Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul, New York City Business Leaders and District Attorneys Push for Stronger Discovery Laws to Combat Organized Retail Theft

Governor Kathy Hochul today stood with business leaders and District Attorneys to call for essential changes to New York's discovery laws that would amend reforms passed in 2019 and serve as another tool to combat retail theft. The Governor’s latest push builds on her efforts to establish new protections against organized retail theft that were signed into law with the FY25 Enacted Budget as part of her five-point plan to combat these crimes.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Let's wrap this up real quick because I've got some work to do. And Deborah, thank you for 35, 36 years ago? 36 years ago – started this and 100 percent of the proceeds go to Hearts of Gold. Her charity, which supports homeless moms and children. If that's not extraordinary as we celebrate our moms around Mother's Day, I couldn't think of a better place to come and to talk about the challenges that our small businesses are facing at this moment in time. So, you're an extraordinary woman and I just want to honor you and thank you for all you've done for 45,000 individuals over the last 36 years. Let's give Deborah another round of applause.

I want to thank our Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for joining us. He's been acknowledged. Richmond County District Attorney Michael McMahon, for those who don't know Staten Island, right? Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. And Jessica Walker, the CEO and President of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce. Let's give a round of applause to Jessica and Mark Jaffe. Mark, thank you for joining us, the President of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce.

We're here for a number of reasons. One is that our small businesses are under enormous stress right now. Just spend two minutes talking to someone like Deborah and she'll tell you that in all the years she's been in business – a very long time – that this is the moment where the future seems more uncertain than ever.

Why? Well, she came through a terrorism attack. She came through a recession. She came through a pandemic. She came through inflation. She came through retail theft, and we'll talk about that in a moment. But now she has to deal with tariffs and the cost of everything going up. So I helped my mom start a small business, and my mom dedicated her efforts to supporting victims of domestic violence. And I know what it's like.

A lot of our products would come in and you hope they weren't broken and you'd hope that someone would buy it. And you'd sit there waiting for that little bell to ring on the door on a Sunday afternoon. Because I always worked there – and sometimes it never rang that meant no customers came in and that makes your heart sink.

But when people come in, there's a sense of, “This is great, a customer has arrived!” So I've lived that experience through my own family. I have such an empathy for the businesses that are struggling now with the uncertainty that this environment out of Washington; this self-inflicted massive wound on all of us and our economy – unprecedented, unnecessary – is making the future really uncertain.

But we also stood together – and many of the people in this room – as we were fighting retail theft just a couple years ago. This was a major issue. We were seeing people come in and just swipe the shelves right here in Manhattan and all across the state. And it got so crazy. We just said, “Well, let's look at the laws. Why aren't people being arrested for this? Why aren't they being tried and put in jail? If they're doing this, what's going wrong here?”

And so we knew we needed to pass some laws, and we increased the penalties. Increased penalties, especially for assaults on retail workers and all the workers who are here, who are out there exposed in every store – exposed to someone who comes in and can do them harm.

I saw enough camera tapes from stores all over the state to see the assaults on individual workers, and it's a frightening time. And we also just gave more money to businesses for security enhancements. And I'm proud to say we did this last year. Retail theft is down eight percent already this year alone. So we're making a real difference.

And on tariffs, I don’t know what to do for you. Elections have consequences and there's always another election. That's all I can say. This is a real challenging time. This is a real challenging time for our people and I wish there was something we could do to unwind where we are at this moment.

Something has to give and I hope enough voices from the small businesses rise up. Because obviously Wall Street was not listening. But the small businesses and there's so many more people. The little mom and pop shops all over this country who need to band together and say, “This is not going to work for us. This is too much pressure. We're not going to survive in this environment. We need your help.”

And I hope those cries are listened to and I'll be there to help with that as well. But I was thinking back to the security measures we put in place – none of that means anything. When I talk about we need to have more people arrested, right? Found the person who did this. They go to court, you think something's going to happen. The DA's involved, the DA makes a case.

But it doesn't matter if that case is thrown out because of a minor technicality because then that person's back on the street and you're back at your shop wondering if they're gonna come in and rob you again or steal from you again. Right?

And to get this cycle of crime going over and over and over. I heard this from family- owned bodegas to neighborhood pharmacies, to clothing stores, to national chains. This is just an incessant attack on our stores and the owners.

So I hear from the owners: We're doing everything we need to do. We're putting in security. We're putting in cameras, we're doing what we need to do. We're being vigilant, but we're testifying in court, but the criminals keep coming back and back and back.

And one contributing factor, are the broken discovery laws. Let me get verification. I mean, our district attorneys who are trying to make the cases are saying that these laws need to be changed. Now in 2019, the laws related to this were changed and they needed to be. I will stand behind those changes. We didn't want people languishing in jails without even knowing what they're charged with or seeing the evidence for an indefinite amount of time. That has dire consequences. I've always said that.

We don't want to roll back the clock when the prosecutors have the way upper hand and can ambush the defense side, we're not looking for that. We're just looking for justice for victims. Whether they're victims of domestic violence that I've been with over the course of the last week. Or victims, like small business owners, retail theft takes a toll, makes them uncertain. And retail workers who aren't sure it's safe to come to work.

