San Francisco shoplifters defeat efforts to stop them

Last week the SF Standard published a story about the new style of shopping in downtown San Francisco. Because of constant shoplifting, many stores have resorted to putting anything valuable in a locked cabinet or shelf. This turns out to be a major pain for shoppers and for employees.

“It’s just too much,” said David MacDowell, who is quitting Safeway after six months…

Customers said they were unhappy with the arrangement, too. Danielle Strauss waited over three minutes on Friday to purchase a single tube of toothpaste from the Castro Safeway.

“Most of the time, I just order this stuff online to avoid going here completely,” Strauss said.

This seems like a pretty bad trade off. The stores may manage to reduce shoplifting but only at the cost of turning off customers who don’t want to spend 5-10 minutes waiting for assistance to buy toothpaste. The situation has become so grim that Walgreens in San Francisco was even locking up candy.

Today, the SF Standard has a follow-up which suggests that even this new approach isn’t working.

Shoplifters at a San Francisco Walgreens ripped off the plastic screens on its locked-up shelves on Monday night, a store manager said…

Walgreens manager Chanh Luu said the group entered the Bernal Heights store at around 8 p.m. and began smashing the shelves in two of the store’s aisles, where laundry soap and dental products are locked away behind plastic shields due to rampant shoplifting in the city. The shields were torn away so the thieves could get their hands on the items but were already replaced by Tuesday when The Standard visited…

They then fled from the 3398 Mission St. store with $200 worth of toothpaste and laundry detergent, leaving behind $250 worth of damage, Luu said.

Police confirmed the incident and said there had been 88 reported thefts at this particular Walgreens between Jan 1 and May 28. That’s just under 150 days so we’re talking about more than one theft every other day. And of course it’s likely the store isn’t aware of every thief so this is just a minimum. (The story does note that’s a decline from last year when there were 102 thefts in the same time period.)

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. People brazen enough to bring trash bags into the store to shoplift in front of everyone probably don’t have a problem breaking plastic barriers to get to what they are stealing. I’m hoping those locked cabinets that look like glass are actually plexiglass. If they are glass, how long before the shoplifters start walking in with bricks?

As always, the state of California is right there to make the situation worse. The state is in the process of passing a bill called SB 553 introduced by State Sen. Dave Cortese which is aimed at preventing workplace violence. One part of the bill says employers are not allowed to order their employees to attempt to stop shoplifters.

“What we’re saying in the bill is, it’s not ok for an employer to take a rank and file worker, somebody whose job is really something else, a reporter for example, and say ‘hey if there’s an intruder, we’re going to deputize you. You’ll be the one to intervene.’ People get hurt and oftentimes killed that way,” Cortese said.

In April, 25-year-old Blake Mohs was shot and killed when he tried to prevent a woman from stealing from a Home Depot in Pleasanton.

Around two weeks later, 24-year-old Banko Brown was shot and killed after a scuffle with a security guard in a San Francisco Walgreens. Still, over 50 organizations, including the California Retailers Association, (CRA) don’t support the bill.

“This bill goes way too far, number one, where I think it will open the doors even wider for people to come in and steal from our stores. Number two, Cal OSHA has been working on regulations for the past few years that all industries have been engaged in. We’d like to see Cal OSHA processes continue because we have been working with them,” said Rachel Michelin, CRA president and CEO.

The confusion of the bill seems to be coming in part from State Sen. Cortese. Every story about this bill that I’ve looked (including the excerpt above) points to two specific incidents as examples of the kind of thing the bill is meant to stop. One was a worker at a California Home Depot who was shot to death when he confronted a shoplifter. The other is the shooting of Banko Brown which happened at a San Francisco Walgreens. However, the employee who shot Bank Brown was a licensed, armed security guard. The DA has decided the guard will not be prosecuted for the shooting. So if that’s the kind of thing Sen. Cortese wants to stop then CRA has a point about this bill being too broad.

The midst of a spike in retail theft that is leading to shuttered stores may not be the moment to clamp down on the retailers rather than the thieves. Here’s a local news report about SB 553. Sen. Cortese claims the CRA’s objection has been dealt with in an amendment which does suggest the language wasn’t clear the first time.

It should go without saying that what would really make the workers safer is putting the thieves in jail so they can’t rob and threaten those employees. Does Sen. Cortese has any plans to do anything about that?