Is there really a "shoplifting surge" in San Francisco?

While incidents are down compared with previous years, San Francisco’s property crime rates are still unusually high compared with other U.S. cities. In 2019, San Francisco had the highest rate of property crime of any city in California. The city’s high levels of economic inequality and population density could contribute to its relatively high property crime rate, criminal justice researcher Magnus Lofstrom previously told The Chronicle. Still, shoplifting has been declining in the city since 1985, according to data from the California Department of Justice. That’s in keeping with broader national trends: Between 2009 and 2018, overall property crime in the U.S. declined by 23%, according to the FBI. “California’s crime rates remain comparable to the low rates observed in the 1960s,” researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California, including Lofstrom, wrote in 2018. While shoplifting incidents haven’t surged this year or last, the rate of shoplifting incidents ending in citations or arrests did go down — a continuation of a decline that goes back at least as far as January 2018, the earliest month included in SFPD’s detailed incident data.