So we also don't want that pendulum to stay as far out as it is, it needs to come back to the middle. It needs to come back to the middle. So the problem is the current law does not allow prosecutors – doesn't just require prosecutors to turn over evidence. They have to turn over anything even remotely related to the case. Not something that's an important piece of evidence that anyone with common sense would think should be out there. We all want to make sure defendants get justice. But it puts an enormous burden on prosecutors when they're trying to build the retail theft cases.

Think about this. If one surveillance video over a period of time in a shop is submitted, but it fails to upload — you've got all this other evidence, you've got everything you need, ironclad — that case gets dismissed. Sorry, the person's back on the street.

If you submit a security guard's personnel file even a day late, too bad, the whole case gets thrown out the window. Or if you forget to include a witness statement that would have had no benefit to the defendant's case whatsoever — technicality, minor item, no bearing on the case — what happens? The case gets dismissed, thrown out.

So speedy trial dismissals have increased more than four times since 2019, four times more, and especially in larceny. The number of larceny dismissals have doubled since 2019.

[...]

It's tough enough. It's tough enough to be a business owner. It's tough enough. So 25 percent of these cases are thrown out, up from 14 percent just five years ago. That's thousands and thousands of cases. Not because the defendant is innocent, because of minor paperwork errors.

And I'll just give you a couple examples. The Manhattan Sephora, an employee approached a serial shoplifter who pulled out a knife on that employee after stealing perfume. During the trial, the judge dismissed the entire case for not turning over a document that didn't even exist, but the judge thought the case should be dismissed despite clear video evidence and multiple witnesses, an armed criminal walked free to hurt someone else.

Now, I didn't fight to secure these record investments in law enforcement, to support our District Attorneys, try to make our streets safer, just to watch these people walk free over frivolous errors. So we proposed some discovery reforms and they’re simple: cases should not be dismissed automatically for technical errors, the court should have to look at whether there's actual harm to the defendant. We don't want cases where there's harm — we don't want evidence where there is harm to a defendant dismissed. It’s not right. And prosecutors shouldn't have to waste their time tracking down absolutely irrelevant, irrelevant material.

We're getting protracted fights to protect sensitive information, and we need incentives for defense attorneys to identify the problems early instead of what they call ‘lying in wait.’ They know there's a problem, but they could tell the District Attorney then, or they can wait until the eve of the trial or the eve of the deadline and then tell them, then it's too late. It's too late to do anything about it. That's what's been happening. That's not right.

So this is not a binary choice. It's really not, the way some are phrasing it. We can have a fair discovery process fair for the defendant, but that also holds criminals accountable. And this goes beyond public safety.

You know, as I talk about higher costs for everyone, another part of my agenda is affordability, right? I want to talk about this because I feel we're on the verge of a very important deal with our Legislature, and I want to thank, particularly, Carl Heastie, for working so hard day and night to help us get this over the finish line. And as a football fan, we're not in the end zone. Maybe we're on the five yard line, that close? Okay. But I know one thing from football, you don't spike it until the game's over or until you get the touchdown. So that's why we're going to wait until this gets absolutely buttoned up but we're very close.

And I want to thank the Speaker and his staff and my staff and the District Attorneys who've given up so much time, so much time — they've come up to Albany, they've been an important voice for the victims who often feel no one is listening to them. And that's why we're here.

We're also concerned about families who are struggling in this environment. We talked about inflation, we talked about the tariffs. It's getting so bad out there and I'm working so hard in my Budget to enact what I call the affordability agenda. What's part of that? If you've got little kids under the age of four, which I happen to know is the most expensive time — the formula, the diapers, they outgrow everything every three months, right? Literally the clothes are like zero to three, three to six. I'm a grandma. I just bought some clothes recently.

$1,000 for every family, a child tax credit so every family with a child under the age of four can get $1,000. Older kids, $500. It starts to add up. An inflation rebate. We collected more money in sales tax than we ever anticipated because inflation was so high, right? It's a certain percentage on the price of the goods. Inflation was up, we collected more. I want to put some of that back in our consumer's pockets.

If you're a parent, again, the cost of school lunches and breakfast, it adds up to about $1,600 a year per child. You've got a couple of kids, we're going to make sure that that's covered as well.

And also the largest middle class tax rate cut in 70 years. I want to get all that done. I'm anxious to put this Budget to bed with those reform so we can start letting money flow back in your pockets. Because here's my fear, we can put upwards of $5,000 back in the pocket of a family, but the prediction from the inflation, not just the inflation, but the tariffs, is that the costs are going to go up anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 out of the other pocket. So that's the stress that New York families are under. I'm fighting that. I'm fighting for public safety, I'm fighting for affordability and I know we are on the verge of getting it done.

So I want to thank everyone, my partners in Albany for working so tirelessly on this as well. We're almost there. And again, all of you for joining us here today because these people, these small businesses and our victims everywhere, are worth fighting for. Thank you very much.