LAPD stats showed an uptick in robberies. Was it really just shoplifting?

At the Los Angeles Police Department’s weekly crime briefings this fall, its leaders tracked what seemed to be a troubling rise in robberies in police divisions such as Southwest and Rampart. California ‘Ghost stops’: Lieutenant claims LAPD officials were warned about troubled gang unit An LAPD lieutenant whose officers are accused of trying to cover up illegal traffic stops and thefts by turning off their body-worn cameras has filed a lawsuit claiming he was “set up to fail” and unfairly punished after the scandal became public. Faced with plunging profit margins, more companies — from mom-and-pop shops to big box retailers such as Target — are making “stopping people at the threshold” a priority, said LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, who noted that shoplifting is still a crime, although not the serious type the term “robbery” conjures. “You can do what you want as a business, but you’re not necessarily going to get an accurate crime picture,” said Hamilton, who runs the LAPD’s detective bureau. Estes was convicted of felony robbery, which was upheld under appeal with the court ruling that “a store employee may be a victim of a robbery even though he does not own the property taken.” In the decades since, law enforcement has used the Estes robbery standard to charge shoplifters with robbery even if they didn’t have weapons.