(BrightPress.org) – A viral video showcasing a San Francisco Target that has everything behind a lock and key is highlighting the shoplifting epidemic. The 30-second video shows someone walking down an aisle in the store with everything behind locked glass cabinets.
It’s common practice in some stores to lock up expensive, small items that are easily stolen, like razors and cosmetics, but even inexpensive items like basic toiletries, toothpaste, and shampoo were behind lock and key.
The store is near the city’s Mission District, famous for its poverty and relatively higher crime rate than some other parts of the city. San Francisco has been hit hard with organized retail crime and shoplifting during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The problem was so bad Walgreens closed five of its stores.
San Francisco is ranked second to Los Angeles for having the worst retail theft problem, according to the National Retail Federation’s 2022 survey. New York is in third place, it overtook Chicago in 2021. Seventy-one percent of retailers who responded indicated a “substantial” or “moderate” increase in organized shoplifting. More than half of them blame bail reform laws that remove or reduce the bail requirement for suspects accused of a crime.
The crime problem was cited as the reason San Francisco Whole Foods closed its doors downtown. Last week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a vote to create lucrative incentives to hire more police in order to deal with their ongoing staffing problem. Defunding the police didn’t work out so well, did it?
Unfortunately, criminal activity seems to be increasing all over the country. Earlier in April, a woman was arrested for causing a scene when she couldn’t pay for $1300 worth of merchandise at a Target in Ohio. She demanded reparations, wanted the manager to call corporate, and ended up getting clocked in the face when she aggressively pursued the manager back into his office. “This is my Rosa Parks moment,” she said to officers before her arrest.
A security guard was shot and killed by a woman attempting a robbery at a Home Depot in California. Blake Mohs, 26, was killed by Benicia Knapps when he tried to stop her from stealing a phone charger. During the struggle, Knapps shot Mohs, and he later died from his injuries. Enabling entitled people with soft-on-crime bail “reform” rules and failure to arrest and charge folks for minor crimes doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem.
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