Bravely risking damage and scorn, San Francisco engaged in a grand sociological experiment: testing whether or not we might all be better off “essentially ‘legalizing shoplifting.’”
Before announcing the conclusion of this daring research, let’s review.
“Shoplifting cases are all too common in San Francisco,” explained the UK’s Daily Mail, “where charges of property theft less than $950 in value was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor in 2014 — meaning that store staff and security do not pursue or stop thieves who have taken anything worth less than $1,000.”
After a Neiman Marcus department store was looted back in July, NBC News described it as “only the latest to give an impression of lawlessness running rampant. . . .”
The ever-so-sensitive re-calibration of the justice system has not been helped by the abundance of examples of mass theft putting stores out of business — all going back at least a year or two.
“As the number of burglaries soar,” informed KPIX, the city’s CBS affiliate, “San Francisco residents say they feel unsafe.”
Finally, following last Friday’s episode of robbing and vandalizing stores in Union Square, city authorities decided to end the research.
Mayor London Breed told her fellow ‘City by the Bay’ guinea pigs the study’s shocking conclusion: Brazen theft is “detrimental to our city.”
“What happens when people vandalize and commit those level of crimes in San Francisco,” her honor elaborated. “We not only lose those businesses, we lose those jobs.”
And then, she applied her hypersonic kicker: “We lose that tax revenue that helps to support our economy that helps to support many of the social service programs that we have in the city in the first place.”
So, there you have it. Theft is bad. Cuz taxes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of course, Mayor Breed’s most talked-about approach to getting crime under control has been more deliberately screwing up the city’s already snarled traffic to make it more difficult for looters to flee. Courage.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)