Walgreens closing 5 San Francisco stores due to 'organized retail crime'
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
The SFPD may choose not to enforce laws, but I don't think anyone outside of SFPD directed that, it's just organized nonfeasance as leadership political protest.
Nope, this is fake news. You should learn more about your DA Chesa Boudin. He rarely brings cases to trial, fired a bunch of prosecutors and 30 others have left, and removed cash bail which puts repeat offenders right back on the street after arrest.
It's just a thought experiment and something to consider.
The political and social climate in SF has led to a situation where the number of officers on the street can shrink even if the budget stays flat or grows.
An 800K San Franciscans have been clammering for community policing for decades but it never happens. Because PDs don’t want that.
This has been the state forever: http://sfappeal.com/2012/04/understaffed-sfpd-is-nonetheless...
If the police can't stop crime and enforce the laws of 47 square miles and 874,961 residents for the princely sum of $755 per person/year or $14 million per square mile/year what exactly are people paying for? Like if I told you that you pay $62/mo for a police subscription and this was the service you were going to get for it, would you still subscribe to it? Probably not.
It's a protection racket. Lower the police budget even in a non-meaningful way just a little and they hold the city to ransom. Just scrap it and start again from scratch, perhaps trying Peelian principles instead of relying on the corrupted outgrowth of slave hunter patrols.
All fingers point back to the electorate.
No, it's not. Putting away repeat offenders requires to know who are they. It helps victims to have a report they can use for insurance claims, etc.
Boudin and his defenders have been trying to spin the rebuke (including the apology, which was actually to the trial attorney, not Boudin), but the comments are perfectly consistent with this critique of Boudin's office from earlier this year: https://www.marinatimes.com/why-colleagues-say-district-atto...
Boudin famously fired at least 7 veteran prosecutors immediately after taking office. (https://www.kqed.org/news/11795676/why-did-san-franciscos-ne...) I'm not sure how many more prosecutors were fired or left after that, but as far as I can tell 7 is about half of the total number of prosecutors. And he seems to have replaced them with public defenders and fresh law graduates who have no experience prosecuting cases. (Boudin himself had never prosecuted a case.)
Boudin doesn't deserve all the blame. His predecessor, Gascon, made several changes that already made the San Francisco District Attorney's Office one of the most lenient in the country. People compare Boudin to the reformist D.A. in Philadelphia, but the better comparison is Gascon; Boudin took things to a whole new level, far beyond the reforms in Philadelphia or in the national conversation.
I've always been on board with Boudin's push for more lenient sentencing. But that's just a small part of his agenda, much of which simply translates as no sentencing. And because of general incompetence he's flubbing everything, resulting in him becoming defensive, spinning and lying about cases (e.g. most recently--last couple weeks--a controversy about disparate treatment of some pedestrian death cases that resulted in his firing the office's victims' advocate) that really should have seen both better attention by his office and, mistakes notwithstanding, a better defense in the media.
Burning it down to the ground, and rebuilding will of course create pretty much the same thing, and probably worse.
Nearly all libertarians I've ever met will readily admit that some form of government existing is desirable. Their disputes with socialists are all in shades of gray. In internet discussions on platforms that amplify extremism (reddit, etc), it may seem like the the two camps are "no government" anarcho-libertarians vs "all the government" totalitarian-communists, but in my experience either of these extreme positions are so rare they're hardly worth considering at all.
From the article. This isn’t normal
They pay and treat their employees terribly along with pushing junk food and other garbage to people just trying to fill a prescription.
We are excited for quality, owner operated pharmacies to return and replace them. Just like they served us before Walgreens came in and muscled them all out of business.
It’s almost as if not looking out for your community results in that community not looking out for you.
What makes you think that the owner operated pharmacies won't be targeted by shoplifters? Are a significant chunk of the shoplifters doing it for ideological reasons?
>It’s almost as if not looking out for your community results in that community not looking out for you.
Sounds like victim blaming to me. The whole point of having laws and law enforcement is to have an official way to pay your dues to the community and get protection in return, rather than having to pay for "protection" from the community itself.
Footage from the LA Riots.
But they don't have a corporate policy against self-defense.
Of course people keep escalating shoplifting if it's known policy not to engage.
(I'm not a shop owner)
“I am completely devastated by this news - this Walgreens is less than a mile from seven schools and has been a staple for seniors, families and children for decades. This closure will significantly impact this community.”
https://twitter.com/ahsha_safai/status/1447988178586013698?s...
Owner-operated pharmacies have been out of business for decades. I'm sure you yearn for the days of Blockbuster video or, better still, your neighborhood video stores. No Netflix for you, right?
Check out anywhere in the US more than 100 miles from an Ocean
Also, consider the fact that at least 40% of the population lives within 100 miles of a coast, perhaps more.
https://fortune.com/2021/04/29/independent-owned-small-pharm...
Walgreens is not 'pushing' anything on anyone - people make choices to buy Doritos.
More importantly -> they're going there for the Doritos as much as anything else.
Walgreens has incredible economies of scale and operational expertise. They know what people want, they know how to keep the shelves stocked efficiently, which is not exactly novel, but it's hard for mom and pop shops to do.
If SF residents truly wanted 'independent pharmacies' for prescriptions, they would have been using them already.
As far as 'employee treatment' - maybe there is something there, but I'm doubtful if it rises to the threshold that we'd want them closed.
'The Problem' is entirely San Francisco's insane attitudes towards crime.
And finally, most poignantly, those criminals will steal from the 'locally owned stores' just as well, and they won't have 500 other locations to absorb the losses.
This is an SF civic problem.
