On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” CNN Senior National Correspondent Kyung Lah reported on crime in San Francisco and said she witnessed three instances of theft in one Walgreens location in the city in a 30-minute time period and noted that stores are having to lock up items like frozen food, coffee, and lotion.
Lah said that retail theft is “So typical that in the 30 minutes we were at this Walgreens, we watched three people — including this man — steal.”
She added that the store — which is located in the Richmond neighborhood of the city — has items like mustard locked up and reported that Walgreens says the store has the highest theft rate of all of their nearly 9,000 locations in the U.S. and is “hit more than a dozen times a day.”
Lah further stated that it isn’t just Walgreens dealing with theft, and reported from stores where frozen food, fake eyelashes, lotion, nail polish, and coffee are behind locks.
She concluded by noting that while property and violent crime rates at the end of 2022 in San Francisco were lower than pre-pandemic levels, things like low-level drug use and retail theft are considered low-level crimes, “but they’re uniformly and widely felt by so many.”
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