Every day, prosecutors across the country show up ready to do their jobs: enforce the law, protect communities, and hold offenders accountable. But when it comes to organized retail crime, they are increasingly confronting a sophisticated national and transnational criminal threat with inadequate tools designed for isolated local offenses.
Organized retail crime has real consequences beyond the loss of product for the retailer. It reaches distribution centers, warehouses, transportation networks, and most importantly, our communities. Workers feel less safe. Consumers pay higher prices. Economic stability and public safety are eroded.
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Congress now has an opportunity to close this enforcement gap and restore the rule of law by passing the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act.
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Organized retail crime is not a series of individual thefts. It is coordinated criminal activity carried out by structured networks operating across jurisdictional lines. These groups target retail stores, cargo hubs, trucking depots, and rail yards in coordinated and deliberate patterns, moving stolen goods quickly through fencing operations, often before law enforcement can intervene.
Even when arrests are made, those taken into custody are typically the most visible participants in a much larger criminal enterprise. The coordinators, financiers, and organizers remain insulated from accountability. As a result, local and state entities rarely disrupt the broader networks driving these crimes.
This is not just an urban or rural, law enforcement or prosecutor issue. It is a nationwide deficiency in failing to provide the appropriate tools and legal infrastructure needed to combat modern, multi-jurisdictional criminal networks properly. While these operations span states and supply chains, enforcement tools remain limited in reach and scope.
CORCA would help tackle these challenges faced by communities through enhanced federal support against organized retail crime. It would establish an Organized Retail Crime Coordination Center that would bring together federal, state, local, tribal, and private-sector partners. This includes retailers, manufacturers, logistics providers, transportation stakeholders, and warehouse operators. Improved collaboration and information-sharing would bolster existing efforts to combat organized crime rings as well as related crimes such as fentanyl trafficking and elder fraud.
CORCA will also allow law enforcement to connect related cases across jurisdictions and build investigations that reach beyond individual incidents. As the National District Attorneys Association emphasized in its April 2025 letter, investigators need the ability to “connect the dots and track the entire criminal syndicate from the ground level booster to the fences and criminal heads.” CORCA provides that framework.
Most importantly, the legislation does not turn shoplifting into a federal offense. Instead, it targets the organized networks driving these crimes and gives law enforcement the means to focus on the high-level leaders orchestrating from the top.
Thirty-eight state attorneys general support CORCA, along with major law enforcement organizations and leading industry trade associations, including the National Retail Federation, Retail Industry Leaders Association, and the Association of American Railroads. It also has strong support from logistics and transportation stakeholders directly affected by cargo theft and supply chain disruption.
As the then-NDAA president and San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, prosecutors are making progress in individual cases, but still cannot fully reach the networks behind them. She explained that investigators “have not been able to break through to what is going on nationally. We know these groups are operating nationally and internationally … but the investigations stop at the local level.” The challenge is not effort. It is the lack of a system built to follow criminal activity across jurisdictional lines.
The scale of the problem underscores the urgency. According to Capital One Shopping, retailers lost an estimated $47.8 billion to retail theft in 2025. RILA provided further insight on this in 2025, stating that retail crime is being underreported. In 2023, there were over 105,000 recorded events of retail theft, but only 11,500 were reported due to under-resourced, overworked departments. The damage does not stop at retail stores.
Trucking companies and logistics providers face cargo theft and unsafe conditions at depots and transfer points. Warehouse operators and rail-linked distribution hubs face coordinated theft that slows commerce and raises costs. CargoNet reports that in the third quarter of 2025, the total value of stolen goods reached $111.8 million, mostly driven by organized crime groups.
These losses ultimately reach consumers through higher prices and negative shopping experiences, while communities suffer. Every closure or disruption removes jobs, services, and a stabilizing presence in communities, often those that can least afford it.
Major retailers, including Dollar Tree, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart, have cited increases in violent crime and retail theft as contributing factors in closing stores. These incidents are driving major investments in security and workplace protection across industries. Workers across the system are not collateral damage. They are the front-line victims of an increasingly organized and emboldened criminal enterprise.
It’s time to update our laws to match the scale of this threat. Law enforcement, Main Street businesses, retailers, supply chain operators, and bipartisan leaders in Congress agree: the current system is not keeping pace.
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America’s prosecutors are ready to do their part. But to promote justice and ensure public safety, they need a legal framework that allows them to follow evidence across state lines, connect cases across the supply chain, and dismantle criminal organizations.
Congress should close this gap by passing CORCA.
Nelson O. Bunn Jr. is executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, the nation’s oldest and largest association of prosecutors with over 7,000 members nationwide.
