evidence: This is no coincidence. Permissive state and local policies and attitudes have signaled to thieves that San Francisco is a perfect "shopping" destination: a mecca for organized retail crime. In 2014, a statewide law (Proposition 47) reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors for stolen goods worth less than $950. California’s property crime immediately spiked from below the national average to above it and has continued to grow. And San Francisco, as of 2019, had twice the property-crime rate per resident — 1 in 18 — as the rest of California; not to mention that San Francisco’s rate of violent crime per resident is 50 percent above California’s. [...] These same patterns are afoot here in New York City, where crooks travel from The Bronx, where Duane Reade stores (a subsidiary of Walgreens) are manned by armed guards, to the easy pickings of less-secured Upper West Side locations. As in Frisco, Gotham’s shoplifters steal whatever they can fence. They include ice-cream nabbers, who clear out shelves of Häagen-Dazs cartons to resell to bodegas and individuals for whatever profit they can turn.