San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Scope of retail thefts difficult to gauge
Data from police, stores falls short, clouding debate As abortion rights hang in the balance and demand surges, East Bay doctor continues making trips to Oklahoma clinic
As San Francisco remains locked in a fierce debate over how best to respond to crime, shoplifting has become one flash point of the battle, dividing people across sharp political lines. But crime experts say the data required to accurately measure shoplifting is woefully inadequate.
There is no better example of the problem than the shoplifting data kept by the San Francisco Police Department.
Starting in January 2018, reported shoplifting incidents are relatively consistent at about 250 per month; they dip sharply when the pandemic begins, and then begin to slowly increase as the city reopens. And then in September 2021, they inexplicably double.
A closer look at the data shows that the spike in reported shoplifting came almost entirely from one store: the Target at 789 Mission St. in the Metreon mall. In September alone, 154 shoplifting reports were filed from the South of Market intersection where the Target stands, up from 13 in August. And then, in October, the reports from this intersection went down again to 17.
What happened at this particular Target? Did the store see a huge spike in shoplifting in September? No, said store manager Stacy Abbott. The store was simply using a new reporting system implemented by the police that allows retailers to report crimes over the phone.
When asked why the shoplifting reports had decreased again in October, Abbott said she wouldn’t be able to answer any more questions and directed The Chronicle to the Police Department as well as Target’s media team, which did not answer questions either.
Story by Joe Garofoli
Photos by Gabrielle Lurie
OKLAHOMA CITY — Hoodie pulled over her head, surgical mask shrouding her face, sunglasses covering her eyes, Rebecca Taub quickly veered through the gate of the Trust Women abortion clinic, parked her rented car in a secure spot, and ducked into the building through a private entrance. She was safe. The East Bay obstetrician and gynecologist takes those precautions to protect herself from the antiabortion activists outside the clinic’s 6-foot-high wooden stockade fence who yell snippets of Bible verses and wave signs saying, “We want to adopt your baby!” and “Okies kill their weakest and poorest!”
Taub, too, is an activist — one on the opposite front line of America’s reignited abortion wars. For the next two days, the 36-year-old will perform two dozen abortions a day at Trust Women. She travels here at least once a month because the clinic can’t find enough local doctors to perform abortions in a state where the procedure is culturally shunned — and demand is surging.
Dr. Rebecca Taub performs a surgical abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City in September. The obstetrician and gynecologist is one of several out-ofstate physicians who make regular trips to the clinic.
Officer Robert Rueca, a police spokesperson, said the new reporting system was accessible to other businesses and individuals on weekdays, not just the Target. He did not respond to questions about how long the system had been in place or whether the department had seen an increase in shoplifting incidents from other stores since the system’s implementation (publicly available data does not show such an increase).
Though the spike seen in the data generates more questions than answers, one thing is clear: A single (albeit large and busy) store’s decision to report a majority of its shoplifting incidents doubled the entire city’s monthly shoplifting rates.
The lack of clear data means that the debate over issues like shoplifting is not grounded in clear facts, allowing each side in the divide to say it is right.
People expressing alarm about shoplifting, including leaders at major retail associations such as the California Retailers Association, say the crime has grown greatly during the pandemic, driving a wave of store closures citywide. They point to stores cutting their hours and company spokespeople saying that shoplifting and the need for security has increased, and they reference incidents like last weekend’s mass thefts at Louis Vuitton and other high-end luxury goods stores.
They argue that police data will always be inaccurate because in a city that has historically struggled with high property-crime rates, store workers either don’t witness or don’t report most incidents. And they say leniency in the criminal justice system plays a role, with stores forgoing reports because they figure people won’t be punished anyway.
But on the other side are people who question whether depictions of surging shoplifting are accurate and worry that those depictions may drive fear and get-tough policies that sideline needed criminal justice reforms.
Supervisor Dean Preston and Mayor London Breed are among those questioning the narratives of the larger retailers. They point out that the major companies announcing store closures, such as Walgreens, announced it would soon be closing hundreds of stores in 2019, before the pandemic. Such stores have been battered by the e-commerce wave.
Walgreens noted that the pandemic may have led to less foot traffic at these stores and thus reduced profits. And it references the police data, which shows that reports of shoplifting and larceny theft have decreased during the pandemic.
California law defines shoplifting as entering an open business with the intent to steal merchandise worth no more than $950.
