Robbery is not a theft charge with a harsher name. It's a violent felony, and it can never be reduced to a misdemeanor, no matter how small the property was or how minor the confrontation looked.
That last part is what catches people. Robbery charges in Los Angeles routinely come out of much smaller situations. For example, someone shoplifts and there is a struggle at the door, or a simple argument ends with one person holding the other person’s phone. The person arrested is often stunned to learn what they’re facing, because the word "robbery" doesn’t match anything they think they did.
Boyadzhyan Legal Shield defends people charged with robbery across Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, from our office in Encino. A robbery conviction is a strike. It follows you into every case you might ever have afterward, and it limits how much of any sentence you can work off. This is a charge to take seriously from the first day.
Penal Code 211 defines robbery as taking personal property in the possession of another, from their person or immediate presence, against their will, by means of force or fear, with the intent to deprive them of it.
Several of those elements are narrower than they sound, and each is a place where cases break.
A purse lifted without any resistance is generally not robbery. The same purse taken after a struggle is. That difference is the whole case, because force or fear is the only thing separating robbery from theft. Picking something up and carrying it off is not force, however fast it happens. The force has to be more than the taking itself required: enough to overcome someone holding on to their property, or to make them let go.
Without force or fear, the same conduct is a theft charge, and theft carries dramatically less exposure. Taking property directly from another person is grand theft under Penal Code 487(c). Proposition 47 then added Penal Code 490.2. A theft of $950 or less is petty theft, a misdemeanor, no matter what Section 487 says. The exception is a person with a prior conviction for one of a short list of the most serious offenses, or for one that requires sex offender registration. Above $950, the charge stays grand theft. Proposition 36 added another layer. Penal Code 666.1 took effect on December 18, 2024. Where a person has two or more prior theft convictions, a prosecutor can charge that same petty theft as a felony. Those priors count no matter how old they are.
No one has to say a word. Robbery can rest on fear alone. Penal Code 212 defines what counts: fear of injury to the person, to a relative or family member, or to their property. It also covers fear of immediate injury to anyone who is with them at the time. Two things then have to be true. The person was actually afraid, and that fear was reasonable. Whether someone was genuinely frightened in the moment, or only decided afterward that they should have been, is a question a defense can take on directly.
Money in a register a few feet from a cashier counts. The property does not have to be in someone's hands or on their body. The test is whether it was close enough that they could have held on to it, if force or fear had not been used.
There is no threshold. A robbery of five dollars carries the same charge as a robbery of five thousand.
Two incidents can look identical in a police report: a fight that broke out over something else, and a fight started in order to take something. The difference is when the intent to take the property formed. The prosecution has to prove that intent was already there at the moment force or fear was used, not that it arrived afterward.
Penal Code 212.5 sets the degrees. First degree is not a judgment about how serious the robbery was. It’s a short list of specific situations, and a case is either on that list or it isn’t.
Three situations make a robbery first degree.
The first is a robbery inside a place where someone lives. That covers a house or an apartment, and it also covers a boat, a floating home, a trailer, or the lived-in part of any other building.
The second is a robbery of the driver or a passenger of a vehicle that carries people for money. That covers buses, taxis, and rideshare vehicles.
The third is a robbery of someone who is using an ATM, or who has just used one and is still nearby.
Under Penal Code 213, first degree robbery carries three, four, or six years in state prison. If three or more people acted together inside a place where someone lives, that range goes up to three, six, or nine years.
Every robbery that is not on that list is second degree, and that’s most robbery cases. It carries two, three, or five years in state prison.
Both degrees are strikes, and both are classified as violent felonies. Custody credits are the time a person can earn off a sentence while serving it. On most offenses those credits cut the time served substantially. On a violent felony they’re capped, so roughly 85 percent of the sentence has to be served.
Attempted robbery is also a felony and also a strike, generally carrying half the term of the completed offense.
An Estes robbery is one of the most common ways ordinary people end up charged with a violent felony in Los Angeles County. The name comes from a 1983 case, People v. Estes. In practice it means a shoplift can turn into a robbery in the parking lot.
Someone takes merchandise worth forty dollars and walks out. A loss prevention officer follows them out of the store and grabs their arm. They pull away, or they push back. What was a misdemeanor shoplifting case under Penal Code 459.5 is now a second degree robbery. It carries up to five years and a strike.
That’s the Estes rule at work. The force or fear does not have to happen while the property is being taken. Using force or fear to get away with the property is enough. That’s what turns a theft into a robbery.
These cases are heavily litigated for good reason. They turn on three questions that are genuinely contestable.
Pulling your arm free from someone who has grabbed you is not obviously force against a person. There’s a real difference between resisting being held and using force to keep the property. What happened is often not what the incident report says happened.
If the property had already been abandoned, or if the confrontation happened after the theft was complete and over, the legal analysis changes.
Loss prevention officers have limited authority, and where a detention was itself improper or excessive, a self-defense argument becomes available.
The video in these cases matters enormously, and store surveillance footage is frequently recorded over within weeks. A preservation demand is a written notice telling the store to keep the footage. Getting one out early is one of the most valuable things that can happen in an Estes case, and it’s one of the first things we do.
Robbery is one of the offenses on the list for California's most severe firearm enhancement.
Penal Code 12022.53 adds ten years for personally using a firearm during a robbery, twenty years for intentionally discharging one, and 25 years to life where the discharge causes great bodily injury or death. The statute provides that the firearm does not need to be loaded or operable.
The second enhancement is about injury rather than weapons. Penal Code 12022.7 adds three or more years where great bodily injury was inflicted.
