Calese Crowder, the Southern California man police have arrested repeatedly for sniffing women’s rear ends in public, was taken into custody again Friday after two Glendale stores called police about him within the same hour. He is 39, a registered sex offender, and he was already on parole when it happened.
The first call came in around 3:30 p.m. from a business on the 1500 block of West Glenoaks Boulevard. According to the Glendale Police Department, a witness reported a man “hunkered down” in the aisles who appeared to be “sniffing someone out.” Officers were still wrapping up that response when a second call came in from the Marshalls near South Brand Boulevard and East Broadway describing the same behavior.
Police pulled surveillance footage from both locations and identified Calese Crowder as the man in the video. Officers found him a short time later on the 100 block of South Brand. He was booked for violating his parole and is being held without bail until his hearing.
An employee at one of the businesses told reporters this was not the first time he had seen it happen. He described Crowder crouching down, looking around, and waiting for a chance to get close to a woman. The first time he noticed it, he said, he thought the man just looked creepy and could not figure out what he was doing.
The pattern goes back years. Crowder’s arrests for similar lewd conduct in Glendale and Burbank date to 2021. In July 2025, Burbank police responded to a Nordstrom Rack at the Empire Center after reports of a man loitering in the women’s department. Surveillance video showed him following a woman through the store, crouching behind her, and sniffing her. Officers found him afterward at a nearby Walmart, where police say he was following another female shopper. About a month later, he was arrested again for a similar incident inside a Burbank Walgreens.
He was also arrested in November 2025 for failing to meet an annual sex offender registration requirement for more than two months. He admitted to a parole violation last year and was sentenced to more than 100 days in jail. Police have also described a longer history that includes peeping, prowling, and residential burglary across Burbank and Glendale.
Most people first saw Calese Crowder in August 2023, when a woman posted TikTok footage of a man crouched down inches from her legs inside a Burbank Barnes and Noble. That video went viral and put a face to what had already been a local problem for two years. Three years later, the same face is in a new booking photo.
The current case will be decided by a judge at his upcoming hearing. Because the arrest was for a parole violation rather than a new charge, the outcome depends on how the court handles the violation, and it is possible additional charges could follow once prosecutors review the case.
