Stepping over shattered glass in Oakland has become a humdrum matter, and local shop owners are exhausted from maintaining a constant vigilance against retail theft. They were even more fumed after learning that the city of Oakland missed an application deadline to receive state funds to help fight retail crime.

On Thursday, the Board of State and Community Corrections approved the distribution of more than $267 million to local police and sheriff’s departments and district attorney’s offices throughout California to fight organized retail theft. The money will go to create task forces, hire and train staff and purchase new technologies. There were 55 awardees.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.