There are people who come to Gig Harbor to settle. Others come to surf. And some come to steal.

Shoplifters come “from all over,” Gig Harbor Police Chief Kelly Busey told the News Tribune. He listed a long list of cities: Port Angeles, Bellingham, Portland, Yakima, Spokane, Tacoma. The police department did a statistical analysis of where their criminals came from and could not detect a pattern, he said.

The department started a program in the fall of 2021 to help reduce retail theft, called the “Business Check” program. Three years later, it appears to be working, he said, although its success is difficult to quantify because of the nature of how it works: An employee who notices suspicious activity inside or near a store can call 911 and ask for a “ business verification. ” An officer will appear, pending availability, in hopes of deterring would-be criminals from taking action once they see police nearby.

If no crime occurs, no police report is written, so there is no accurate data to indicate how many crimes such business checks could have prevented.

The News Tribune recently sat down with a Gig Harbor police officer to learn how police look for suspicious activity, review examples of police reports from business inspections in cases where an alleged crime has occurred and learn how the program works .

Shoplifting in Gig Harbor

Crime rates in Gig Harbor in 2023 fell near the middle of Pierce County police jurisdictions, according to data from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police. At an overall crime rate of 58.6 crimes per 1,000 people, it ranked eighth out of the 19 Pierce County jurisdictions included in Washington Crime Report 2023.

Among crimes committed in Gig Harbor that year, theft crimes ranked first, with 26.8 incidents per 1,000 people, according to the report. Theft includes shoplifting as well as other types of theft and refers to the “unlawful taking, transportation, driving or removal of property from the possession of another,” according to the report. Gig Harbor’s next highest crime rate was 5.6 per 1,000 for motor vehicle theft.

Data from the Gig Harbor Police Department also showed that the stores most hit by shoplifters are major retail chains. The top five stores in Gig Harbor with the most theft calls from January 1, 2023 to September 16, 2024 were Albertsons, Target, Famous Footwear, Safeway and Rite Aid.

Busey provided an excerpt from a Sept. 17 police report that illustrates how a business check works. An officer responded to a business check request around 8:11 a.m. at Albertson’s at 11330 51st Ave. in Gig Harbor, where he learned that a man wearing a fisherman’s hat was acting suspiciously while pushing a cart with several cases of Tide Pods — a commonly stolen item — and two cases of beer.

“He abandoned the cart in the store after noticing us in the business,” the officer wrote in the report.

At the employee’s request, the officer told the man the business would like to have him violated, which the man admitted before leaving the parking lot, the report said.

According to reports from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police, the number of reported theft crimes in Gig Harbor fell to 350 in 2023, the lowest annual number of reported incidents from 2019 to 2023.

During an annual crime report at the Sept. 9 City Council meeting, Busey offered several reasons why he believes retail theft — calculated as part of larceny offenses — is down from 2022 to 2023. First , underreporting among retail establishments due to changes in corporate policy may have decreased theft calls, he said. Retail theft accent patrolwhich are periodic operations to concentrate arrests in a short period of time, and commercial checks may also have contributed, he said. And the loosening of jail booking restrictions after the COVID-19 pandemic has made it easier for officers to take suspected thieves to jail “on the first day” and prevent reoffending, he told the council.

Store policies can make it difficult to stop shoplifters

Busey told the News Tribune that the department invented the Business Check program in part because they felt the loss prevention policies for some larger, corporate-owned stores were too weak.

“Most employees can’t deal with shoplifters, which isn’t bad,” Busey said. “We don’t necessarily want confrontations. That’s how people get hurt, right? But we also found that most employees were not even able to call 911 to report shoplifting.”

Nationally, retail theft contributed to a 1.6 percent “decline rate” among retailers in fiscal year 2022, according to a survey report by National Retail Federation. Dwindling, or diminutionmeasures the inventory that businesses lose due to theft by both employees and non-employees, administrative or operational errors and other causes, according to the National Retail Federation. Taken as a percentage of their total earnings in 2022, retailers lost $112 billion, with foreign theft accounting for 36 percent of that total, the survey found.

Violence in retail stores has also increased, prompting more retailers to advocate a “crackdown” approach to shoplifting, it said; 41% of respondents to a retail survey said “no employees are authorized to stop or apprehend shoplifters”, up from 38% the previous year.

“Like many in the industry, we are seeing a higher level of rampant theft and organized retail crime,” Rite Aid spokeswoman Michelle McEnroe told The News Tribune in an Oct. 17 email. “We are taking an active role in helping law enforcement pursue shoplifters, as well as continuing our efforts to educate community leaders about the impact of retail theft and promote solutions.”

Busey said he thought the reason for such policies could be fear of litigation or negative publicity if the store found the wrong person. So the police department decided to make an arrangement with their dispatch center. South Sound 911 handles emergency dispatch services for Pierce County jurisdictions.

If an employee calls 911 for a “business check,” the dispatcher will not ask them any questions other than the employee’s name and the name and location of the business, according to a letter explaining the program that Busey said was distributed to various merchants. If officers are available, they will respond to that location knowing something suspicious may be going on – but they won’t know who they’re looking for or what the situation is.

“We assume it’s probably a burglar, but we’re not sure,” Busey said. “But just the fact that we are there reassures the employees. Generally, if the suspect is still in that location, he will leave without stealing anything and the crime has been avoided.”

Their goal is to prevent crimes in the first place, rather than respond after the fact, he said.

Busey said some companies have barred their employees from even requesting business checks. It’s disappointing, he said.

“It’s really a non-invasive way to address a potential crime,” he said. “We don’t profile anyone. We are not falsely accusing anyone. We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

He declined to share specific businesses that have stopped using the program, but said the department knows about them because employees at those stores said they can no longer call when speaking with officers conducting routine checks.

A national problem

Mike Johnson, senior vice president of policy and government affairs for the Retail Association of Washington, told the News Tribune he applauds Gig Harbor’s Business Check program. But not all jurisdictions have the law enforcement, prosecutors and jail space to crack down on retail theft in the same way, he said.

He also pointed out that the biggest problem facing retailers is organized retail theft, not petty shoplifting. Organized retail theft is when criminals make a profit by selling stolen goods. They often use that income to fund other criminal activities, such as human trafficking, illegal drug use and prostitution, he said.

“This is killing us financially,” he said.

Each year, Washington state’s retail industry loses about $3 billion to theft, and organized retail crime is a significant part of that, according to Johnson.

Busey said commercial checks help prevent both organized retail theft and petty shoplifting. Sometimes police see cars serving as “lookouts” in the parking lot while the theft is taking place, which Busey said tends to be associated with organized groups.