Sensational news reports of mob thefts, particularly in California, have spurred promises of law enforcement budget increases from the state’s Governor Newsom and other proposed actions, supported by oft-cited numbers from the California Retailers Association, which reportedly said organized retail crime had produced astonishingly high losses of $3.6 billion in San Francisco and Oakland alone. But those numbers are apparently not standing up to scrutiny. The NRF’s research on organized retail theft point to an amount roughly 330 times lower than the CRA’s estimate.