Retail partnership with law enforcement takes aim at repeat shoplifters on LI, Suffolk DA says

Suffolk County has apprehended 18 individuals alleged to have stolen items worth a collective $110,000 from local retailers through repeated shoplifting, county officials announced Monday.

The arrests stem  from the county’s Retail Protection Partnership, which brings together police, retailers and U.S. Marshals to coordinate responses to repeat shoplifting offenders, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney announced at a news conference inside The Home Depot off Crooked Hill Road in Commack Monday. 

“We want to make sure that we’re working with our police and retailers to identity the professionals, the ones who are doing the most damage, affecting our communities and stores most profoundly," Tierney said.

The 18 defendants have been charged with felonies over the last six months, including grand larceny burglary, to according to Tierney's office.

Each faces “at least one felony charge,” and three have been additionally charged with robbery in the second degree, a class C felony, for “allegedly using physical force to steal the merchandise,” according to the district attorney’s office.

The partnership, launched in 2023, brings together retailers with local authorities so repeat offenders can be identified, Tierney said. From there, shoplifters’ individual thefts can be “aggregated," increasing the total value of their theft, thereby increasing charges to felony levels, which carry harsher penalties.

Tierney said the goal is not to send U.S. Marshals after the one-time thief who “steals a six-pack from 7-Eleven and doesn’t show up [to court]," but rather to go after “organized and sophisticated" criminals who proficiently steal from retailers with the intent to resell those goods on the secondary market.

“The person who has a demonstrated history of this repeated retail theft for profit involving thousands of dollars, sure, were going to ask our Marshals to go out and get him or her and bring them in so we can prosecute," he said.

Nicholas Guttman, regional asset protection manager for The Home Depot for the metropolitan area,  said shoplifting has become a more prominent issue in recent years.

Surveillance video  at the media event showed several instances of charged individuals walking out the door with flat-bed carts stacked with large tools and appliances.

“It’s just gotten more organized and so much more brazen," Guttman said. “No longer is it the days where they’re hiding somewhere and trying to put something down their pants. Now, it’s just walk out with a cart full of product."

The Home Depot, based in Atlanta, has been working to combat organized retail theft, the company said, and is investigating nearly 500 cases of organized retail crime with a combined value of more than $133 million, according to a company fact sheet. 

An organized retail crime is reported at one of its more than 2,300 stores every 5 minutes, according to the fact sheet. 

Retailers reported a 93% increase in the average number of shoplifting incidents in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a National Retail Federation report released in 2024.

But newer data from the Council on Criminal Justice suggests that shoplifting is down to around pre-pandemic levels, said Ernesto Lopez, senior research specialist for the council.

Data from 2025 from the Council on Criminal Justice found that of the 21 cities the organization reviewed, reports of shoplifting were down 10% last year from 2024, and about 4% lower than in 2019. Though the report notes that because data relies on incidents being reported to police, the true prevalence of retail theft is "almost certainly" higher. 

The cases are being prosecuted by Assistant District Attorneys Giovanna DiFilippo, Raymond Leggett, Evan Ryan, and Dominique Vaccaro, the district attorney’s office said.