Author: HP McLovincraft

With investors and residents fleeing, organized crime has found itself some big business opportunities in leftwing San Francisco.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

Retailers attributed a majority of losses to professional thieves instead of opportunistic shoplifters who may be driven by poverty, with one CVS leader calling San Francisco a hub of organized retail crime. Losses have shuttered drugstores providing vital services, even more critical during the pandemic as some stores give out vaccines.

“This has been out of control,” said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who held a hearing Thursday with retailers, police, the district attorney and probation departments. “People are scared to go into these stores — seniors, people with disabilities, children. It’s just happening brazenly. We can’t just as a city throw up our hands and say this is OK. We have to come up with solutions.”

And more to the point, drug stores, groceries, and small retailers are closing rather than let these organized crime theft rings strip them bare.

According to today’s New York Times:

At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable.

And yes, the crime was organized:

Brendan Dugan, the director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, called San Francisco “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime” and said employees were instructed not to pursue suspected thieves because encounters had become too dangerous.

“We’ve had incidents where our security officers are assaulted on a pretty regular basis in San Francisco,” Dugan said.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The cost of business and shoplifting led Walgreens to shut 17 locations in San Francisco in the past five years — an “unpopular and difficult decision,” Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii, said at the hearing. The company still has 53 stores in the city.

Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, Cunningham said.

At CVS, 42% of losses in the Bay Area came from 12 stores in San Francisco, which are only 8% of the market share, Brendan Dugan, director of organized retail crime and corporate investigations, said at the hearing.

So now it’s empty storefronts and fleeing residents in a city supposedly in a boom. The leftists in charge decided that there were so many, they’d try to tax them. That hasn’t stopped the flight.

Meanwhile, the poor old people who can no longer get their medications easily, or the Asian-American shopkeepers, assaulted by organized criminal gangs for trying to protect their merchandise, are significant victims. Nobody leftist cares about them. San Francisco’s rabid-left district attorney, Chesa Boudin, adopted son of Bill Ayers, failed to show up for an event to support an assaulted Asian-American shopkeeper just the other day, going full weasel.

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