Organized Retail Crime Association of Idaho - Fighting ORC Since 2014

By Curt Crum, Special Services Manager for the Boise Police Department & President of CLEAR and Edward Fritz, Crime Prevention Supervisor for the Boise Police Department & ORCAID Treasurer and one of the founding members
 

In 1989 Law Enforcement in Boise Idaho starting seeing an emerging trend of known career criminals turning from the traditional crime of burglaries, car thefts, and robberies to retail theft and fraud schemes. This is believed to be because of the perception that retail theft could reap monetary rewards without the substantial risk of the other crimes. This perception was true, given that law enforcement, prosecutors, and the courts had not yet understood the scope of this problem. A significant education process was needed to be developed to bring these entities up to speed.

Our first initiative was to bring all of the affected parties together to gain a perspective on the scope of the problem. This included prosecutors, law enforcement, and retail loss prevention personnel. As you can imagine, there was some resistance initially from each discipline to feel free sharing information. These concerns were alleviated when guidelines for information sharing were developed with input from prosecutors and retail loss prevention staff.

We then started to review shoplifting arrest reports to develop trends, patterns, and identify organized theft rings. We were quickly able to determine there were indeed many different rings operating throughout our region, and that retail loss prevention staff had a tremendous amount of intelligence on these groups. We also saw the relationship between narcotic users and retail theft. The problem we found was there was no communication between retail and law enforcement reference these groups.

In order to develop a forum to get all of the parties together to share information, we started holding monthly meetings between law enforcement and loss prevention staff. After getting past the initial hesitancy to share information, these monthly meetings started to gain momentum and became the cornerstone of our information sharing. As we started to develop the link between retail theft and numerous related crimes, other law enforcement agencies and divisions started to understand the value of the intelligence information these loss prevention staff were bringing to the table. These entities now include patrol officers, fraud, property crimes, narcotics and violent crimes investigators. We have all of the major retailers in our region attending these monthly meetings. These meetings and this partnership resulted in thousands of arrests for everything from theft, refund fraud, check and credit card fraud, narcotics activity, assaults, armed robbery, vehicle burglaries and vehicle thefts. We were also able to make arrests of major organized retail crime groups that traveled to Idaho and other cities in the Northwest.