The Toronto Police Service's Retail Crime Unit has laid out the results of its enforcement work two years after it was created, pointing to a sustained crackdown on organized retail theft. Police say the Organized Retail Crime Unit has arrested more than 500 suspects and laid more than 4,000 charges over that period. The most recent investigation highlighted by the service focused on the northwest corner of the city.
To illustrate the scale of the problem, police released surveillance footage of brazen thefts caught in progress. In one video, a suspect pulls into an LCBO with suitcases, then moves through the store packing the cases with alcohol and filling shopping carts before walking out. The images underscore how far removed these incidents are from casual shoplifting.
Another video shows suspects inside a Walmart grabbing clothing and other retail items off the shelves. As they head for a waiting vehicle, at least one suspect threatens people with pepper spray while bystanders try to intervene, a detail that points to the growing risk to shoppers and staff who get in the way.
Investigators say the stolen merchandise does not simply disappear. Some of the alcohol taken in these thefts ends up being resold illegally to bars and restaurants, while other goods such as clothing lifted from big box stores are funnelled onto online retail markets, feeding a wider resale economy behind the thefts.
For those tracking the trend, the pattern amounts to more than petty crime. "This isn't just shoplifting, this is organized crime," said Rui Rodriguez of the Canadian Retail Council, framing the thefts as a coordinated criminal enterprise rather than a series of isolated incidents.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw said arrests can only go so far on their own. He argued that the cost-benefit calculation for offenders is tipped the wrong way and that a whole-system approach is required, including a justice system and prosecutors prepared to pursue these cases in court and impose meaningful consequences, up to and including incarceration.
Demkiw said he takes the issue seriously even as overall violent crime in Toronto is down, because brazen retail thefts chip away at the public's sense of safety. That erosion of everyday security, he said, is a large part of why the service is pressing to crack down on the organized networks driving the crime.