A judge can take a firearm enhancement off a case entirely. Senate Bill 620 gave judges that power under Penal Code 1385, which lets a court strike an enhancement in the interest of justice. Striking an enhancement means removing it from the case, which is a different use of the word than the strike a robbery conviction carries. Senate Bill 81 then expanded what a court has to consider before deciding.
In a robbery case with an enhancement attached, that decision is often where the most sentencing time is actually available. It’s won on the strength of a mitigation record about the person facing the charge, not on the facts of the offense.
One more piece of arithmetic people don’t expect: each victim is a separate count. A robbery of three people in one incident is three robbery charges, not one. How many counts the facts actually support is something we test early.
Knarik Boyadzhyan served as a Deputy Public Defender, representing people facing serious felony charges at every stage of a case. She appears regularly in the Van Nuys and Glendale courthouses and throughout Los Angeles County, and Boyadzhyan Legal Shield works with clients from the firm's office in Encino.
Almost every robbery defense begins in the same place, because there’s only one lever that changes the category of the case.
This is the central argument in most robbery cases. It's the difference between a strike offense and something that may be a misdemeanor, and it lives entirely in the force-or-fear element. What a police report characterizes as force and what the video actually shows are frequently two different things. We reconstruct the sequence second by second, because the law requires force beyond what is incidental to taking the property, and that line is where robbery charges get reduced.
Store footage, parking lot cameras, cameras on nearby businesses, police body cameras, and phone video from witnesses. Most of these systems record over themselves within a few weeks. If your case has video, it’s frequently the entire defense, and once it’s erased it doesn’t come back.
Robberies happen fast, often in the dark, to a frightened person looking at a stranger. Then police drive that witness to where someone has been detained and ask whether that is the person. One person, in handcuffs, beside a patrol car. That's called a field showup, and it's suggestive by its nature, because there’s only one person to pick. How the showup or the lineup was run, what the witness was told, and what the witness said first, before being shown anyone, all matter. An identification made under those conditions is among the least reliable evidence in criminal law, and where the case rests on one, that’s where the case is.
California allows a defense where someone took back a specific thing they honestly believed was already theirs. Two limits on it. The belief has to be sincere, and it has to attach to that exact item. Collecting a debt does not count: taking a neighbor's tools over an unpaid loan is not this defense. Between people who know each other it comes up far more often than the charge suggests. It turns on the history between the two of them, which a police report almost never contains.
A fight where a phone ends up on the ground and one person picks it up is not the same case as a fight started in order to take the phone. Robbery requires that the intent to take the property already existed at the moment force was used. Where it did not, that element is open to challenge. Assault and robbery are different charges. Where more than one person is charged, the real question is usually whether you took part or were simply there. Being present is not the same as taking part, and the prosecution has to prove the difference.
An enhancement is a distinct proceeding with distinct evidence, and since SB 620 it can be won even where the underlying charge cannot.
Mitigation is the file we build about who our client is: work, school, family, health, treatment, service, and letters from people who know them. In a case carrying a strike and a possible enhancement, that file affects what gets charged, what gets offered, and what a judge does at sentencing. It takes months to assemble properly, which is why it starts on the first day and not the week before a hearing.
Robbery is often filed after an investigation, and the decision about whether the case is filed as robbery or as theft is made by a person who has only read a police report.
If you’re ever convicted of another felony, this conviction doubles the sentence on that new case. That’s what a strike does. The credits are a separate problem. Custody credits are the days that come off a sentence for good conduct and work. Because robbery is a violent felony, those credits are limited. Roughly 85 percent of whatever term is imposed has to be served.
Robbery is treated seriously under federal immigration law, both as a crime involving moral turpitude and, depending on the sentence imposed, potentially as an aggravated felony. That first category has no statutory definition and turns on the wording of the statute rather than on what happened, as our guide to the immigration consequences of a California conviction explains. For anyone who is not a United States citizen, this has to shape the defense from the first conversation, particularly around what sentence length a plea carries.
A felony conviction means you cannot legally possess a firearm in California for the rest of your life.
Employers, landlords, and licensing boards read a violent felony conviction differently from almost anything else on a record. With some felonies, a reduction to a misdemeanor becomes available years later. Robbery is not one of them: it is never a wobbler, so no reduction is available later.
Not to explain that it was your property, not to say the other person started it, not to minimize. In a robbery case the difference between theft and a strike lives in details you won’t know are important.
Not to apologize, not to offer to pay, not through anyone else. Contact during a pending case can create new charges.
Which store, which corner, roughly what time, and who would have the recording. We can send a letter demanding that the footage be saved, but only while it still exists, and many systems erase themselves within weeks.
Who touched whom first, what was said and by whom, where your hands were, how far apart everyone was standing, and who else was there, including people who only walked past. Write it today, while you still have it, and keep it for your attorney.
Calls from a jail phone are recorded, apart from properly placed calls to your attorney, and prosecutors do listen to them. The same goes for posts, texts, and messages. A sentence written to reassure your family can be read out loud in court as an admission.
If your question is not answered here, call (310) 877-7770 to discuss your situation.
Boyadzhyan Legal Shield defends robbery cases throughout Los Angeles County from the firm's office in Encino. Whether you have been arrested, contacted by detectives, or are waiting to learn whether the case will be filed as robbery or as theft, we can talk through where things stand.
Initial consultations are free and confidential, with no obligation to hire the firm.
This page is general legal information, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. California statute references link to the official California Legislative Information site.
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