California WILDFIREs | Fearless residents get tough with looters, threaten to shoot them; hire private security as incidents of robberies and crimes soar

Daily MailLos Angeles 

Los Angeles residents have put up signs threatening to shoot looters as almost 70 opportunist criminals were arrested while trying to burgle evacuated homes.  Among the 68 people who were arrested is a burglar who disguised himself as a firefighter to gain access to decimated mansions caught in the path of the worst fires to ever tear through Los Angeles. 

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna revealed the fake fireman had been arrested in glitzy Malibu - which was particularly ravaged by the largest of the fires — when he was caught burglarising the abandoned and burnt out homes along the waterfront.

Authorities who have vowed to prosecute looters to the full extent of the law as the city reels from devastating, which are still destroying everything in their paths across southern California.

Security in evacuated neighbourhoods has been beefed up, with wealthy residents employing a private security firm to protect their homes from looters after abandoning them due to the ongoing wildfires.

Private guard Arturo Garcia told the ‘Los Angeles Times’ he and his partner had been working around the clock outside a stately home in Pacific Palisades they had been paid to protect and didn’t when they would be able to go home. 

Garcia, employed as a deputy sheriff, works with a private company. He and his partner have joined fire trucks and law enforcement in patrolling the streets of the now largely burnt-out neighborhood.

Some residents have taken matters into their own hands as they put up signs warning looters they would ‘be shot’ if they dared to try and burgle their homes. The burglar dressed as a firefighter was sitting on the side of the road in Malibu, causing LA Country Sheriff Luna to ask him whether he was okay. “I didn’t realise we had him in handcuffs,” Luna said. “We were turning him over to LAPD as he was dressed like a fireman, and he was not. He got caught burglarising a home.”

He said the man had pretended to be associated with one particular fire station, but after a quick check with the department it was established he was lying. Two fires, the Pacific Palisades blaze and the Eaton fire, have been destructive, killing 24 people so far, wiping out at least 12,300 structures and burning through 40,300 acres.

Luna said 25 people have been arrested in the area surrounding the Eaton Fire evacuation zone, and another four in the Palisades region. Lihui Xu, whose home is in Altadena, near Eaton Canyon where the fire started, said she was lucky her house survived the inferno, but said it had also been burgled.