‘Walgreens fed my household’: contained in the San Francisco shops closing over ‘retail theft’ | San Francisco
IIn mid-October, Walgreens announced the impending closure of five of its San Francisco stores. “Retail theft” has risen to an unsustainable level despite increased investments in security, the chain said. It was time to give up.
In the months leading up to the announcement, viral videos of outrageous shoplifting attempts at Walgreens locations around town – including one that appeared to show a man riding out of a store on his bike with a garbage bag filled with stolen items – had it taking center stage followed a heated national debate about fears of a pandemic-induced “crime wave”.
To critics of the San Francisco leadership, the closings seemed to confirm a narrative long held by people outside of the city and, increasingly, by those inside: that San Francisco is a lawless place where officials operate to the detriment of local businesses Turn a blind eye to crime. Political leaders, including Mayor London Breed, pointed at Walgreens. “When a place is not generating revenue and when it’s saturated – Walgreens has many Walgreens locations across the city – I think other factors come into play,” Breed told reporters.
The Walgreens Excelsior District site three weeks before its closure. Photo: Boris Zharkov / The Guardian
But neighborhood officials and lawyers for people trapped in the legal system paint a more complex picture of Walgreen’s role in San Francisco and the city’s struggles with shoplifting in recent years.
They described Walgreens stores as important places where San Franciscans can get basic groceries at a reasonable price and pick up last minute medicines and other essentials. “We have seniors, working families and long-term customers and I think it will be extremely disruptive, especially for older people who are more pattern-based,” Ahsha Safai said of the closings.
Safai represents the Excelsior District, just outside the historic Latino Mission District, on the San Francisco Board of Directors. The neighborhood’s Walgreens, which closed on November 11, were on a busy section of Mission Street, surrounded by clothing stores, banks, and local restaurants. On a Tuesday afternoon in the weeks leading up to the closure, the shop was bustling with seniors picking up items and residents waiting to be called to the pharmacy counter.
Many shoppers get off the nearby bus routes to get to the Walgreens, making it a convenient stop in a busy area where parking can be abysmal, Safai said. Pedestrian traffic from nearby stores feeds the Walgreens and vice versa, making the drugstore an important part of the neighborhood’s retail ecosystem.
Safai said he worked with police and community organizations to fight retail crime in his neighborhood. “There must be consequences for the most monstrous. People need to know that they can’t go into the store with a garbage bag, ”he said.
“But we’re not going to lock ourselves out of this problem,” he warned. “We have to steer people on the right path.”
“Walgreens were indispensable”
Gina Mullins’ father has worked for Walgreens for more than 40 years, first in the Mission District and then in the East Bay. She remembers going to company picnics as a child and, because of her family’s long history, chose the company to shop at a Walgreens instead of CVS. “Walgreens is a big, big part of my life. It sounds cheesy, but it fed my family. “
Mullins now lives in East Bay seeing her local Walgreens showing telltale signs of theft concerns. More and more items were locked behind plexiglass, she said, and some shelves were consistently empty. While she’s frustrated with the wait it takes to get a store clerk to unlock the products, she doesn’t judge those stolen from the store out of necessity. “I understand hard times, don’t judge anyone. Do what you have to do to support your family. “
Before moving over the Bay Bridge, Mullins worked in public housing near the Walgreens location on Cesar Chavez Street in the Mission District. There she got the flu vaccinations for her four children and bought basic food for the kitchen at lower prices than her local grocery chain. The site is slated to close on November 17th.
“This Walgreens was essential to at least my family,” said Mullins of the Mission District location. “It’s closer than Safeway, has more items than the corner shop, and has a pharmacy attached. It was a staple, so seeing them shut down in neighborhoods that really need them is heartbreaking. “
Mullens works for the Pretrial Diversion Project in San Francisco, a nonprofit that seeks to get people accused of shoplifting and other petty crimes out of jail. The program helps participants keep track of court appearances and orders, and connects them to employment, addiction and other services that can deter them from bringing a new charge. Mullins oversees the employees and works with the groups that provide services to the nonprofit’s customers.
