Thieves steal 20k in merch from California Apple store in broad daylight

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Crooks and thugs are setting their sights on high-end retailers now, seeming to have grown bored with the product selection at pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens.

In one of the latest incidents, police are in search of four young males wanted for stealing over $20,000 from an Apple store in California in broad daylight.

The crime took place in Santa Rosa, CA, about an hour from San Francisco. The perpetrators, believed to be ranging in age from 14 to 18, entered the store Wednesday morning and quickly started pulling as many display models as they could get before fleeing the scene.

Authorities called it a “brazen daytime burglary” in a police report.

Due to an unexplained Apple store policy, police were not notified until 10 minutes after the burglary.

California’s left-wing policies continue to demonstrate clearly the law of unintended consequences, with this daylight robbery just another in a recent surge of lootings and smash-and-grab-robberies. In one November week alone, thieves have made off with tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise due, in large part, to the state’s Democrat-led softness on crime.

Around 20 misanthropes successfully executed a raid on a Nordstrom store at The Grove retail complex in LA on Monday night, making off with $5,000 worth of merchandise. Not to ignore the reliable pharmacy, a CVS in the city was struck just an hour later, where looters stole $8,000 from a cash register. Why there was eight grand in a cash register instead of a safe – or even onsite – is unknown.

To complicate matters, law enforcement officials say that mercenary thieves are being recruited to steal the goods and ship them across state lines where they are then sold on the internet.

Similar robberies have occurred in the bay area cities of Palo Alto and San Francisco. In the latter city’s case, nine people have been charged in connection with last Friday’s successive attacks on stores including Louis Vuitton, Burberry, and Bloomingdale’s in the downtown area and in Union Square, an upscale retail sector in San Francisco popular with tourists and bustling with holiday shoppers at the time of the robberies.

The recent swell in looting and robberies is not unique to California, however. In the city of Chicago, for instance, more than a dozen thieves – also apparently Louis Vuitton enthusiasts – grabbed more than $120,000 worth of high-end clothing and other merchandise from the boutique retailer.

According to the Daily Mail,

Proposition 47 was passed by California voters on November 5, 2014.

It made some ‘non-violent’ property crimes, where the value of the stolen goods does not exceed $950, into misdemeanors.

It also made some ‘simple’ drug possession offenses into misdemeanors, and allows past convictions for these charges to be reduced to a misdemeanor by a court.

Under California law, though, if two or more person’s conspire to ‘cheat and defraud any person or any property, by any means which are in themselves criminal’ they can face no more than one year in county prison, a fine of $10,000 or a combination of the two.

 

So-called “experts” on crime have cautioned against using terms like “looting” to describe the lootings, because –  in leftist logic – if you redefine the word, the activity it describes will cease to exist …

Lorenzo Boyd, a professor of criminal justice & community policing at the University of New Haven, and Martin Reynolds, co-executive director of the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education, urged news outlets to refer to the crimes as “organized smash-and-grabs.”

The pair was roundly mocked on Twitter for the ludicrous suggestion, with conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza remarking that “Experts refuse to call a spade a spade, unless, of course, it’s a spade wielded by a white male.”

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