California Retail Theft Statistics (2026 Report)

California retail theft statistics for 2025 show 121,339 reported shoplifting incidents statewide — more than any other individually defined type of larceny-theft in California, surpassing theft from motor vehicles for the first time in the five years of comparable data. Shoplifting is up 89.5 percent since 2021, according to the California Department of Justice, though it fell 8.1 percent from 2024’s peak of 132,076 — the first year-over-year decline in that period. This page presents the statewide picture and compares shoplifting across the eight Southern California markets Guardian National Security serves.

Isaac Roberts, Security Specialist, Guardian National Security (PPO #120268)

This 2026 report covers 2025 data — the most recent complete official year available from the California Department of Justice — against U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 population estimates. No page-refresh date is claimed beyond that; every figure is tied to the 2025 reporting year, not to today’s date.

⚠ Not a search-demand play. A 180-day Google Search Console pull for this property returned zero measurable impressions on any query containing “shoplifting,” “retail theft” or “retail” among its top 500 queries by clicks, and Ahrefs carries no keyword record at all for the exact phrase “california retail theft statistics.” This page is not built to capture existing search volume. It is built to be cited — by journalists, researchers and other sites writing about retail crime in California — and to give Guardian National Security’s own retail-security content a sourced statewide reference to link to.

California Retail Theft Statistics at a Glance

• California retail theft statistics for 2025 are built on shoplifting, the only retail-theft category the California Department of Justice tracks as its own reporting field — 121,339 incidents statewide, a rate of 308.3 per 100,000 residents (U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025).
• Shoplifting is 25.7 percent of all California larceny-theft in 2025, up from 11.8 percent in 2021 — more than doubling its share of the larceny total in five years.
• Shoplifting overtook theft from motor vehicles in 2025 to become the largest specifically defined larceny-theft category in the state, trailing only an undefined “Other” catch-all that CA DOJ does not break down further.
• Reported shoplifting is up 89.5 percent since 2021, but it fell 8.1 percent from 2024’s peak of 132,076 incidents — 2025 is the first year in this five-year series that shoplifting declined.
• California does not publish a shoplifting-specific clearance rate. All larceny-theft cleared at 12.6 percent in 2025, higher than burglary’s 10.2 percent and vehicle theft’s 6.6 percent.
• Among the eight Southern California markets Guardian National Security has measured, Long Beach runs the highest shoplifting rate (416.0 per 100,000) and Santa Barbara County the lowest (185.3 per 100,000) — better than a two-to-one spread.

Every figure on this page comes from the California Department of Justice’s Crimes and Clearances collection or the U.S. Census Bureau, and every one can be re-derived from the raw files linked in the methodology section.

Shoplifting Is Now California’s Largest Named Category of Larceny-Theft

Of the 471,841 larceny-theft offenses California law enforcement agencies reported to the Department of Justice in 2025, 121,339 — shoplifting — was the single largest category CA DOJ names individually. Theft from motor vehicles, long the largest named category in this data, fell to 117,199 in 2025, putting shoplifting ahead of it for the first time since at least 2021. Only an unbroken “Other” catch-all, which CA DOJ does not define further, is larger.

CA DOJ does not disclose what makes up the “Other” line, so this page does not speculate about its contents — it is shown for arithmetic completeness, not characterized further. Shoplifting also accounts for a meaningful share of all property crime, not just larceny: at 121,339 offenses against 705,925 total property crimes statewide, shoplifting alone is 17.2 percent of every property offense reported in California in 2025, nearly matching motor vehicle theft’s 17.6 percent share of the same total.

Reported Shoplifting Rose 89.5 Percent Since 2021, Then Fell for the First Time in 2025

Shoplifting climbed every year from 2021 through 2024, then reversed. It rose from 64,027 incidents in 2021 to a peak of 132,076 in 2024 — a 106.3 percent increase in three years — before falling 8.1 percent to 121,339 in 2025. Even after that decline, 2025’s total is still 89.5 percent above 2021’s. Burglary, vehicle theft and larceny-theft overall each ended the five years lower than they started, and none of the three rose for three consecutive years in a row the way shoplifting did before its own 2025 pullback.

