The Patriot Post® · 'Organized Retail Crime' in Pelosiville

San Francisco was robbed. And we’re not talking about last night’s Giants-Dodgers matchup. (The game — and the Giants’ 107-win season — ended on a terrible call of a check-swing strike.) We’re referring to the rampant wave of theft that has Walgreens closing five stores (after closing 10 over the last two years) and other retailers reeling.

We’ve had plenty to say about Nancy Pelosi’s hometown over the years. It’s a “sanctuary city” with rising crime, high rent, widespread homelessness, streets full of human feces, and a major problem with drug overdose deaths.

Just another Democrat-run city, you might say. But San Francisco is notably bad, and people are leaving Pelosiville in droves because, as native Californian Victor Davis Hanson put it this week, Democrats took “a paradise and turned it into purgatory.”

So, back to the actual subject of this story: Retailers are also leaving the city because of its ordinance making theft of less than $950 merely a misdemeanor, and one that’s rarely prosecuted. In other words, if you walk into a Walgreens and walk out with $949 worth of merchandise without paying, you’ll likely get away with it.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that people are going to walk out of Walgreens with $949 worth of merchandise. It’s so brazen that videos of it have become a viral cottage industry.

Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso says the city’s policy has led to “organized retail crime, by which I mean professional thieves steal goods from retail [that] are ultimately then sold to consumers — primarily on digital marketplaces.” He says that despite Walgreens stores’ efforts, spending “46 times our chain average” for security, theft in its San Francisco stores is “five times our chain average.”

The result is closing 15 stores in recent months, and a lot of lost jobs (relocations notwithstanding).

Mayor London Breed, who grew up in public housing and has worked for the government her entire adult life, blamed Walgreens’ departure on free-market forces. The market, she insists, is “saturated” with drugstores and those Walgreens locations couldn’t be profitable.

Arrogant leftist politicians want to be seen as doing a favor for their constituents, but they are actually hurting those same people — not to mention the vast majority of citizens who remain law-abiding but who now have 15 fewer drugstores from which to purchase necessities.

Nancy Pelosi, call your home office.