The Riverside Police Department (RPD) announced Thursday that 17 smoke shops across Riverside, including nine in the Magnolia Avenue Corridor, have been shut down after months of investigations into alleged criminal activity.
Stay up to date with the latest from The Record. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter today!
The announcement comes after months of increased efforts by the Riverside City Council to crack down on the shops and certain product sales.
“I’m not sad to see an empty storefront when a business that was operating outside the rules and outside the law and preying on the community is gone,” Councilmember Sean Mill, who represents part of the Magnolia Corridor has championed several of the new restrictions, said. “I’m extremely excited to hear that those businesses will be gone along the corridor and throughout the city as a whole.”
RPD Det. Steven Espinosa said the investigations took between four and eight months and documented the shops allegedly engaged in various illegal activities including the sale of illicit drugs, nitrous oxide and kratom, the possession of weapons, the running of illegal gambling operations and money laundering.
Working with the Riverside City Attorney’s Office, the department then coordinated the closure of the smoke shops, using the evidence of alleged illegal activity collected during the investigations.
Nine of the shops were located in the Magnolia Corridor, a commerce hub on the city’s westside spanning Wards 5 and 6 that has long been identified by city officials as a hotspot for police service calls.
Ward 6 Councilmember Luis Hernandez, who was sworn into office in July, said one of his priorities was to address the Magnolia Corridor’s issues. He said he was confident the smoke shop closures would have a positive impact on combating criminal activity in the area and that the Magnolia Corridor could see some positive change if the enforcement continued.
“We’ve been working with them to identify some of these smoke shops as well, because it obviously attracts unwanted attention, loitering and sometimes even other illegal activity,” Hernandez said. “I’m glad to hear that they were able to locate those smoke shops, identify the laws that they were breaking and shut them down.”
The department added several other shops were currently under active investigation, though Espinosa said he could not disclose the exact number.
However, he explained RPD’s crackdown on the businesses has been aided by the council’s recent ban on the sale of nitrous oxide and kratom-based products.
“If my ordinance helped expose that, I’m proud of the efforts,” Mill said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “I believe that my constant drive [helped] to make sure that we crack down on these businesses that I find to be predatory businesses that are specifically placed in areas that are struggling.”
In addition to the ban on the sale of kratom and nitrous oxide, Mill also pushed for stricter rules on tobacco shops that could force some to close within the next two years.
Those new regulations were implemented a year after Mill and Councilmember Philip Falcone championed a temporary pause on the approval of any new tobacco retail permits in response to an eight-month police investigation that found multiple shops selling cannabis, nitrous oxide tanks and psilocybin mushrooms.
“Smoke shops aren’t my idea of economic development,” he added. “I think the cost that they have on our community is much greater than any money that they could possibly bring into the community.”
Last year, the council also voted to lower the maximum number of permitted cannabis dispensaries from 14 to seven after Mill raised concerns that many of the permit applications were located in Wards 5 and 6.
The Riverside Record is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet providing Riverside County with high-quality journalism free of charge. We’re able to do this because of the generous donations of supporters like you!