When even CNN has to admit that liberal policies have failed Democratic-run cities, you know things have gotten really bad.
But even the former employers of Don Lemon have to admit the obvious. When the network’s reporters went out to San Francisco to look at the city’s shoplifting crisis, they had to acknowledge that even they managed to see three people allegedly committing the crime within 30 minutes — in the same store.
The report, aired this week on “Erin Burnett Outfront,” featured reporter Kyung Lah at the most-heavily shoplifted Walgreens in America: in San Francisco, naturally.
It came after a sandwich shop owner went viral with an expletive-filled rant about getting sucker-punched by a man after he asked the fine gentleman to stop urinating on his trash can.
“I’m f***ing fed up with this g*****n city,” the owner said in an Instagram video. “It’s like, I can’t just be outside and just running a f***ing business without getting punched in the g*****n face … It shouldn’t be this way at all. Like, this isn’t how our city should be.”
Host Erin Burnett wanted viewers to know that, despite the owner being visibly injured, “It’s not clear what was said before the altercation or whether there’s even video of it.” (Emphasis mine.) It may matter whether or not there’s video of the incident, but pray tell, what would Burnett think the shop owner would have had to say to mitigate a man who was urinating on his garbage cans punching him in the face? Enquiring minds want to know.
However, “San Francisco police have said they’re investigating,” Burnett continued.
That’s more than can be said for most organized or disorganized shoplifting going on in the city — where even goods like frozen food and mustard have to be locked up.
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“Chains — heavy chains that went from padlock to padlock on both sides of the doors,” said a San Francisco resident named Richie Greenberg, who’d noticed that items needed to be locked up.
“And this was bizarre, something I’d never seen before. This is just more icing on the cake, telling us that rampant crime has become a regular part of life.”
Lah noted that it was “so typical that in the 30 minutes that we were at this Walgreens, we watched three people” walk out with stuff they hadn’t paid for.
Of Walgreens’ over 9,000 U.S. locations, the one in the Richmond area of the California city has the highest theft rate, being hit over a dozen times a day. The chains on the frozen food “were ordered down by corporate because of the negative messaging,” Lah said, but it’s not like they were alone.
“At this [unidentified] store, frozen food is controlled with a cable lock, fake eyelashes locked behind plexiglass, along with lotion and nail polish. At another grocery store, $14 bags of coffee under lock and key,” she noted.
“It’s become kind of like a police state in San Francisco,” one man said, remarking about how the coffee was behind the plexiglass.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
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Actually, the problem is the exact opposite: San Francisco doesn’t have enough police or willingness to enforce the law. Add that to the city and state’s notorious unwillingness to seriously address theft concerns along with a huge population of homeless people and drug addicts, and you have a recipe for mustard behind plexiglass.
Even city residents are fed up with this, as the recall of progressive former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 proved.
And yet, what’s truly remarkable is that CNN talks about solutions like “activism” and solving “systemic problem[s]” within the system being offered by San Francisco’s residents and the people they elect. Neither CNN nor any of the San Franciscans they talked to — be they elected officials or everyday people affected by the rampant crime in the city by the bay — wanted to make a significant change in how the city approaches law and order, it sounds like.
They suffer under the misapprehension that a little bit of cheering and moving back toward the center from far-left approaches to criminal justice will be able to fix the underlying problem. Just shuffle a few chairs around on the deck of the Titanic, and it gives the ship a whole new look, doesn’t it?
Oh, you say it’s sinking? You clearly don’t understand enough about systemic factors that influence ship-sinkings. Here, let me show you this speech by Ibram X. Kendi, which decisively proves that icebergs are a white colonialist phenomenon. Are you afraid of that freezing cold ocean-water because it’s darker than you? Your privilege is showing.
San Francisco’s crime rate isn’t an unexpected problem. Rather, it’s the end of an inexorable process when you follow the left’s line — the line that usually gets touted on CNN, it’s worth noting. At least the network was willing to cover the fallout when a city that’s been Democrat-led since time immemorial is getting ransacked by criminals the police have no intention of arresting, but it would be nice, too, if they were to deal with the real “systemic” issues behind it: bail reform, a toleration for lawlessness and criminal codes that don’t punish shoplifters.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
