THANKS, JOE:

Supervisor Dean Preston then wrote a Twitter thread lamenting that "media reports have accepted without analysis Walgreens' assertion that it's closing due to retail theft," and shared an SEC filing from 2019 in which Walgreens announced plans to close 200 stores.

"So is Walgreens closing stores because of theft or because of a pre-existing business plan to cut costs and increase profits by consolidating stores and shifting customers to online purchases?" Preston asked.

The city's leaders and critics alike appear highly motivated to preserve their respective narratives, and the online discourse on the Walgreens closures is as polarized as one would expect regarding San Francisco crime.

To make sense of whether Walgreens is telling the truth, let's start with the August 2019 SEC filing Preston and other city progressives are widely sharing. It states that the company "plans to close approximately 200 locations in the United States," as part of a "cost management program" that was announced in December 2018. [...]

According to San Francisco's crime dashboard, larceny theft is up nearly 8% year-over-year, though crime statistics in 2020 are skewed downward because the early days of the pandemic brought life to a near-halt and forced temporary store closures.

When comparing 2021 larceny theft figures to pre-pandemic 2019 figures, one will find that reports of theft are actually down. From Jan. 1, 2021, to Oct. 10, 2021, there have been 21,842 reports of larceny theft, and there were 31,958 reports over the same period in 2019, which is a 31.6% decrease. 

There were 33,312 reports of larceny theft during the same time period in 2018 and 35,483 reports in that period in 2017, so the number of theft reports has actually been in decline over the past few years.

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