Governor Hochul: "All these entrepreneurs made a point to be here today to lend their time and their voices because organized retail theft poses a real threat to their livelihoods. And as Governor, I'm not going to stand by and watch brazen thieves wreak havoc in their shops and dismantle, destroy everything they've built...It's becoming a never-ending nightmare for business owners.”
Hochul: "I'm asking my colleagues in the Legislature to step up. This is who we're fighting for. This is what we're fighting for. This is an important fight to take on because the status quo, the lawlessness, the chaos that is going on in our stores, in our communities, all over the State of New York, it must stop. So, let's step up and do it. We have a plan. We can get this done.”
Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul was joined by members of the Legislature and small business owners from across New York to support a comprehensive statewide crackdown on organized retail theft. Governor Hochul's anti-theft plan, included in her FY25 Executive Budget proposal, includes $25 million for a dedicated retail theft unit in the New York State Police, $15 million for District Attorneys and local law enforcement, and $5 million to cover security costs for businesses. It also includes new legislation to protect retail workers from assault and to crack down on online sales of stolen goods.
VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format.
AUDIO of the event is available here.
PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:
Welcome. Good to see everybody. So proud to be joined today by some of New York's hardest working small business owners, and the stresses they've been through. And I want to acknowledge some of the people who have joined us here today and I appreciate all of them for participating in this.
Nelson Eusebio, Founder and Director of Collection Action to Protect Our Stores. Deborah Koenigsberger, the owner of a store in NoMad. Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, the Senator, who can't be with us. One of our sponsors, Assemblymember Manny De Los Santos from the Assembly. You'll be hearing from him. Also want to acknowledge Senator Brad Hoylman, who is tied up in committee right now, but had hope to participate. County Executive Dan McCoy, Mayor Kathy Sheehan, District Attorney Mary Pat Donnelly and our friends from the District Attorneys Association. Friends from the Business Council and our hard-working business owners. Yes, let's give yourselves a round of applause.
If you run your own business, it's hard to get away on a Tuesday morning. Who's back running the shop, right? I know how that goes. I know how that goes. My mother had a little shop, and it was she and I. We weren't in the shop, it wasn't open. So, we understand the stresses, but all these entrepreneurs made a point to be here today to lend their time and their voices because organized retail theft poses a real threat to their livelihoods.
And as Governor, I'm not going to stand by and watch brazen thieves wreak havoc in their shops and dismantle, destroy everything they've built. And I know how hard it is on their workers – sleepless nights, stressing over the next encounter with these menacing criminals. And sometimes, you're then stuck paying out of pocket expenses for the broken windows, the broken locks, replace stolen items and all the extra security. It's becoming a never-ending nightmare for business owners like Deborah Koenigsberger, who you're going to hear from in a couple of minutes. And she'll speak to us what it's like owning two clothing shops in New York City's NoMadDistrict.
Now, over and over, she's seen thieves come in, scare her employees, and make off with literally hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothing all at once. She does her best to reassure her team and recoup her losses through a never-ending stream of insurance claims. You know, people like Deborah deserve better. They're the lifeblood of our communities. They're given to this charm, its vitality, its personality.
And people represented by Deborah here all across the State of New York deserve to live and work in safety. And these incidents have become much more frequent. And as a result, there's been a pervasive unease just seeping through our communities.
It's really unsettling when you walk into a store and see items that you thought you could purchase easily, locked up behind glass windows – or worse, you actually witness one of these sprees in person and not quite sure, are there weapons involved? Is it going to be harm to you and to the other customers? It's high stress. And people think, you know what, I'll just do it online.
You know what that does to retail? It kills it. And we saw that during the pandemic, when so many people turned out of necessity to purchasing online. But it is the downtown communities that benefit from having retail shops open, their doors wide open, welcoming walking people in – the walking traffic. And so, foot traffic dwindles when people go online.
Profits go down. People don't look at other items in the store, right? And some businesses just can't make it. And communities lose their identity and their vitality. This can no longer stand. It's time to go after the organized retail theft rings the same way we went after the gun traffickers and car thieves.
Here's how we do it. We have a record of success launching specialized units, forming new partnerships, strengthening coordination between law enforcement agencies and elevating the role of the State Police. Now doing this, we drove down the sky high gun crime back to historic pre-pandemic levels, historically low pre-pandemic levels.
And we used the same strategies to knock down car thefts in places like Rochester, we knocked it down 55 percent, down 45 percent in Buffalo in just a matter of months. Targeted strategies that work. But you know, we don't fight crime by just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. We do it with precision and purpose.
