Walgreens has already closed twelve stores in the San Francisco area and now will close five more. The company has described the city’s rampant shoplifting as “organized retail theft.”
Over the last two years, progressive cities like San Francisco have declined to prosecute cases of shoplifting, which has only emboldened thieves.
Jesse O’Neill reports at the New York Post:
Walgreens closes five more San Francisco locations, citing ‘organized retail crime’Walgreens is closing five more San Francisco locations as drug stores from the Bay Area to the Big Apple are besieged by rampant shoplifting and lax enforcement.San Fran shoplifters have been emboldened by a referendum that lowered the penalty for stealing goods worth less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor, cops and prosecutors have said.A spokesperson for the company confirmed the latest closures to SFGate.“Organized retail crime continues to be a challenge facing retailers across San Francisco, and we are not immune to that,” Walgreens spokesperson Phil Caruso told the outlet.“Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average. During this time to help combat this issue, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment.”
You may recall this viral video from June showing a thief robbing a Walgreens store in broad daylight:
In this video from NBC News in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed pleads with would-be thieves to stop robbing stores, noting that when these stores close it hurts the community. Perhaps she should have thought of this a year and a half ago:
Other cities, such as New York have experienced a similar problem.
There is only one way out of this problem and the left doesn’t want to hear it. Police must be allowed to arrest thieves and the criminals must be prosecuted. That’s it. It’s really that simple.
Featured image via YouTube.
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