. The task force claimed to have identified two criminal street gangs that were involved in the looting attacks.

I realize that ten looters sound like a drop in a very, very large bucket when we’re talking about California’s mass looting and gang problems. But it’s at least a start, right? Well… maybe. It really all depends on what happens next. We’ll need to see if this task force conducts similar operations in the other major retail outlets that are constantly being emptied out. If this was a one-time operation, nothing is going to change.

Even more to the point, the future depends on what happens to these ten looters and how the public is informed as to their fate. California has changed its laws in recent years as noted above. If the six looters who sound like they will face misdemeanor charges were found with less than $1,000 dollars worth of merchandise, they can’t be locked up. And then you have to find a prosecutor willing to actually press charges and put them in front of a judge. The best intentions of the police don’t add up to much if some liberal District Attorney just springs them all immediately anyway.

Having that situation change is the only way that California is going to turn its mass looting and gang problems around. Laws need to be repealed so that serious theft is treated as a serious crime that can bring serious jail time, particularly for repeat offenders. Soft-on-crime, Soros-friendly DAs and prosecutors need to be recalled and replaced with people who will at least make an effort to take back the streets and tame the gangs. And then the people committing all of this mayhem might eventually start to get the message.

None of that will happen overnight, however. New legislators are required, and that means waiting for the current election cycle to conclude and hoping that new voting patterns will promptly emerge. More funding for law enforcement will be needed and that will require the support of the voters as well. If none of this happens, these ten arrests will remain a “local news story” that will be buried in a few days and the crime wave will continue unabated. But then, this crime wave was what the people of Los Angeles and the state of California voted for. And now they’ve got it.