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Among the many problems plaguing San Francisco in recent years,
business leaders say one has become so commonplace that
residents barely notice it: shoplifting.

Walgreens says petty theft in the city has gotten so out of
control that it’s had to close 17 of its stores. CVS has told
its employees not to intervene because the thieves so often
attack them, calling San Francisco “one of the epicenters of
organized retail crime.”

“We’ve had incidents where our security officers are assaulted
on a pretty regular basis in San Francisco,” Brendan Dugan, head
of CVS’ retail crime division, said at a 13 May hearing with
city officials, according to a New York Times report.

Police agree that the stealing has become endemic.

“The one trend we are seeing is more violence and escalating –
and much more bold,” Commander Raj Vaswani of the San Francisco
Police Department said at the hearing. “We see a lot of repeat
offenders.”

Even more shocking is the fact that many shoplifters then sell
their stolen goods on the street – often not far from the store
where they stole them.

For example, the Walgreens at 30th St and Mission St reported 16
shoplifting incidents from November 2020 to February 2021. Just
six blocks away, at 24th St and Mission, a city official said he
saw Walgreens’ products being sold at an outdoor market.

“Half of Walgreens was on the sidewalk. I’m not kidding,” Ahsha
Safaí, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, told
The New York Times. “I was blown away. I’ve never seen anything
like it in this city.”

Meanwhile, local residents are angry – at the stores. When a
Walgreens that had seen 18 stealing incidents in four months
announced it was closing, a group of citizens started a petition
demanding that it remain open.

“Walgreens Corp has an annual revenue of around $139.5 billion,”
the petitioners wrote. “We think they can afford to keep needed
stores like this open.”

“In the middle of a pandemic and crisis, we cannot allow profit
driven greedy Corporations to further traumatize and abandon
their responsibility to the community,” one signer of the
petition wrote. “Shame on Walgreens.”

San Francisco has faced a painful set of concurring crises in
recent years, including skyrocketing homelessness and an
epidemic of drug overdoses. And in 2020, added to all that was
the Covid-19 pandemic.

City officials say all these problems have fueled the rise in
shoplifting, but other factors have contributed as well. For one
thing, in 2014 California passed a ballot measure called
Proposition 47, which deems any nonviolent theft of items worth
less than $950 a misdemeanor, not a felony.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/san-francisco- shoplifting-walgreens-closing-b1852470.html

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