Shoplifters Ransack Sephora Store in Los Angeles
Alex Oliveira, Daily Mail, May 30, 2022
The moment a trio of brazen thieves ransack the shelves of a Los Angeles Sephora store before strolling out as employees and customers look on has been captured on camera.
The cellphone footage shows three individuals in hoodies snagging handfuls of products off the Sephora shelves and stuffing them into trash bags.
‘Oh my god,’ the woman filming can be heard saying as the thieves fill their bags with loot, ‘Oh my f*****g god. ‘F*****g lowlifes.’
Once their bags are full the thieves scurry off towards the door of the store, before pausing to saunter out.
Several store employees can be seen watching the thieves and speaking into radios, but keeping their distance and allowing the shoplifters to walk out.
The footage was taken by Jessica Ortiz, who posts make up tutorials on TikTok.
‘I was just trying to buy concealer then I heard a BANG,’ Ortiz wrote in the video.
Ortiz wrote that the crime took place at 8.50pm at the Cerritos Mall. In a follow up video she said that she did not know what happened after the thieves took off.
The thieves appeared to be two men and one woman.
‘Her confidence to do that while wearing slides,’ one person commented on the video.
The footage comes as shoplifting is surging across the country, and Los Angeles robberies are soaring amid a controversial zero-bail policy that critics says provides thieves little motivation to not commit crimes.
The zero-dollar bail policy, initiated by the Bail Project during the pandemic to reduce jail crowding, means that suspects are quickly released from custody after they are arrested and booked for misdemeanors and low-level felonies in California.
‘As California struggles to contain COVID-19, this critical bill would help mitigate the crisis by preventing tens of thousands of people from cycling unnecessarily through overcrowded jails just because they cannot afford bail,’ the Bail Project said of the bail order.
Proponents of the zero-dollar bail order claim it has helped to lower rates of recidivism among criminal offenders, however crime has continued to spike city and statewide, with smash-and-grab burglaries becoming a regular occurrence.
LAPD data shows that as of March 2022 robberies had skyrocketed in Los Angeles by a staggering 17.2% from the same period of time in 2021.
