Walgreens has closed 22 stores in the city, where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.
The connection between crime control and social inequality doesn’t get a lot of attention in the media, but last week’s decision by pharmacy chain Walgreens to close five more stores in San Francisco because of rampant shoplifting is another reason why it should.
The recent closings bring to 22 the number of stores that Walgreens has shut in the city since 2016. “Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. Local lawmakers have said that Walgreens is too preoccupied with boosting profits, that theft isn’t that bad, and that the chain should just suck up the losses.
That argument might have more credibility if Walgreens was alone in airing concerns about shoplifting, but other large retailers have had similar problems. Earlier this year, a spokesman for CVS, which has closed at least two stores, told CNN that of its 155 locations in the Bay Area, the 12 in San Francisco account for 26% of all shoplifting incidents in the region.
Much of this lawlessness can be linked to Proposition 47, a California ballot initiative passed in 2014, under which theft of less than $950 in goods is treated as a nonviolent misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. Out of concern for safety and potential lawsuits, stores tell employees and security guards not to intervene when they witness a crime. Most suspects, if they are pursued at all by police, are soon released. Californians effectively decriminalized shoplifting. Not surprisingly, they have more of it.
Still, California isn’t the only place where retail theft has been creating larger-than-usual headaches for proprietors. A National Retail Federation survey, released in December, revealed that the average cost of crime to retail operators—costs that are invariably passed on to consumers—rose for the fifth year in a row and was up close to 60% since 2015. Meanwhile, politically progressive local prosecutors from Los Angeles to Philadelphia and New York compete to see who can prosecute the fewest people.
These trends don’t affect all groups and all communities in the same way. Target has closed stores in predominantly black sections of Chicago, Milwaukee and Flint, Mich. in recent years in the wake of not only increased store thefts but also rioting, looting and violent antipolice protests. If you are middle class and the nearest big-box store closes, you simply drive to a different one or its equivalent. But if you are a poor single mom without a car, your options are limited. You’ve just lost access, perhaps, to the closest, cheapest and widest variety of fresh produce, medicines and other goods. The alternatives are more-expensive convenience stores and less-healthy processed food for your family.
Moreover, when these large retailers leave a community, so do lots of jobs. In June, the New York Times profiled a Target in a mostly black Baltimore community that opened its doors in 2008. It “recruited heavily from the neighborhood,” hiring people who had never been steadily employed. “When Mike Johnson applied for a job, he was ‘down on his luck,’ having run out of tuition money to stay at Coppin State University, a historically black college,” the paper wrote. “At 19, he got a position stocking shelves overnight and worked his way up to earning $16.50 as a supervisor. It was the first time he had worked somewhere with Black people in leadership roles.” Nevertheless, the mall where the Target was located was looted during antipolice protests in 2015, and the store reportedly struggled for years with high rates of theft. It closed in 2018.
Like the local leaders in San Francisco, Baltimore officials blamed the retailers for leaving instead of the thieves for driving them away. But indulging criminal behavior in the name of “social justice” only helps criminals, who are not representative of all blacks. Public policies that give priority to the interests of lawbreakers only lead to more lawbreaking, and by extension to more economic inequality. Businesses have every incentive to flee these communities and the jobs follow them.
Tempting though it may be to blame the social dysfunction in poorer communities on heartless business owners or racist cops, the bigger blame surely lies with public policies that condone counterproductive behavior and make successful businesses much more difficult to operate. The fallout from antipolice protests in recent years has been all too predictable, as has the left’s response to it. Large employers quit urban areas after the riots of the 1960s as well, and some of those communities still haven’t fully recovered. Until the rule of law is restored and enforced, they probably never will.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal