'This Is Costing Americans': Ashley Moody Slams DAs 'Abdicating' Duties To Prosecute Retail Crime

Forbes Breaking News

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) called for a national crackdown on retail crime and organized theft.

Transcript

00:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for introducing the federal legislation,

00:05Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. I am incredibly proud to be a co-sponsor of that,

00:11and it is timely, certainly, and needed now more than ever. I'm one of the newest senators here,

00:20as you can tell. I sit down here at the edge of the dais, and one of the things that has

00:27shocked me and frustrated me, and that's putting it mildly, is when we're dealing with issues like

00:33organized retail crime, whether that's cargo or smash and grab or organized retail theft,

00:39really this should be a bipartisan effort in how we approach it, but I'm always incredibly

00:46surprised to hear questioning that, is it really that bad? Like, shouldn't we attribute that to

00:52something else, or why is FBI and DHS helping? So what I'm finding is that I think, whether it's

01:04a governor or a mayor in so many places, and just to be clear, that's the executive branch whose

01:10responsibility is to enforce the law. There is almost an ignorance or willful blindness,

01:17or maybe it's self-promotion over the success and stability of their state or city. I don't know

01:23what it is, but it is increasingly hard for somebody like me that served as a judge and a federal

01:30prosecutor and is the wife of a law enforcement officer to watch these statements. For example,

01:34one governor, Newsom out of California, went to a cargo theft site and was like, I don't know what's

01:40happening. This looks like a third world country. In fact, I don't think it's a coincidence that in the

01:47last three years, the incident rate of cargo theft has gone up 17,000 percent. And we've also seen

01:56unvetted people come into this country by the millions and invited into California.

02:05And nobody's picking up on that. How many times have we heard the word transnational criminal

02:09organization, transnational criminal organization? In fact, we just rolled out more arrests since

02:14Trump's been in office of people here that have been deported time and time again with criminal

02:18backgrounds and are stealing from cargo freight. In Florida, we just arrested a ring of people here

02:26from Venezuela with ties to Trenderagua who were found to have been responsible for dozens of retail

02:35thefts in Florida. Now, what I'm happy about is we now seem to have proposed legislation that's going

02:43to do what we did in Florida. So when I was Attorney General, we launched a database that started tracking

02:49these cross jurisdiction. So where one might look like a single theft incident, we were able to then

02:55show, oh, no, this was nine jurisdictions, $20 million in loss, 20 different retailers. And we charged it

03:01that way and prosecuted that way and locked them up for the true crime. We also did legislation that

03:07condensed, or excuse me, expanded the time period on which you could tie in these multiple hits and

03:13incidents into the organized crime. And that is what this proposed federal legislation is going to do.

03:20But what we have to stop doing is saying the problem's not bad when the numbers are staggering.

03:25It's costing Americans. When we're trying to figure out how we're going to afford to put food on the

03:32table with skyrocketing prices, we don't need built into those prices, theft that can be avoided. If we

03:38just have executives understand that it is their job, governors and mayors, to work with law enforcement

03:45to enforce the law. When you have DAs abdicating their responsibility and saying, I'm not going to lock

03:51anybody up for theft, that just flows gasoline on the fire. And what did we do different in Florida?

03:58We actually removed the DAs that wouldn't enforce the laws they didn't like. So in New York, it shouldn't

04:04have been surprising when they were catching people stealing and they said, well, we steal here, but we

04:09go in Florida to spend our money. Because in Florida, if we get caught, they'll lock us up. We need a

04:15national approach that says we're taking this seriously. This is costing Americans money.

04:22It's costing us the ability to share information across not just county lines within a state,

04:30but across state lines and then across nation states. This is so important. I cannot stress

04:37how important it is. Otherwise, Mr. McBride, you referenced this and I want to say to you, you said,

04:42look, it's costing us so much money. We have to, can we even stay open? Miracle Mile was about a third

04:48empty. Miracle Mile in Chicago and you had a mayor blaming the businesses that they didn't have more

04:54security. If that is not short-sightedness in the role of an executive in an executive branch,

05:01I don't know what is. And that is a primary driver of this. Mr. McBride, can you say from your experience,

05:07how much do you think costs go up as a percentage as a result of this organized retail crime?

05:13So I cannot speak exactly to a number. I can tell you that the losses are absorbed by corporations

05:21for as much as they possibly can stand, but it does end up coming to act to the consumer

05:26in a lot of different ways. Whether there's cost of goods, because we have to provide additional

05:31inventory to cover the gaps that now are missing from the store, cost of security, cost of training,

05:38the cost of rehiring associates when they no longer feel safe enough to want to work in those locations.

05:44So it is a very exponential amount of increased effort and costs on the part of every single

05:53retailer because every single retailer in this country, in every single state, have been victimized

05:59in some way by these crime groups. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Whitehouse.

06:08Senator Tillis, are you going to ask questions?

06:14I've got to go vote, so you guys will have to work this out here. We'll manage.

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