David Mauroff fears high-profile incidents are masking the decline in property crimes reported in 2020. Photo: Boris Zharkov / The Guardian
The organization’s CEO David Mauroff said there was no denying that people were stealing from drug stores, clothing stores, and cars. Mauroff, like many San Franciscans, has a connection with the Walgreens. “I don’t know how many times we ran here to get cold medicine because our child couldn’t sleep,” he said of the chain’s location in Excelsior.
Mauroff saw people steal shoplifting in his local shop. However, he fears high-profile incidents will mask the city’s 2020 drop in property crime. And while he didn’t see an increase in customers for the organization, he has found that the theft hotspots in San Francisco have changed over time as the pandemic progressed.
“There are fewer tourists and fewer people who drive to work – that’s where break-ins used to take place. But because of Covid, people had to find another destination, and unfortunately that turned into Walgreens and other retail stores.
“We do not allow ourselves to be driven by hysteria”
Crime data is complex and often incomplete, and a full picture of what happened in the city during the pandemic still emerges. San Francisco has long had higher levels of property crime than other California cities, but recent data suggests that while some categories of crime have increased while others have decreased.
Theft, the category that shoplifting falls under, appears to have declined from 2019 to 2020, which is lowering the overall rate of real estate crime, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s crime dashboard. Crimes like rape and robbery also fell in 2020, according to an analysis of the latest FBI data from the San Francisco Chronicle. Murders, car thefts, and break-ins increased according to the same FBI data.
The decline in shoplifting appears to continue in 2021. In 2020, according to the San Francisco District Attorney, 12,266 incidents and about 380 arrests were reported for the crime. By the end of October 2021, around 200 people had been arrested for theft or theft that year and there were 9,221 reports. By the end of September last year there had already been 9,558 reports.
Regardless of any discrepancies between perception, data, and lived experience, people breaking into cars near tourist spots like Fisherman’s Wharf and viral videos like the one documenting a man riding his bike out of a Walgreens forced the officers to join one Reaction.
At the end of September 2021, the mayor, together with the San Francisco Police Chief, presented the organized investigation and deterrence strategy for retail theft. The initiative will expand the city’s retail crime rate from two to five officials. The new hires will coordinate with other law enforcement agencies, including the California Highway Police and off-duty officers hired by companies under the city’s 10B program as private security. The city will also triple the number of unarmed community ambassadors from eight to 25.
Mauroff, the CEO of the Pre-Trial Program, said that while the police have a role to play in deterring and combating shoplifting, they are working to find solutions that are not just police-led, but rather the rehabilitative needs of individuals and racial differences taken into account in the criminal justice system.
He noted that during the pandemic lockdown, therapeutic services such as anger management courses, which had previously been found to be helpful, were only available remotely, which is what they are for most of the diversion program’s customers, especially those in the unsafe Living conditions, making it largely inaccessible.
“We mustn’t let ourselves be driven by hysteria so that we can find solutions,” said Mauroff.
The Excelsior District location was closed on November 11th. Photo: Boris Zharkov / The Guardian
Charles Ryan, a case manager with the Pretrial Diversion Project, argued that big companies like Walgreens also had a role to play.
Ryan lives in a community in San Francisco that has already gone through a Walgreens shutdown held responsible for “rampant” theft. In the summer of 2019, Walgreens closed its store in Bayview Hunters Point, a historically black working-class neighborhood near San Francisco Bay.
Ryan said he saw shoplifting in the store but complained that he saw no management efforts to make the drugstore a respected part of the community – for example, educating their staff on implicit biases and keeping the location clean. Black customers are being followed by employees in the store who believed they had come to steal, he said.
“They didn’t have a manager to get the line on how to deal with people who came in,” Ryan said. “Nobody was there to do the high pressure wash and keep it clean, so people said, ‘We just go in and take what we want. They don’t treat us right and have never done anything for the neighborhood. ‘
“Closing the other locations is bad because they are closing some in neighborhoods where people would have to walk around town to get what they need,” he continued. “They’re only closing it because some people stole.”
