* The voters sacked the old DA. He wasn't doing a great job but more importantly he had picked a fight with the police chief. The police have a tough job in the city and also they have been slacking off for the past 50 years. A security guard can't really intervene in a fight without 1.) risking their physical safety for $18 an hour, and 2.) risking a lawsuit since they don't really have any legal grounds to detain someone.
The store was on 8th and Market. I generally try to avoid that part of town for physical safety reasons based on a number of personal incidents involving some of the the more unpredictable characters in that part of town. I'm not sure what Whole Foods corporate HQ was thinking on that one. The location is just not a good place for a high end grocery store. HQ messed up. I would also point out that Rainbow foods is maybe 0.5 miles over on Folsom and Division. While Rainbow is near a lot of homeless encampments (maybe more than 8th and Market) the people are more steady and I never get the unsafe vibes in that part of town.
The previous DA was doing a fantastic job, he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism. Doing this is difficult because people will (as they did!) post videos online of petty theft or “unruly” people in the streets and people who do not understand how safety is actually created are never going to listen to people who are actually informed.
> he had picked a fight with the police chief.
This is not true. He prosecuted a police officer for murder and put pressure on the police, which have a long history of corruption and rampant racism, human trafficking, etc.. But police unions have a lot of power and influence, the average person thinks that police create safety (they do not! if they respond at all to anything, they respond after the fact with a pencil and paper, and their behavior is often very dangerous - e.g. speeding around the city running red lights when they clearly are not headed anywhere).
The police in SF do not have a tough job, and police everywhere, always slack off. The SFPD famously went on strike some decades ago and were basically shooting out streetlights and holding the entire city hostage, eventually culminating in a bombing on the mayor’s front lawn.
SFPD do not live in SF, almost any of them, they aren’t members of the community, they do not have the community’s best interest at heart. They are bullies who come from the suburbs and basically view all residents of SF as dirty miscreants. If you ask them for help in a violent situation, they will likely threaten you with violence or arrest yourself.
> he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism.
And it's more central than their South-of-Market store on ... 4th & Harrison.
The Twitter building's nearby "The Market" grocery might benefit from this closure - it's suffered greatly from the Pandemic, Twitter itself shrinking, and the great Fentanyl-flooding.
No. Shopkeeper’s privilege allows detention for a reasonable time solely for the purpose of investigation of 490.5 shoplifting in the presence of probable cause.
(Dead right on the eighteen dollar bit, though).
I never understood what's the point of hiring security at a miniscule wage. Noone sane will risk any physical confrontation for that money.
If they get stabbed, need 6 months to recover and get a $100K surgery, is employer paying all the bills?
I see this in many places - like a few badly behaved teenagers will jump over the barriers at the tube and the employees are not willing to challange them.
Like do I only pay because I am well-mannered?
Almost certainly. That’d fall under workers’ comp.
However property crime is now low. And downtown, TL, SOMA etc are full of tents and open air drug use.
Shoplifting has been bad in SF since I first moved there in 2009 from Seattle. I was surprised to see Walgreens had nearly everything locked up, and you had to get staff to unlock it to buy just about anything.
But it feels like it's gotten worse. And while I believe the violent crime statistics are likely correct. I suspect property crime goes hugely underreported because people don't think it's worth reporting to a police department that won't do anything.
SF police are severely under-staffed, down about 500 officers since their peak several years ago.
The previous DA wasn't prosecuting a lot of these kinds of crimes. The police might have been on a quiet strike, not really doing their jobs because of understaffing and defund the police politics. This last point is mostly speculation and anecdote. But lots of stories of the police seeing a robbery go down, doing nothing.
And then the rampant poverty you see all over downtown has just gotten worse.
Same way I’m not gonna do any extra work in the office if I know my manager doesn’t care.
Every quarter since we recalled the old DA we've had higher homicides than the year preceding (the old DA had no increase over the one before).