CA DOJ’s own 2025 publication carries a caution this page applies to the 2025 figures above: not every reporting agency submitted a complete year of data for 2025, and 2021–2025 combine two different reporting formats during California’s transition to incident-based reporting. This page treats the 2025 decline as a measured fact from the published data, not as a claim about why it happened — no cause is asserted, and none should be inferred from this page alone.

Five of Eight Markets Peaked in 2024; Three Are Still Climbing

The statewide 2025 decline is not universal. Comparing shoplifting counts year by year across all eight markets in this report shows two distinct patterns rather than one statewide trend. California overall, Orange County, Ventura County, the Inland Empire and Long Beach all reached their highest shoplifting count of the five-year period in 2024, then fell in 2025. Santa Barbara County, San Diego County and Kern County show the opposite pattern — each reached its own five-year high in 2025, with no decline at all.

No single explanation for the split is claimed here. Kern County’s path is the most irregular of the eight — it dipped in 2024 before setting a new high in 2025 — while Santa Barbara and San Diego counties climbed in every one of the five years without interruption. A statewide headline of “shoplifting is finally falling” would be accurate for California in aggregate and wrong for three of the eight markets Guardian National Security has measured.

California Does Not Publish a Shoplifting-Specific Clearance Rate

The Department of Justice reports clearances for larceny-theft as a whole but does not break arrests out by larceny subcategory, so no shoplifting-specific clearance rate exists in this data at the state or county level. All larceny-theft, shoplifting included, cleared at 12.6 percent in 2025 — 59,390 clearances against 471,841 reported offenses. That is a higher clearance rate than burglary (10.2 percent) or motor vehicle theft (6.6 percent), though still meaning fewer than one in eight reported larcenies resulted in an arrest.

A clearance describes an enforcement outcome after the fact, not the odds of a theft happening at a given property. Guardian National Security’s retail deterrence coverage is built around the moment before that arithmetic applies — a visible guard presence that a would-be shoplifter has to weigh before acting, not a response after the loss has already occurred.

California Retail Theft Statistics by County: How the Eight Markets Compare

The statewide 25.7 percent larceny share masks real differences by market. Guardian National Security has built crime-statistics reports for eight Southern California markets, each drawn from the same CA DOJ Crimes and Clearances collection as this statewide page. Ranked by shoplifting incidents per 100,000 residents, the eight run from Santa Barbara County’s 185.3 up to Long Beach’s 416.0 — a spread of more than two to one.

Los Angeles County’s row is marked “see note” deliberately, for the same reason Guardian National Security’s statewide commercial burglary report handles it the same way. The Los Angeles property crime statistics page profiles the City of Los Angeles using LAPD’s own incident-level data, not the county-wide CA DOJ file this table uses for the other markets. Publishing a county-wide, CA-DOJ-sourced shoplifting figure here would not match what that sibling page reports, so no county-wide Los Angeles figure is claimed — only the independently verified population figure is shown.

Long Beach carries both the highest per-capita rate and, by a wide margin, the sharpest five-year increase — shoplifting there is up 311.0 percent since 2021, nearly triple the statewide 89.5 percent. Kern County and the Inland Empire also run above the statewide rate; every other measured market runs below it. All eight markets, including the ones with the smallest per-capita rate, moved in the same direction over the five-year window — up, not down — even where 2025 alone posted a decline from 2024.

What These California Retail Theft Statistics Mean for Retailers and Property Managers

These California retail theft statistics establish three things a retail operator can act on. First, shoplifting is not a shrinking problem being crowded out by other crime categories — it is now the largest specifically defined type of theft in the state’s own data, ahead of theft from vehicles, and every measured Southern California market has seen it rise since 2021. Second, the 2025 statewide dip does not mean the pressure has eased at every property; Long Beach, Kern County and the Inland Empire all still ran above the statewide per-capita rate in the same year.

Third, these California retail theft statistics show no arrest-rate data suggesting enforcement alone is closing the gap — CA DOJ does not publish a shoplifting-specific clearance rate, and overall larceny clearance sits at 12.6 percent. A theft that is not prevented is unlikely to be quickly cleared, which is why deterrence carries more weight than the expectation of an arrest.