We zero in on what works. And that's why in my Fiscal Year 2025 Executive Budget, I proposed more than $25 million to establish a dedicated retail theft team within the New York State Police. This will fund over 100 new State Police positions, investigators, troopers, crime analysts, all devoted to retail theft. We also included another $15 million to help prosecutors and police go after these criminals.
Because many times, these are transnational organized crime entities, operations, I'm proposing for the first time that we launch a joint operation between state, federal, and local law enforcement and going after these increasingly sophisticated multi-state retail rings. That's what this is all about – an intense focus on a persistent area of crime with regular collaboration and sharing of data all throughout the week.
Now, in many cases, retail theft is no longer one person waiting for the right moment to snatch an item. It's much more sophisticated than that. You get multiple groups working together. Somebody distracts. Someone's talking to someone at the counter – making sure your eyes are not on the people in the store. They have lookouts. They have getaway cars. They have planned escape routes.
It's like Bonnie and Clyde all over again. And these are very sophisticated. And they have access to fledgling illegal online marketplaces where they can quickly turn their ill-gotten gains into cash for themselves. They often go over state lines, county lines, making their crimes harder to investigate. And we want to break down these silos and have more interagency cooperation so jurisdictions and police can work together, find patterns, link crimes, infiltrate these networks, and build strong cases.
We also want to protect these businesses. We're providing $5 million for a tax credit to small business owners to offset the cost of additional security measures like cameras. Life is already hard enough to run a successful business. As I mentioned, my mom opened a little flower shop. It was mostly her, and I'd go in on a Saturday or Sunday and help her out. She had to comb over every single expense, we were just on the margins for such a long time. I don't know if she ever made any money, but she loved hiring women, just so you know, she wanted to hire women who needed jobs.
But unanticipated costs, despite all your best planning, they can set you back. They can also shut you down. We can't have that. We can't have that. That tears at the vitality of our State, the fabric of what binds us together. We have to make sure that we do something aggressively about this. And business owners should be reinvesting their profits into the business itself, not forking over thousands and thousands of dollars for extra security. Let's give them some help.
And finally, let's strengthen our laws. I proposed legislation that would increase criminal penalties for assaulting a retail worker. These individuals are very exposed, especially in a small shop with just one worker. They don't have any way to protect themselves. They're literally on the front line.
And under this law, assaulting a retail worker would carry the same elevated penalties that we have in place for assaulting a first responder. Retail theft has been long characterized as a petty crime, but calling it that makes it sound small and trivial. But ask me, ask the people behind me. Do you think it's small when someone comes in and steals from you? Let's ask their employees how they feel.
So, this description, even in our law, minimizes the impact it has on all of you and your workers. And I'll tell you, more and more shoplifting incidences are turning violent. In fact, since the pandemic, shoplifting incidents involving physical force have more than doubled – more than doubled. So those who harm our retail workers must pay a steep price and a punishment that fits the crime.
And we also want to make it harder to sell these stolen goods online. We have to break the pipeline of stolen goods and go after the middle men, middle women, perhaps – the third-party sellers that underlie the sharp surge in retail thefts. Right now, as the law is written, there's a lot of incentive and very little risk for the middle men – people that they can use to fence this stolen merchandise.
These third parties typically resell items over the internet, but they never have those items in their possession, which makes it really hard to go after them. The law I'm proposing would change that, allowing prosecutors to hold them accountable if they know or should have known that the items were stolen.
I'm asking my colleagues in the Legislature to step up. This is who we're fighting for. This is what we're fighting for. This is an important fight to take on because the status quo, the lawlessness, the chaos that is going on in our stores, in our communities, all over the State of New York, it must stop. So, let's step up and do it. We have a plan. We can get this done.
Because they're counting on us. These individuals and thousands like them all across the state, they're counting on us. They're the lifeblood of our communities and right now, they're under siege. They should not be left alone to have to fight off these brash and organized criminal networks on their own.
So, I'm calling on the legislature to approve more than $40 million dollars that law enforcement needs right now to crack down on retail theft. Again, take up the legislation that we proposed to strengthen criminal penalties for those who commit and enable retail theft.
And as I said before, it's time to give the police and prosecutors the tools they need to go after these thieves, those who think they can break the law with impunity. It's time to take back our businesses and their workers and give them the full force of the law behind them.
And it's time to restore the sense of security and peace of mind so they can focus on what they do best. Add that charm and that spice and that flavor to our communities and bring that vitality, which is so important. So, I thank all of you for being here today, joining this fight, making our voices loud in here, right here in the Capitol as we venture into the budget process. And I hope to get a successful conclusion at the end of that.
So, thank you everyone. I want to, at this point, Nelson Eusebio, the founder and director of the Collective Action to Protect Our Stores is going to be delivering some remarks, and I can't wait to see what Nelson says.