San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Reports of ‘shoplifting surge’ are not backed by police data
On June 14, KGO television reporter Lyanne Melendez posted a video from a San Francisco Walgreens. The video showed a man shoving items into a garbage bag and biking out of the store without paying for them, as customers and a security guard looked on.
The video received over 6 million views on Twitter alone and generated dozens of news
articles. Even before it was posted, however, many outlets had reported on a perceived spike in store thefts, including an article in the New York Times titled “San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge.”
But has there actually been a surge in shoplifting in San Francisco? Data from the San Francisco Police Department suggests these reports may be overblown. According to the data, overall shoplifting incidents reported to the police are below their levels before the start of the pandemic. And before that, shoplifting rates had been decreasing more or less steadily since the 1980s.
The Chronicle analyzed Police Department incident report data from January 2018 through April 2021. We looked at how overall numbers of shoplifting incidents and commercial robberies changed from month to month over that period.
The data shows that shoplifting rates dipped at the start of the pandemic, when many stores shut down, and have since recovered to just below prepandemic levels. The city saw 710 reported shoplifting incidents in the first four months of 2021, down from 933 during the same period in 2019.
Shoplifting declined in San Francisco during the pandemic largely because many stores closed temporarily or permanently. A recent survey of 22 large U.S. retailers found that while overall shoplifting apprehensions declined by about 41% from 2019 to 2020, “essential” retailers that didn’t close stores saw apprehensions increase by 8%. This survey suggests it’s possible that chain stores like Walgreens and CVS in San Francisco have seen shoplifting incidents increase. But public data does not indicate an overall spike in shoplifting in the city.
While incidents are down compared with previous years, San Francisco’s property crime rates are still unusually high compared with other U.S. cities. In 2019, San Francisco had the highest rate of property crime of any city in California. The city’s high levels of economic inequality and population density could contribute to its relatively high property crime rate, criminal justice researcher Magnus Lofstrom previously told The Chronicle.
Still, shoplifting has been declining in the city since 1985, according to data from the California Department of Justice. That’s in keeping with broader national trends: Between 2009 and 2018, overall property crime in the U.S. declined by 23%, according to the FBI.
“California’s crime rates remain comparable to the low rates observed in the 1960s,” researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California, including Lofstrom, wrote in 2018.
While shoplifting incidents haven’t surged this year or last, the rate of shoplifting incidents ending in citations or arrests did go down — a continuation of a decline that goes back at least as far as January 2018, the earliest month included in SFPD’s detailed incident data.
The San Francisco Police Department did not return a request for comment on the shoplifting data, and why citations and arrest rates are declining. However, in a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, police officers said that shoplifters are getting more brazen, and that shoplifting incidents are likely underreported.
Cmdr. Raj Vaswani, the head of the investigations bureau at the San Francisco Police Department, said during the meeting that the department had seen a trend toward more violent shoplifting events. He also said there was an increase in repeat offenders.
Police Department data shows that there were 91 incidents of shoplifting involving “force against an agent,” classified as robberies in the system, in the first four months of 2021, a slight decline from 108 instances in the first four months of 2020 and 102 in 2019.
At the Board of Supervisors meeting, the officers also said that thieves had been emboldened by the passage of Proposition 47, a statewide initiative that reclassified certain theft and drug possession charges from felonies to misdemeanors, including shoplifting of items under $950.
According to a 2018 Public Policy Institute of California report, several types of property crime, including shoplifting, increased in California immediately following Proposition 47. However, shoplifting reports decreased in 2016 and as of 2018, were at roughly the same levels as 2010.