Free Republic

San Francisco’s Union Square, the high-end shopping district at the center of the city, is boarding up for the Christmas shopping season after a string of “mass looting” events that began on the weekend before Thanksgiving. Normally, Union Square is festive and bright in December. Its giant Christmas tree and menorah attract visitors from across the region, as does its outdoor ice skating rink. Situated alongside the city’s famous cable car, it is an oasis of prosperity in a gritty downtown. However, this year is different, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports: As San Francisco approached the critical December shopping...

AOC told the Washington Times that “a lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are not actually panning out.” “I believe it’s a Walgreens in California cited it, but the data didn’t back it up,” she said. Now, she says this in the face of numerous videos and reports of smash and grabs in Democratic cities across the country, in particular a spurt of such criminal actions in California. So, it’s fantasy to deny them. Republican lawmakers and retailers blasted AOC for denying the obvious.

The staff of a San Francisco restaurant denied service to three uniformed police officers after claiming the officers’ weapons made them feel “uncomfortable.” The staff then proudly posted the incident on social media. The staff of Hillda and Jesse San Franciso posted on Instagram, an announcement that they asked three uniformed police officers to leave their restaurant after the sidearms police are required to wear made them feel “uncomfortable.” They declared the restaurant to be a “safe space.”

The move has touched off a social media firestorm, and one of the owners is explaining the restaurant's decision in an exclusive interview with ABC7 News anchor Dion Lim. San Francisco Police Chief William Scott is also reacting to the controversy. Staff at North Beach brunch spot Hilda and Jesse on Union St. seated the uniformed officers at a table on Friday. According to chef and co-owner Rachel Sillcocks, restaurant staff grew uncomfortable by their presence and asked the officers to leave, which they did. Sillcocks said the decision to turn the officers away had nothing to do with who...

A woman who took more than $40,000 in merchandize from a San Francisco Target is out of jail as the city faces an ongoing surge in retail looting and theft. Aziza Graves is wearing an ankle bracelet and faces 120 misdemeanor counts of petty theft after she scanned dozens of items and made nominal payments before leaving incomplete transactions.

Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want....

San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, the ordinance's author, said in a statement suspending the business tax on cannabis will help support legal cannabis retailers as they struggle to compete with illegal cannabis sellers.

Among the more than a dozen smash-and-grab robberies in the Bay Area in recent weeks, cannabis facilities may have been the hardest hit. In San Francisco, at least four cannabis businesses have been robbed in the last two weeks, according to news reports. At least 20 have been hit in Oakland, where most of the Bay Area’s cannabis cultivation, manufacturing and distribution facilities are located. “It’s proving to be unbearable for cannabis operators,” said Amber Senter at an Oakland press conference held by cannabis business owners on Monday. Senter owns multiple cannabis business licenses in San Francisco and Oakland, and...

A spate of violent robberies targeting marijuana businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area last month have thrown into question the survival of several small businesses, with the combined losses of those operators estimated to be at least $5 million. The crimes ranged from break-ins that resulted in minor damage to, in some instances, wild gunfights between criminals and security guards, according to media reports and sources. At least one person was shot, and a scandal has emerged over San Francisco police officers apparently looking on while burglars made off with cannabis products from a store they’d broken into. The...

Usually at this time of year, San Francisco’s luxury stores are decked with holiday garlands. Instead, they’re boarded up after widespread “flash mob” looting turned Union Square — the city’s most fashionable shopping district — into an area resembling a blighted neighborhood in Detroit. “It’s a ghost town,” said Michelle Tandler, a San Francisco native and high-tech entrepreneur, whose photos of the stores barricaded in plywood went viral on social media this week. “Every store has a security guard. People are going to lose their jobs. And these things have a ripple effect.” Two weeks ago, San Francisco was the...

The uniformed officers had just sat down when staff members asked them to leave because the workers felt uncomfortable about the officers’ weapons, the restaurant said. Three uniformed San Francisco police officers sat down for a meal on Friday at an all-day breakfast restaurant. But it was not long before staff members of the restaurant, Hilda and Jesse, “felt uncomfortable with the presence of their multiple weapons” and “politely asked” the officers to leave, the restaurant said on Instagram on Saturday. That request drew widespread attention, with the San Francisco police chief criticizing the move and hundreds of people leaving...

San Francisco cops have more to deal with than a DA who keeps releasing violent criminals back into the community...On Friday, three on-duty officers were seated at Hilda and Jesse, a local restaurant, before the staff denied them service and asked them to leave after they became "uncomfortable with the presence of their multiple weapons," according to a post on the eatery's Instagram account.The officers left without incident."At Hilda and Jesse, the restaurant is a safe space. The presence of the officers weapons in the restaurant made us feel uncomfortable. We respect the San Francisco Police Department and are grateful...