More than a dozen crime gangs have crews following wealthy victims around Los Angeles to rob them after they leave designer stores, luxury hotels and exclusive nightclubs, police say.
The number of targeted “follow-home” robberies, where assailants were reported to be making off with handbags, watches and gadgets worth tens of thousands of dollars, prompted the Los Angeles Police Department to create a special team, the Follow Home Task Force, last November to tackle the problem.
Captain Jonathan Tippet, the officer leading the task force of 20 detectives, told The Los Angeles Times that 17 independent gangs identified by police were based mostly out of the South LA area.
The police were not able to disclose the specific affiliations of each gang member they had identified, but told the newspaper that some suspects allegedly had associations to both the Bloods and Crips.
The LAPD special task force was able to relay some of what they have learned from studying the “follow-off” robbers’ strategy.
Capt Tippet told The Times, that the quick-acting crews typically worked in groups of three to five cars when planning an attack.
“There’s no chance or opportunity for these victims to comply,” he said, adding that LAPD has identified cases where “spotters” have even served as a plant inside an expensive venue to flag down big spenders to their partners outside.
“They’re just running up to people and attacking them, whether that’s putting a gun in their face or punching them and beating on them,” he added.
In 2021, when the task force began tracking this specific kind of robbery, the LAPD documented 165 instances where this “follow-off” tactic was deployed. So far this year, there have been at least 56 cases.
The LAPD’s Hollywood Division witnessed the most “follow-off” robberies with 50, followed closely by the Wilshire Division with 46 and Central Division with 40.
In 23 of these cases, there were shots fired and so far, a total of two victims have been killed in relation to these robberies, Capt Tippet told The Times.
“In my 34 years on the job, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
In an investigation published by the Times at the end of last year, the Los Angeles outlet dug-in to what was driving this seeming uptick in tracking wealthy victims as potential burglary targets.
They stated that the number of “follow-off” crimes were higher in regions like the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, but that overall thefts were higher in divisions like South Los Angeles, a region that recorded 942 robberies in 2021 (compared to Hollywood’s 626).
The paper added that, despite these crimes managing to capture the attention of the city, this specific kind of tactic only makes up a fraction of overall burglaries and thefts, which had not increased significantly from previous years.
Compared to 2020 figures, burglaries were down 8 per cent in 2021 and robberies shot up by just 5 per cent.
Those numbers have done little to ease political tensions from rising when these very public burglaries occur in the city.
In November 2021, a highly publicised smash-and-grab robbery at a Nordstrom located in a high-end shopping district of Los Angeles resulted in the mayor of the city laying blame at the local prosecutors and calling for stricter penalties on the criminals.
“There need to be consequences. We need a jail system that will step up and do some of the rehabilitative work,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, adding that committing a crime of that magnitude needs to carry a “penalty that doesn’t seem to exist right now”.
Hamid Khan, an organiser for an LA-based coalition centred around building community-based power to dismantle police surveillance, told The Times in an interview that he viewed the LAPD’s latest reported trends as being blown out of proportion, saying it was “week after week of sensationalism”.
“LAPD has to constantly legitimise itself, constantly has to make itself useful to the community, by raising the spectre of people running wild,” Mr Khan said.
In November 2021, the Los Angeles Police Commission approved a $213m budget increase for the LAPD in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, which took the operating budget for the department from $1.761 billion to $1.974 billion.
