Good morning.
Quickly after shifting to San Francisco in 2016, I walked right into a Walgreens in North Seaside to purchase an electrical toothbrush.
As I used to be paying for it, a person walked into the shop, grabbed a handful of beef jerky and walked out. I seemed over at an worker, who shrugged. Then I went to Safeway subsequent door for some groceries and I noticed a person stuffing three bottles of wine right into a backpack and strolling casually towards the exit. On his approach out he bagged some snacks. I requested the Safeway clerk concerning the thefts.
“I’m new to San Francisco,” I mentioned. “Is it non-compulsory to pay for issues right here?”
5 years later, the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco has solely worsened.
At a board of supervisors listening to final week, representatives from Walgreens mentioned that thefts at its shops in San Francisco had been 4 instances the chain’s nationwide common, and that it had closed 17 shops, largely as a result of the dimensions of thefts had made enterprise untenable.
Brendan Dugan, the director of the retail crime division at CVS Well being, known as San Francisco “one of many epicenters of organized retail crime” and mentioned workers had been instructed to not pursue suspected thieves as a result of encounters had change into too harmful.
“We’ve had incidents the place our safety officers are assaulted on a fairly common foundation in San Francisco,” Dugan mentioned.
The retail executives and cops emphasised the position of organized crime within the thefts. And so they instructed the supervisors that Proposition 47, the 2014 poll measure that reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen items are price lower than $950, had emboldened thieves.
“The one development we’re seeing is extra violence and escalating — and far more daring,” mentioned Commander Raj Vaswani, the pinnacle of the investigations bureau on the San Francisco Police Division. “We see a whole lot of repeat offenders.”
San Francisco has suffered in quite a lot of methods through the pandemic. Town has had twice as many deadly drug overdoses as coronavirus deaths. Tents of legions of homeless folks lined sidewalks through the lockdowns. However the listening to final week targeted on one thing far more prosaic: One of many richest cities in America is combating sticky fingers.
The listening to didn’t reply a vital query: Why San Francisco? If the issue stems partly from a change in California regulation, why aren’t different cities within the state seeing related spikes in shoplifting?
On Thursday I known as Ahsha Safaí, the member of the board of supervisors who organized the listening to.
We talked concerning the thefts we had witnessed within the metropolis and the sidewalk thieves’ markets the place steaks, bicycles and different stolen items are fenced. Safaí mentioned he had not too long ago stopped to examine certainly one of these markets at twenty fourth and Mission.
“Half of Walgreens was on the sidewalk. I’m not kidding,” Safaí mentioned. “I used to be blown away. I’ve by no means seen something prefer it on this metropolis.”
He talked about what he known as a laissez-faire perspective in San Francisco.
“It has change into a part of the panorama,” he mentioned of thefts. “Folks say, ‘Oh, properly, that simply occurs.’”
Thieves “are clearly selecting locales based mostly on what the results are,” Safaí mentioned. “If there are not any penalties for his or her actions, then you definitely invite the habits. Again and again.”
Right here’s what else to know in the present day
Compiled by Jonathan Wolfe