Surveillance camera video recently showed a man stealing a pile of clothes from a San Fransisco store as the city faces a recent shoplifting surge.
In the video, recorded on a Google Nest camera and posted to Twitter on Friday morning, a man is seen walking into a store located in the Pacific Heights neighborhood with a ski mask, a camouflage jacket and a Golden States Warriors shirt.
The man was greeted by a store associate as he entered the store.
“Hi, how are you today,” the woman is heard saying.
The man replies, “What’s up?” before reaching over to grab a stack of jeans and a pile of sweaters from the window display.
He then walked over to the other side of the store with the clothes in his arms before bending down to pick up one more item and walking out the door.
The associate told the man to “wait” as the man left, to which he responded “shut up” before exiting the store.
As of Friday afternoon, the San Fransisco Police Department did not have additional information to provide Newsweek about the incident.
The video showed just one incident of several that have recently occurred in the Bay area.
Last month, Walgreens announced it was planning to close an additional five locations in the San Fransisco area due to a rise in “organized retail crime.” One of the shuttered stores on Ocean Avenue had reported seven shoplifting incidents this year alone.
The pharmacy chain has now closed 10 of its 35 locations in the city.
Over the summer, a group of shoplifters was also seen sprinting with an armful of designer bags from a Neiman Marcus in downtown San Fransisco.
“We’ve been sounding the alarm for a while that this issue is not getting better,” Rachel Michelin, president and CEO of the California Retailers Association, told the San Fransisco Chronicle.
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Three of the nation’s top 10 cities for organized retail theft are located in California, with San Fransisco ranking fifth on the list.
Despite the recent string of incidents captured on video, a midyear public safety report from the San Fransisco Police Department showed that overall thefts were down nine percent in the first six months of the year, compared to the same period in 2020.
Police officials acknowledged that while crime is up across the city, the overall number of violent and property crimes has fallen.
Over the summer, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott suggested that the shoplifting incidents could be executed by individuals who are trying to exploit California’s Proposition 47, which voters passed into law in 2015.
The proposition lowered criminal sentences from felonies to misdemeanors for certain nonviolent crimes, including shoplifting of items under $950.
“Some people calculate, ‘Hey, you know, I don’t want to go over the $950, so let me steal $949 worth of property,'” Scott told NBC News in July.
https://www.newsweek.com/video-shows-man-stealing-piles-clothes-san-francisco-store-amid-shoplifting-surge-1648859