This is the shocking moment a Walgreens security guard in San Francisco confronted a shoplifter – taken back armfuls of stolen items out of his bags – only to let the thief walk out the door with bags still bulging.
The cellphone video, taken by a fellow shopper, ended with shoplifter kicking a display on his way out, and the guard on his knees, picking up dropped items and putting the almost-stolen goods back on the shelves.
‘Can’t even go to the Walgreens,’ Darren Mark Stallcup, who posted the video to Twitter, wrote.
It comes in the wake of huge spike in smash and grab robberies across the US, with LA County and New York City being espeically hard hit due to the soft-on-crime policies of progressive District Attorneys George Gascón and Alvin Bragg.
In lawless California, the passage of Proposition 47 in 2014 downgraded charges of property theft of less than $950 in value from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Non-violent property crimes under $950 have been downgraded to misdemeanors, while two or more people conspiring to ‘cheat and defraud any person or any property, by any means which are in themselves criminal’ face no more than one year in county prison, a fine of $10,000 or a combination of the two.
Earlier this month, fed-up California assemblyman Rudy Salas, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would lower the amount a suspect can steal before facing a felony to $400, which was the original threshold before Proposition 47 passed.
‘Enough is enough, we need to fight back against the criminals who are stealing from our communities,’ Salas said in a statement introducing the bill. ‘We have seen the unintended consequences of Prop 47’s weakening of our theft laws and I believe California voters are ready to make their voices heard on this issue again.’
The law will need to pass through the state legislature and receive a majority vote from California voters on a ballot measure before becoming law.
On January 21, surveillance footage from San Bruno in Los Angeles County showed Usman Bhatti, owner of Maaz Jewelers in Tanofran Mall in San Bruno, California, single-handedly ward off thieves attempting to rob his store.
In the footage, Bhatti can be seen shoving away a suspect who ran into his store and began breaking the display case. Then, he can then be seen pulling out a gun and scaring the culprit and five other suspects who fled the scene, away.
Bhatti, who had a concealed carry permit, told FOX KTVU that he was ‘not trying to be a hero or a macho man.
‘It just happened very quick and I had no choice.’
On Friday, the county’s Registrar’s Office approved a recall petition for woke Los Angeles County District Attorney Gascón in a bid to replace him with someone harder on crime.
Campaigners can now collect signatures to remove him from office, in their efforts to garner support from the required 10% of the county’s registered voters (just over 560,000 people) by July 6, the Los Angeles Times reported.
New York City has seen a similar wave of smash-and-grab robberies as new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg faces backlash over his shockingly soft stance on crime that the progressive prosecutor revealed on earlier this month.
Bragg sent a memo to his staff announcing he ‘will not seek carceral’ sentences for criminals, unless they were guilty of murder or a handful of other crimes he deemed serious enough to warrant prison.
His sweeping changes call on prosecutors to ditch felony armed robbery charges and instead charge suspects with petty larceny – a misdemeanor which carries a maximum of one year in prison – even when a weapon is involved if the firearm did not ‘create a genuine risk of physical harm.’
Burglaries will no longer be prosecuted as burglaries if the bandit steals from a storage unit or outdoor property that isn’t connected to a ‘living’ dwelling, and quality-of-life crimes such as prostitution, turnstile jumping, weapons possession (of non-firearms) and marijuana possession won’t be prosecuted at all.
Drug dealers will not be prosecuted for felony crimes unless they commit other offenses on top of drug dealing, and prison should be a ‘last resort’ – despite the mounting number of violent crimes being committed on the streets of New York by repeat offenders who have been let out of jail early.
Earlier this week, actor and comedian Mike Rappaport posted a video similar to the one taken in San Francisco, documenting a bold thief sauntered out of a Rite Aid on the Upper East side of New York City with two shopping bags full of stolen goods, calling it ‘pathetic’ that brazen crime continues to spiral in the Big Apple because of soft-on-crime policies.
On Sunday, Rappaport returned to the Rite Aid to find the shelves empty.
‘Back in my Rite Aid,’ he said in a video posted to his Instagram on Sunday. ‘And there’s nothing to steal because this Rite Aid like so many other Rite Aids is closing down because everybody stole everything. And the workers here don’t know if they’re getting jobs.
‘Congratulations, losers,’ the 51-year-old actor concluded in the video, which had already garnered 20,570 views in just one hour.
A similar theft at a Rite Aid in New York City went viral on TikTok in October after a woman named India, who was a security guard at the store, posted footage of thefts pilfering Halloween candy before fleeing.
People asked in the comments why she isn’t stopping the thieves if she is supposed to be a security guard, to which she replied: ‘Because it’s illegal to touch, grab or use any physical force to stop them.’
Instead, she said, her job is to ‘observe and report.’
*story by DailyMail.com