While both sides have plenty of anecdotes and reasonable-sounding points, neither can point to reliable data on actual shoplifting rates in the city — because none exists, said Read Hayes, a criminologist at the University of Florida and director of the Loss Prevention Research Council.
“There’s not a great source” of shoplifting data, Hayes told The Chronicle.
Police data, he said, is particularly flawed, because most retailers are reluctant to call law enforcement or detain shoplifters for a number of reasons, among them that they don’t believe offenders will be charged, and they’re worried about their own safety and legal liability if they intervene.
Stores keep their own data on inventory and losses, and Hayes said this is a better source than police data. But store data still isn’t perfect, because expected inventory can get lost for several reasons — an employee might steal something, or a shipment may never make it to the store. Moreover, Hayes said individual retailers tend to be reluctant to share their data publicly.
Walgreens, CVS and Target have not responded to repeated requests for shoplifting data from The Chronicle, other than the most aggregate statistics.
Mike DeAngelis, a spokesperson for CVS, said the store had experienced a “300% increase in retail theft from our stores since the pandemic began,” but did not provide specific information on San Francisco stores. He also said CVS loses $200 million each year because of “organized retail crime,” or less than 0.1% of CVS’ annual revenue of $268 billion.
At the now-shuttered Walgreens at 300 Gough St. — the site of a viral video that showed a man riding out on a bicycle, with a garbage bag of stolen goods dangling from the handlebars — store managers advised security guards to avoid encounters with shoplifters and report thefts to their supervisors rather than police.
“The policy is not to confront, stop or engage with shoplifters,” security guard Emmanuel Robertson said, standing near the front entrance of the near-empty Gough Street pharmacy on a rainy afternoon in October.
By that time, workers had cleared products from several aisles, preparing for the store to permanently stop business the next month — one in the string of closures that Walgreens blamed on rampant theft.
“Walgreens — they don’t want any incident,” Robertson said, noting that some people committing theft are presumed to have weapons, and companies do not want to be held liable if a contracted guard gets injured in an altercation.
Robertson also expressed a sense of malaise, venturing that the police “probably won’t come” to investigate a shoplifting report, “and even if they come, they probably won’t arrest anyone.”
Chris Phipps, a property manager for the Gough Street store from 2012 to 2020, said thefts occurred on a daily basis. He visited the location two or three times a week
and regularly observed people throwing items into bags.
“The security guard would tell them to stop as they walked out,” Phipps said, noting that security guards were told “they couldn’t physically restrain the person.” Target spokesperson Amy Tew said in a statement, “For the last few months, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores, similar to reports from other retailers in the area. Target is engaging local law enforcement, elected officials and community partners to address our concerns. With the safety of our guests, team members and communities as our top priority, we’ve temporarily reduced our operating hours in five San Francisco stores.”
For aggregate information from retailers, Hayes pointed to the National Retail Security Survey, an annual survey conducted by the National Retail Federation. The survey asks dozens of retailers about issues affecting their inventory, including stores’ “inventory shrinkage” or “shrink rate,” which is the share of inventory listed that doesn’t show up in the store’s actual inventory.
Across the 55 retailers surveyed for the 2021 survey, the average shrink rate for fiscal year 2020 was 1.6% — about even with fiscal year 2019 and slightly higher than fiscal years 2018, 2017 and 2016, which hovered from 1.3% to 1.4%.
The survey’s authors said the 1.62% figure observed in fiscal year 2019 was an “alltime high,” and that organized retail theft has been a “serious problem” for retailers, with average losses reaching $700,000 per $1 billion in sales for all retailers (less than 0.1%).
However, the shrinkage rates for 2019 and 2020 are actually lower than several decades ago: From 1991 to 2002, shrinkage rates ranged from 1.7% to 2%, according to previous surveys.
The study did not cite what share of the latest shrink rate was believed to be caused by shoplifting. But in previous surveys, retailers have indicated that shoplifting constitutes a little over one-third of the shrink rate, with employee theft constituting another third.
Similar survey data on shoplifting trends in San Francisco does not exist, according to Hayes. The survey ranks cities by how much they are affected by what the report calls “organized retail crime,” which tends to refer to several people shoplifting in “substantial quantities.” For fiscal year 2020, the San Francisco-Oakland metro area ranked second, behind only Los Angeles.