Guardian National Security serves all eight markets in this comparison and publishes its rates openly: unarmed guards $25–40 per hour, armed guards $35–65 per hour, and mobile patrol $45–70 per hour, with a price-match guarantee on any comparable licensed quote. Shopping center and retail security coverage and shoplifter deterrence staffing are built around the entry points, hours and departments a site’s own theft exposure actually follows, not a generic patrol schedule. For the legal changes California voters made to how repeat and high-value retail theft is charged, see Guardian National Security’s separate report on Proposition 36 and retail theft in California, which covers the prosecution and sentencing side this page does not.

Methodology and Source Notes

The California retail theft statistics on this page come from the California Department of Justice’s Crime in California 2025 annual publication (Tables 11 and 15), published through OpenJustice in July 2026, and cross-checked against the underlying Crime in California 2025 report (PDF) and the agency-level Crimes and Clearances data file. Population denominators come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 county population estimates.

“Shoplifting” is CA DOJ’s own defined category, not a broader “retail theft” or industry “shrinkage” measure. It does not include employee theft, organized retail crime rings, or losses tracked only by private retail-industry surveys — those are different measures from different sources and are not used anywhere on this page. Every statewide figure was read directly from the Crime in California 2025 report’s published tables, then independently recomputed by summing the same year’s agency-level rows in the raw Crimes and Clearances data file. Both methods produced the identical statewide 2025 shoplifting total of 121,339 — a summary-table figure and a row-level sum, computed two different ways from two different files.

The county and city figures in the comparison table were cross-checked against Guardian National Security’s own previously published Inland Empire, Orange County, San Diego County, Ventura County, Kern County and Santa Barbara County crime-statistics reports, each built in an earlier, separate session from a separate query of the same CA DOJ source — every one of those six figures matched this session’s independent computation exactly. Long Beach’s shoplifting figure was computed the same way from the same file but is not published on Long Beach’s own sibling page, which reports a different larceny breakdown (vehicle-related theft); it is sourced independently here, not borrowed from that page.

Population figures were verified by confirming that Riverside and San Bernardino counties’ combined population matches the Inland Empire page’s previously published figure exactly, and that the sum of all 58 California counties in the Census Bureau’s file equals the state’s own published total. Long Beach’s population comes from the Bureau’s separate city and town estimates file, not the county file used for the other seven markets, because Long Beach is a city rather than a county.

Deliberately not claimed on this page:

• A shoplifting-specific clearance or arrest rate, statewide or by county. CA DOJ publishes clearances for larceny-theft as a whole only, not broken out by subcategory.
• A county-wide, CA-DOJ-sourced shoplifting figure for Los Angeles County. Guardian National Security’s Los Angeles sibling page profiles the City of Los Angeles using a different dataset (LAPD’s own incident-level records), a different geography and a different methodology than the county-wide file used for the other seven markets on this page.
• Any cause for the 8.1 percent statewide decline in shoplifting from 2024 to 2025, including any effect attributed to Proposition 36 or any other law. CA DOJ’s own publication cautions that 2025 combines two reporting formats during an active transition and that not every agency submitted a full year of data; this page reports the measured decline without asserting why it happened.
• Any industry “shrinkage” or organized-retail-crime dollar-loss estimate. Those come from private retail-association surveys, not a government primary source, and are not comparable to CA DOJ’s incident counts.
• Any reduction-in-loss percentage attributable to hiring a security guard. No CA DOJ or Census dataset measures the effect of private security staffing on shoplifting rates, and any figure claiming a specific percentage reduction would not be traceable to a primary source.

Limits of this data. These California retail theft statistics are offenses reported to police; unreported shoplifting is not counted, and retail-industry research consistently finds a large share of shoplifting goes unreported to police at all — a limitation of any government crime dataset, not specific to this page. Figures reflect calendar year 2025 as published by CA DOJ in July 2026 and are not updated in real time. County-level detail beyond shoplifting — burglary, vehicle theft, clearance rates and five-year trends for other categories — is published on each market’s own page linked above, not repeated here.

California Retail Theft Statistics: Frequently Asked Questions