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> The hearing did not answer a crucial question: Why San Francisco? If the problem stems in part from a change in California law, why aren’t other cities in the state seeing similar spikes in shoplifting?
> The hearing did not answer a crucial question: Why San Francisco? If the problem stems in part from a change in California law, why aren’t other cities in the state seeing similar spikes in shoplifting?
Does Los Angeles count? Last I checked six months ago with LAPD Pacific Division most forms of crime were up, significantly. That was just listening to them take questions at the Venice Neighborhood Council meeting and looking at their reported crime stats documents. Solution: I moved out of LA.
Problem is, most of these types of petty crimes aren't reported because LAPD can't do anything. Plus, it's below the insurance deductible for most retailers. I speak from experience as a former retailer in LA (Culver City) on a major street, Sepulveda Blvd, for twelve years managing my own decent sized store.
I had tens of thousands stolen year after year. Even with video, I couldn't do anything. It's exceptionally difficult to catch and recover the money, so what's the point in trying, or even reporting it? It's a complete waste of time. I did my best with prevention, but even reveiwing videos to figure out what's happening takes a long time... And you need to know it's gone in the first place!
When you have $500k to $1mm in inventory, which really isn't much, and tons of product coming and going every day, how are you to keep up? Even with cycle counts, we were always behind the thefts.
I finally sold the shop in 2016 after a series of heart breaking thefts by employees, customers, and an electrician. Sure you can say it's my fault for not having a better system, and you're probably right. Still it takes honest employees and honest customers for it to work.
Prop 47 seems self fulfilling: Expand misdemeanors to cover twice as much product, so then less crimes are reported by the community, finally claim crime is down!
If technicalities were equivalent to reality this would be great policy, but it's different on the ground than what most people see from a report on their computer.
San Francisco's budget to address the problem is $106,500 per homeless individual, or enough to literally just buy them everything they need and send them to a trade school.