One thing, though - nobody in the 1970s was welcome to walk into a grocery store with a garbage bag, sweep things off the shelves into the bag, and just walk out. Watching that feels very unsettling.
Also, I recently walked from the golden gate theater to the civic center bart station, and I am not exaggerating, I mean it when I say that it is worse than the dystopian vision of post-apocalyptic boston in "last of us". The amount of menace, disorder, drug use, drug dealing, theft, tent cities, edgy, tweaking people, comatose and dying people, swollen and infected toes and limbs... it is truly a hellscape.
Now, there are few problems so bad that they are immune to hyperbole, and because SF's progressive failure can be good fodder for conservatives, there is incentive to exaggerate. I still have good days here, and there are still parts of SF that are much less affected (though almost nowhere you don't see some jolting sign of the disorder). But it isn't just the 'loin and soma, this disorder has turned many formerly lovely parts of San Francisco into horrible places. And while you may compare violent crime rates and homeless rates to other cities, it does matter where in a city it occurs.
For example, imagine if the Luxembourg gardens in Paris became overrun the way the civic center has? That the fountain outside the old senate building became an open air drug scene tent city, where now and then someone is stabbed to death. Yeah, you could compare this to a violent city with more homeless living under a freeway overpass, but I'm willing to say it represents a deeper, more alarming loss. I say this with full acknowledgment of the humanitarian disaster both scenarios represent.
This, to me, is why people are so shocked by San Francisco. We've allowed our civic center and market street, areas that were once the center of government, business, and cultural life for a huge area of the western united states, to become a kind of hellscape. I wouldn't put it on the level of the luxomberg gardens, but you can see the artifacts of a prouder city.
This would likely result in a social media fallout that they don't want to deal with, considering that the core customer base of Whole Foods overlaps largely with those that at least publicly claim that law enforcement over private property rights is tantamount to oppression.
To be fair, the security presence in Wal-Mart, or in a bank, may also be an aesthetic.
Other whole foods in SF have a guard at the door. Are they armed? I don't know but they have a guard. No one is bothered. Most big stores in SF seem to have security. Target has multiple that stand by the doors.
I can already imagine social media backlash over someone being apprehended at gunpoint after trying to steal a small amount of food. Contrast that with how it would look for someone apprehended at gunpoint at a bank. Almost no one thinks it’s okay to steal just a little bit of money from a bank.
But violent crime is not unique to San Francisco and if you look at the data the city is far safer than many others.
When it comes to issues like this you really need to look at the data as it is too easy to let passions and bias drive decision making. If you could solve crime by hiring more police and locking more people up every city would do that. But the data shows that it doesn't work like that.
"Safer than 2% of U.S. Cities..."
A lot of petty crime stems from inequality and drug use not from career criminals.
And those issues can't be solved by more policing.
the war for the streets of SF was winnable maybe fifteen years ago
not now, the people on the street have won and the city is theirs
every day, some part of the old SF is dismantled
every day, the number of homeless rises
the homeless have been winning the city inch by inch continuously for over a decade
SF passed the failsafe point a long time ago
That seems rather “off brand”, and in any event while we could begin outsourcing public safety to corporations, and we probably will, I don’t think that story ends well for anyone.
Sit down at outdoor seating at any restaurant in those areas and there is a guard standing there right by the tables while you eat.
San Francisco is about at that point. Years ago I was sitting at some outdoor seating on a first date and a guy walked up, grabbed my dates glass of wine, pounded it, and said "I'm an alcoholic" making eye contact with both of us, as he set my dates glass back down on the table.
Although to generally protect the community, maybe there’s a way we could do like an Uberpool for the whole town? If only there were a way to get everyone to chip in.
I don't know.
But I have directly seen security from the Target on 4th tackle someone in the middle of the crosswalk, and hit them repeatedly as they took back whatever that person had stolen.
Random people on the street then started yelling at security to stop hitting the person who was caught shoplifting.