Get SF to act rationally - and then - maybe it's possible to have a discussion about 'locally owned' shops etc..
> Rodriguez is finally in jail, but he rode the city’s revolving door of justice to allegedly rip off Walgreens 37 times this year. He was particularly partial to the drug store at 91-08 Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights, which he hit 23 times, police said.
Right, but even if 46 arrests in a year isn't representative of the median shoplifter, it's still an appalling example. Why is the justice system so ineffective that a shoplifter is allowed to be arrested 46 times in a year? You'd think by the 4th or 5th one he'd be denied bail.
Last year NYC passed a bail reform law which removed bail as an option for a whole list of crimes.
You can shoplift all day everyday now, and you will be back on the street without bail.
Again, silence from the civil libertarians on using bail as a form of infinite detention. But more to the point: the bail reform doesn't apply here, since he's a previous offender. There's nothing (other than court capacity) stopping a judge from issuing a bail for him.
I don't think the article says, but I suspect that he probably hasn't had a bail hearing related to these arrests this year. The court system is badly backlogged, and the alternative would be indefinite detention (here is where I'd expect the civil libertarians to come marching in, but there's always curious silence when it's someone like this).
Have you considered mentioning age of consent?
Probably not though. I bet there are dozens if not hundreds more like him.
To be clear: betting like this is baseless speculation. I'm telling you from lived experience that it just isn't that common here, especially when you factor in how dense and populous NYC is compared to SF.
And it's probably not the case that he's "singled out" in any way (other than for reporting by the NYP). He's the "spiders Georg"[1] of shoplifting. There's always one!
It is speculation, but it is not baseless. I base my speculation on a foundation of N=1, which may not be very firm but is not baseless.
Just now though, I clicked through to that nypost article and found this:
> There are 77 other thieves right now walking the streets of New York with rap sheets of 20 or more shoplifting charges, NYPD sources say.
77 is a bit more than 6 dozen, so I feel vindicated. My speculation was accurate.
Seriously: NYC is big. 77 kleptomaniacs in a city of 8.4 million people? Not bad! Per capita, we're one of the safest (and lowest-crime) cities in the country[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
These huge businesses like Walmart, Walgreens and Starbucks target and study successful mom and pop businesses and then move in ruthlessly. In Portland I've seen so many great local businesses destroyed because they couldn't compete with the large chains. And, if that eventually doesn't work out for the chain, they close up shop.
Amazon and Walmart have destroyed small mom and pop grocery stores across the country.
I bet these retail gangs wouldn't go after a mom and pop shop of any kind. The owner would probably fight them with their bare hands. That's why they are going after Walgreens.
In some weird way, this feels like capitalism, actually. It's just a hidden facet we don't see often.
That's a big assumption...If elderly Asian people are being attacked on the streets, I don't think their moral code extends to mom and pop shops, even if they're willing to throw down, unless they bring out guns.
I'm beginning to prefer that theory. Explains some motives a little better.
Lots of things play into the situation. I don't think historic racism is the only factor, it's certainly not a useful point of intervention, but it is a factor. It's important we remember that when we're presented with options for intervention so we can approach them with a degree of empathy we otherwise would not afford them.
I've never seen strong evidence or really good theories that fit the facts about this which aren't just pages of handwaving and waffling and speculation (or worse, veiled threats that you are a racist if you disagree with the theory).
What I think is that in fact it is a great tool for use by some unscrupulous people because it means they never have to actually be held to account for any of their policies or legislation or agenda. None of it is measurable. Somehow people have us convinced that they and only they are able to fix racism or improve the lot of disadvantaged minorities... without ever having to show a single scrap of evidence or results. Anything that goes wrong for them can be blamed on others who are racist, and any questioning of their methods or policies makes you a racist. They actually have an extremely strong incentive to never fix these problems at all.
That's why I prefer my theory. It fits reality and explains motives a lot better in my opinion.
Hopefully everyone here is grown up enough that I don't need to add the usual wall of disclaimers (racism existed and exists and people suffer from it, my theory is about social scale effects and not any person's individual experience, etc.).
What I'm saying is: A large portion of modern Black poverty comes from historic racism and slavery. There are people alive today that couldn't use the same fountains as the white kids when they were younger. Poor people commit more crime.
What I'm not saying: People can't rise out of poverty (I managed it, I think others can to). People shouldn't be accountable for their actions (Moral hazard is a thing). Racism is the dominant factor in crime (Poverty and culture are more the issue now, but those have roots in a history that was not long ago).
Not true. You'd be surprised how many kids in comfortable middle class families think they are poor because they aren't living the luxury jetset lifestyle they see promoted by influencers on instagram.
What other excuses do you have?
I'm not particularly invested in defending SF, but comparing shoplifting in a dense urban center to one of the least densely populated regions of the Eastern US doesn't make a ton of sense. It occurs to me that Appalachia has plenty of entrenched and even organized crime (moonshining being the historical one that comes to mind), but most of it doesn't involve hitting up the store you live a block from.
It's depressing that we need prefaces like this.
Why? Probably a lot of reasons. But it certainly doesn't hurt that we have a (mostly court-backed) housing mandate, and the country's largest youth employment program[1].
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/jobs-internships/abo...
Now we are all dead. Thanks, racism.
I wonder how they arrived at this number of 46x.
46x the chain average of single minutes spent reviewing security staff resumes?
46x the chain average of security camera photos sent to LEOs?
46x the average number of bic lighters placed further back? No, up more? No, up and back higher, like where you can't reach? No, they can really jump that high, so up higher?
> our investments in security measures in stores
Clearly this refers to their dollar expenditure on security measures, however that had been accounted.
That would be 18 cents.