‘We can’t go inside, but you can’: Arcade owner repays homeless encampment after vagrants ransack his business and police hands are tied | Law Enforcement Today

SAN BERNADINO, CA - Will Luna, owner of the Extraordinaire Arcade in San Bernadino could only watch on helplessly as he observed at least 18 homeless people strip his arcade to the bone on security footage from now-stolen cameras. Although a homeless good Samaritan told police where Luna’s stolen equipment and merchandise were taken, the officers were powerless due to laws protecting “homeless rights.”

According to The New York Post, from Wednesday to Friday over the Thanksgiving holiday, a woman who had hidden in the arcade’s ceiling waited for Luna to close his doors from Wednesday to Friday before dropping into the business and opening the doors.
“They were just in there, in and out. They had a free-for-all all,” Luna told reporters as he tried to replace the lost equipment.

He explained that his arcade had been cleaned out with security cameras, gaming consoles, his debit card reader, keys to all of the game machines an entire X-Men arcade cabinet, and even the snack foods were stolen. And though he said police performed an initial investigation, a major break in the case from a vagrant at a homeless encampment couldn’t be answered.

Luna told the officers that his equipment was found. So Luna went there himself. “I just went through all their tents. I started knocking that s–t down,” he said. “I was ripping all the tents up. And I start finding my stuff.”

The Arcade owner reached out to the police but he said the officers replied they were forbidden from entering or moving the homeless thieves’ tents. “I said, ‘Why can’t you guys just move this s–t and go in there?’ They said, ‘We can’t.’ It violated homeless rights,” Luna told the Post. “I said, ‘I don’t give a f–k about how many rights they have. These people have my stuff.’”

“They said, ‘We can’t go inside, but you can.’ So I did. I kept tearing that s–t down.”

Although he recovered some of the stolen goods, Luna says he didn’t recover several consoles including PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch consoles, or his X-Men game cabinet. He reported that a neighboring salon was also victimized.

"Excuse my French, but f* whoever did this," Luna said in a post on Instagram. "Look at this man, my whole counter. Wow dude."

"I feel violated," Luna told KABC.  "I’m extremely upset." No arrests related to the burglary have been made. The owner estimated to the outlet that his losses could amount to as much as $12,000.